Dear Visitor,
Welcome to the Black List!
Thanks for visiting. Our mission is to radically improve the way great writing is discovered and valued within film, television, and theater. Here's a few things that I believe and why the Black List exists as it does as a result.
Stories profoundly matter, and we, collectively, underestimate their significance. Whether they're bedtime stories, religious narratives, news, or the stories we tell on stage and screen, stories define how their audiences see the world, who they perceive as having value and not, who the heroes and villains are, and where and how heroes and villains can be found in our lives beyond the screens and stages. While the individual effects may be hard to measure, the collective influence on billions of global viewers is undeniable.
Quality is the best business plan, but evaluating art is fundamentally subjective. Successful storytellers thrive because they captivate their audiences–however small or however niche–prompting them to share their enthusiasm with others. But those people, of course, may not share that enthusiasm, and neither party is necessarily wrong.
Fundamentally, art is subjective. The business challenge that follows: How to most efficiently find projects that when made finds an audience large enough to justify the high price of its production and distribution.
Writing is the best early indicator of story value and writers are undervalued relative to their contributions to its success. Stories well told on the page attract top talent. Together they attract financial resources, and eventually, audiences, ticket sales, viewership, and advertising revenue. Writing is the currency of the realm.
The success of screenplays on the annual Black List validates this thesis. Movies made from these scripts have grossed more than $30B in worldwide box office. They've been nominated for 223 Academy Awards and won 60, including four Best Pictures and 13 screenwriting Oscars since 2007.
A 2019 Harvard Business School working paper also found that Black-Listed scripts “did better at theaters, with movies of the same budget generating 90 percent more revenue at the box office.” Said Associate Professor Hong Luo, who led the study, “the annual Black List can help to further differentiate quality among observably similar ideas in a notoriously difficult-to-predict industry.”
Contrary to William Goldman's assertion that “nobody knows anything,” some things can be known. And first among them, which I imagine he'd co-sign: Great writing is box office. And writers should be compensated as such.
The industry's archaic material discovery processes are exclusionary and inefficient, harming writers, their work, and the industry's creative and financial prospects. For years, the answer to the question “how can I gain visibility for my script with the people who matter” was some version of “well, there's querying, but you'll probably have to move to Los Angeles or New York, get a job that keeps the lights on and then network incessantly until someone who matters pays attention.”
For writers, that presents innumerable potentially insurmountable obstacles wholly unrelated to the quality of their work; and that doesn't even include the financial barrier of attending a “respectable” university that the industry regards as a reliable guarantor of talent. The industry consistently rewards material written by those who can bypass the cost or impossibility of moving to Los Angeles or New York and subsist until they can penetrate the highest echelons of social and professional networks–networks that are deliberately inaccessible to all but those who were either born into them or could buy their way in.
But where you live, who you know, or who you are shouldn't determine the opportunities available to your written work. When it comes down to it, those opportunities should be determined by the quality of a story's craft, and its writer's ability to collaborate productively and emotionally engage audiences.
On the industry side, the conventional method of finding great material is akin to the NBA telling aspiring professional basketball players to just play pick-up ball near their midtown Manhattan headquarters until someone takes notice. One can only imagine the negative consequences on the game and the NBA's financial fortunes if this was the only way.
Because the industry primarily recruits from among the folks who are already here or who have the financial wherewithal to get here, a lot of great material is excluded–leaving potential creative genius and billions of dollars on the table.
Traditional writing contests and contest aggregators are irretrievably broken A writer submits their work unaware of the qualifications of the readers, how they are assigned, and how much they are paid. They receive feedback months later, if at all, with no recourse if inadequate. By that point, irreversible decisions have been made. Meaningless laurels have been awarded.
Writers who pay for feedback on their written work have a right to know the qualifications of the people evaluating their work. They have a right to readers with expertise in the format and genre they read. They have a right to know how those readers are compensated. They have a right to receive their feedback quickly, and they have a right to recourse if that feedback indicates less than a close and unbiased reading of their work.
When writers receive positive feedback on a written work, they have a right to have that work circulated widely and immediately within the industry so that they can have access to real-time information about the effects of that circulation and can make informed decisions about the future use of their money.
Further, the opportunities available to writers should be correlated to the quality of their work, not the amount of money they spend. Great writing should reduce the amount of money necessary for a writer to attract the attention of the industry. There shouldn't exist an incentive structure where writers are encouraged to pay infinitely more for confirmation of their quality.
And there should always be a way for great writers who have no financial resources to certify their talent to the industry on equal footing with those who do.
The near exclusive reliance on personal relationships for writer discovery is a glaring inefficiency begging for modernization. In an age where search engines provide instant answers and countless platforms connect buyers and sellers at scale in nearly every industry, relying solely on personal connections to promote and find work seems archaic. The loss of time, creative energy, and potential profit on both sides of the equation is incalculable.
Ask any industry professional how long it would take them to compile a list of, for example, “action features with an antihero written by a Latina?” The answer might range from hours to weeks when it should take mere seconds.
Industry professionals should be able to generate comprehensive lists of screenplays, pilots, or plays that are instantly available for on-the-spot reading. They should be able to search by various criteria, including genre, characters, narrative devices, era, mood, theme, and beyond. Search results should update instantaneously as new information becomes available.
And that's why the Black List exists.
If you're a writer–anywhere–writing film, television, or theater, you can create a free profile, showcasing yourself and your work to thousands of verified professionals, fellow writers, and other creatives.
Black List industry members are selected based on the depth and quality of their industry experience and their expertise in developing films, episodic series, or theatrical plays.
For a monthly fee, you can make your scripts, pilots, and plays directly accessible to industry professionals and monitor the volume of views and downloads in real time.
You can receive fast, accountable feedback from continuously vetted readers with at least a year of industry experience as at least assistants who read only in the formats of their expertise and genres of their interest. If that feedback ever takes longer than three weeks, you'll automatically receive a free month of hosting.
Your work will be judged on the likelihood that your reader would recommend it to their peers or superiors in the industry. You will know that readers are paid $60 to provide roughly 500 words of feedback on your feature script, hour-long pilot, or play and $45 on your half-hour pilot, with additional bonuses for high-quality work.
If your feedback ever indicates less than a full, close, and unbiased reading of your work, we encourage you to contact Customer Support so that we can address that failure with you and the reader immediately and replace it with feedback of the high standard we expect.
If your work is poorly received, you and you alone will decide whether to ever make that feedback public.
When your work receives consistent positive feedback, it will receive greater visibility in our database.
If it's met with a truly rare, positive response (an 8 out of 10 or better, roughly 3.5% of evaluations), that response will be shared–with your permission–on multiple fronts with thousands of industry professionals to make it even more visible. You will be offered additional free hosting and free evaluations for that script, pilot, or play so that that work can continue to reap rewards consistent with its quality without spending more money. And everytime your work elicits a similar response, you'll receive the same offer, until it happens five times and then we'll host that script, pilot, or play for free for as long as you'd like.
Once you've had a single evaluation, whatever the score, you'll be eligible to submit to dozens of programs–labs, grants, diversity lists, and commissions–all at no additional cost to you.
And yes, a need-based fee waiver program does exist for all Black List paid services. No writer will ever be excluded from the full scope of Black List opportunities due lack of financial resources.
If you're a working film, television, or theater professional–an actor, director, producer, financier, agent, manager, dramaturg, assistant, and beyond–Black List website membership offers you access to a comprehensive searchable database of scripts, pilots, and plays in the English language.
Receive weekly notifications of highly praised feature screenplays, pilots, and plays with the writer or their representative's contact information, and very often the project itself available for immediate download.
Search the database by writer experience, representation status, producer attachments, format, genre, and more than 500 descriptive tags.
Explore real-time lists of well-regarded scripts, pilots, and plays among our readers and other industry professionals.
Partner with us to identify exceptional scripts, pilots, and plays of whatever description.
You will find better screenplays, better pilots, and better plays. You will find them more efficiently.
And we will all have more creative and financial success.
We welcome you, your contributions, your concerns, and your constructive criticism. It's the only way we'll continue to make all of this any better.
Sincerely,
Franklin Leonard
Founder & CEO, the Black List
TEDxVenice Beach: “How I accidentally changed the way movies get made”
2019 Writers Guild of America, East Awards “James Schamus presents the Burkey Award”