Welcome to the 242nd insertion of DEMUR®, an analytical series highlighting the intricacies of the artistic world and the minutiae lying within. In this episode, we reveal the secrets of ‘The Black List,’ a $30 billion spreadsheet that changed how movies are made.
Movies are widely regarded as one of the most expensive forms of media. From set designers to directors, actors, and equipment, production studios are no strangers to hundred-million-dollar budgets and, on occasion, billion-dollar returns. Commonly fronting massive sums of cash with hopes of a profitable box office release and, potentially, an esteemed legacy, this degree of risk begs the question: who chooses what movies get made?
For a long time, this idea was answered with uncertainty. Sure, executives may have had the final go-ahead on plots and storylines, but amid the 50,000 scripts registered to the Writer’s Guild each year, finding new screenplays was a laborious job tasked to lower-level employees. Requiring hours of demanding work in following leads and reading through cinder blocks of writing, many curators, like Franklin Leonard, became fed up after repetitive failure.
At the time, Leonard worked as a development executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s production studio, Appian Way Productions. Finding scripts worthy of realizing proved to be extremely difficult, so he took it upon himself to innovate on this poorly constructed system and email 75 of his peers, stating, “Send me a list of your ten favourite unproduced screenplays and in return, I will send you the combined list.”
To his surprise, many responded, so Leonard got to work. He compiled the data into a spreadsheet, ranking each script in order of ‘most liked’ based on votes and submitted the table back to each recipient as promised. Naming the file ‘The Black List’ as an ode to the Hollywood blacklist of the McCarthy era and an “inversion of the notion that black needed to signify bad,” the underground script list was born. Today, of the 1000 screenplays inducted since 2005, at least 440 have rolled into production, including Argo, Juno and American Hustle.
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