Franklin Leonard and Randy Winston: Discovering Great Stories with The Black List

Charlie Melcher:

Hi. I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome to the FoST Podcast. For many aspiring screenwriters, writing the screenplay is only the first step in a long and often difficult process of getting your movie out into the world. Today, I’m speaking with two people who are making that process easier for undiscovered creators. Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO, and Randy Winston, creative director of fiction for the Black List.

Franklin started the Black List 20 years ago to bring attention to the best screenplays that Hollywood had overlooked. Some of those screenplays from the Black List would go on to be box office hits, and even Academy Award winners, films like Spotlight, Slumdog Millionaire, and The King’s Speech. In addition to the annual list, the Black List website helps writers to get feedback on their work and connect to the right people to help bring their projects to life. Given the tremendous success of the Black List in helping Screenwriters, Franklin and his team have turned their attention to a new industry, publishing. He’s tapped Randy Winston previously the Director of Writing programs at the Center for Fiction to help create a similar resource for fiction writers looking to get their manuscripts published.

As someone who knows the challenges of the book industry, well, I’m excited to hear that the Black List is expanding to help connect talented writers, publishers, and ultimately readers. Franklin and Randy know a tremendous amount about crafting a good story. So it’s my pleasure to welcome them to the FoST podcast, Franklin, Randy, welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast. So happy to have you here with us.

Franklin Leonard:

Thanks for having us.

Randy Winston:

Thanks for having us.

Charlie Melcher:

So Franklin, you and I go back a ways now.

Franklin Leonard:

We do.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s been a bunch of years since you came and spoke at the Future of Storytelling Summit, and I just want to say congratulations. It’s extraordinary the impact that the Black List has had in these years. For those of our listeners who don’t know what the Black List is, could you tell us what it is and how it works?

Franklin Leonard:

The Black List is a platform that sets as its North Star, finding and celebrating great writing. That’s our fundamental premise. And the way we do that, and there are a lot of ways we do that. Part of it is the annual survey of Hollywood’s most liked unproduced screenplays, but throughout the rest of the year, our work is a platform that allows writers at any stage of their career, whether they’re writing screenplays, television pilots, theater plays, and now novels, the ability to create a writer profile on our site, the ability to get feedback on their work. And when that work is received well, we share information about it with everybody in the professional industries associated with screenwriting, television, writing, playwriting and fiction. And what that means is that if you have something great, we can help it find its way to people who can do something with it. And conversely, if you are a person who as part of your professional work is to find great writing, we make it easy to find great writing of exactly the sort that you’re looking for.

Charlie Melcher:

And how successful has it been over the last 20 years?

Franklin Leonard:

Harvard Business School did a study about five years ago, six years ago, about the success of movies on the Black List. And they found that movies made from scripts on the Black List make 90% more in revenue. Hundreds of writers via the website have gotten signed, had their movies produced. Those movies have been nominated for Golden Globes and Emmys and premiered at Cannes and the London Film Festival and all over the world. And weirdly, one of the things I’m proudest of, honestly, is not any of that. It’s when we get emails from writers who don’t live in Los Angeles or New York who don’t have a direct connection to the industry who email us sometimes to say, “Hey, your reader destroyed my script. But for the first time, I have an understanding of where I need to be to have an opportunity to actually be a professional writer, and I’m excited to jump back in and do a rewrite because for the first time I have access to someone who can give me guidance about how I should be thinking about this stuff.”

Charlie Melcher:

I think the point that you left out that I would just like to add is that the movies that led to this 90% better financial return are not the Marvel entertainment blockbusters. They’re not the well-known IP second or third or fifth film on that series. It is work that is quirky. In many cases, things that executives looked at once and said, “We can’t make this. It’s too weird or too personal or too unique,” and that it can have that financial return. I mean, I feel like you guys are the Moneyball for Hollywood. Like you figured out a different way to identify underappreciated talent that has led to incredible payoff.

Franklin Leonard:

What that Harvard Business School study proves is that it’s not the right actor that makes a movie successful. It’s not how much money you spend on the budget or on the marketing. The best business plan is a great screenplay. The best business plan is always a great story. And I think that’s what that study proves. And I think what we’ve found is that the conventional wisdom about what is valuable, what matters in Hollywood, what matters to audiences is all convention and no wisdom. And what we’ve tried to do is let people know like, “Hey, start with a great script.” In the beginning was the word. That’s also your best path to making lots of money and winning the admiration and jealousy of your peers, which is a primary driver for most professional behavior. Let’s be real.

Charlie Melcher:

Tell us about this transition from serving that need in film and television to moving now to publishing.

Franklin Leonard:

Yeah. I’ll tell the story of how the idea became real, and then I’ll hand it off to Randy to talk a little bit more about how he got involved. The Black List, I was working in film and television. My job was to find great scripts and great writers. I built this platform specifically to do that. And over the years, people who were variously involved in the publishing industry would say, ‘Look, there’s a similar dynamic in the book space. There’s more writers than anybody could possibly read. Everybody’s desperate to find good material. What you’ve built in this space would work pretty well in that space.” And once it became clear that it did, it became also clear to me that if I was going to do this right, if the Black List was going to do this right, we needed somebody who came from the publishing world to really build this for us and make sure that we got it right.

And I made a couple of calls to senior people in the publishing industry who I had met or who I’d had long-term relationships with, and quite literally every single one of them said, “Well, there’s this guy at the Center for Fiction in New York named Randy Winston.” So Randy and I got on a Zoom in late 2023. Then again in 2024, within 5 minutes, I knew that I needed to figure out how to bring this guy on board, and I was lucky enough to do that. Randy, how would you tell the story?

Randy Winston:

The one thing that I’ll say is that Franklin was very transparent about how the Black List works and how it works specifically for writers, which is very important for me to hear because a lot of the work that I’ve been doing for the past decade has been bridging the gap between emerging writers and people in the publishing space. Franklin, being open to being interrogated was very important for me as well. I’m a fiction writer myself. I did an MFA at the New School. I was a fiction editor at a literary magazine for seven years here in New York, and was the director of writing programs at the Center for Fiction.

So literally, my day-to-day has always been how do I provide support and resources to writers? How do I help them? How do I connect them when they’re ready? Knowing that there was someone on the other side saying, “All right. I get it. We will build this together,” was really, really exciting for me. Now, when you think about where the Black List is with the expansion, it mirrors how the platform is built for TV and film writers, except now it’s fiction. So the language is different, but the platform itself, how it functions still looks the same.

Franklin Leonard:

Randy mentioned interrogation in our first conversation, and I think that’s an accurate description. I mean, literally, I would say the first two, three hours of our conversations were Randy’s basically saying, “Okay. Well, what about this? I’m a writer, I’m worried about this situation, or am I paying for this?” And part of the way that I knew that he was the right person to bring on this team was that those are exactly the questions that I want to be asking all the time.

Randy Winston:

If you don’t mind, Charlie, I can talk a bit about the basics of how the platform is set up for writers.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, please.

Randy Winston:

Writers can create a free profile, so you can include your bio. If you have representation, great. If you have lawyers, you can include that information as well. Links to your website and social media, you can do that as well. We also give writers the ability to list their projects or publish work. And listing is basically a text field where you can type in your title and a text field where you can type in a brief description of that project. We call that the pitch. You can tag it with up to 20 tags from a bank of over 600 tags. So you’re thinking about things like a hero’s journey, evil versus good, feminism. And that makes a project searchable for industry members who are on the site.

Now, if a writer has an unpublished or self-published project that they would like to upload to the site, and we call that hosting, it’s 30 bucks. And what that does is give industry members who find those projects the opportunity to jump straight to the document and read it. It means that I can just almost like opening my inbox, I can go to the Black List website, I find something I love, and I can open it right there on the site and read it. We also provide statistics for writers. So writers can follow and watch how many clicks their project is getting, how many downloads the project is getting. And then we also have an option where you can get your work evaluated.

Now what that looks like is that for fiction, you upload two files, you upload a full manuscript in the first 90 to 100 pages of a manuscript, and we call that the excerpt. We have vetted readers with industry experience evaluating fiction who will evaluate that excerpt, not the full manuscript. So some writers will say, “Wait, well why am I uploading the full project?” Well, if agents and publishers are finding what they love on the site, the last thing we want is someone going, “The Black List is great, but they never have projects on there that are complete.” So that full manuscript is a signal to those industry members that this project is ready to come to me and I love it. So now when I reach out to that writer, now we’re talking about the process of discovery. Let’s talk about working together, representation, and then possibly submitting to a publishing house.

Charlie Melcher:

My own origins, I think as you know, is in publishing. I still do a tremendous amount of work in bookmaking. I just appreciate that you’re providing a service that frankly, I think has been a lost art from the publishing industry and the agent side. I think there used to be more of a conscious effort to nurture talent. And in these days with so much stress and bottom line focus, there’s very little appetite for that.

Franklin Leonard:

Randy and I talk about this a lot. I think that especially if you’re a writer, but I think anytime you’re outside of a system, there’s an instinct to be like gatekeepers. These are bad people who are trying to keep people out. And certainly, those people probably exist. But I’ve worked in Hollywood for 23 years now, and I think I have not really encountered very many people who would fall into that category. What I encounter more often than not is people who are overwhelmed by the volume of their work, who desperately want to find good things, but they have to service many other masters. They have to service their bosses, they have to service the big agent that sent them a manuscript that this weekend that they have to read because their boss will get a phone call if they don’t return the call quickly.

In Hollywood, they have to serve actors and directors who may have their own priorities, and there’s a super abundance and a rapidly increasing super abundance of stuff on the other side. So they are making rational, triage based decisions about how to get through their day. And I think, again, we’re just trying to provide a tool that makes their lives easier in a way that makes everybody else’s life easier too. I talk about trying to be a tide that raises all boats and that really is the goal. But selfishly, the Black List is on some fundamental level, a selfish project designed specifically so that I can read better books, watch better movies, and watch better TV shows. And the solution that I’ve come up with is make it easy for talented people to connect with people who can do things with them and give all the people who might be talented, all the resources so they can maximize their talent.

Randy Winston:

Franklin, you mentioned something earlier about gatekeepers and I will say maybe 10, 11 years ago I was one of those writers. However, there is something that happens to the psyche when you are educated on how things work on the inside of a business and the approach starts to change and you have a healthier outlook on how things can happen for you. And that’s not just me talking, that’s also writers that I’ve worked with over the years who’ve done the work of educating themselves, whether it’s through free resources or resources that were given to them. So that when it comes their time and they’re sitting at a table and a contract is sitting there, they know how to read it, they know the right questions to ask, and it just makes for a better process altogether. It levels the expectations that people have. So if we can do that for fiction writers, man, what a better world it’ll be.

Charlie Melcher:

I love this conversation about gatekeepers because I’ve had my own beef over the years feeling that they were looking for a certain kind of thing. They had a very limited definition of what would work in publishing. But I had this epiphany at one point through talking to two different editors and publishers that what was really going on was that they were subject to the book buyer decision. I didn’t realize that a lot of the real gatekeeper was the book buyer at Barnes & Noble, or Amazon whose power was so great because their initial buy was going to set the tone for whether this book was a go or no go. And realizing that sometimes that person is really just working off of sales data of what they’ve seen worked well last season or the last few seasons.

And then I just realized like that’s why all of this is geared towards looking back. It’s all geared towards what sold well in the past and made it very difficult for something new. And it’s one of the reasons why, again, I have such respect for the Black List because you came up with a mechanism that looks forward, that looked for the kinds of projects that weren’t going to get approved because they didn’t fit the definition of what sold well last season, but actually were the kinds of projects that people would love and would love to watch or see or read, but needed some special attention to get out of this institutional bias against new.

Franklin Leonard:

I think that a lot of the conventional wisdom about what works, what has value, what can sell is based on convention and not wisdom. One thing I was told throughout my, or early career in Hollywood was female-driven action movies don’t work. Don’t develop them. Don’t green light them. They don’t make money. But if you go back and look at the actual history, James Cameron’s entire career is women-driven action movies. Titanic is a women-driven action movie. The other conventional wisdom is black movies don’t sell abroad. There may be an audience for them in the US but you can’t sell them outside of the US. Coming to America made several hundred million dollars internationally in the eighties. Big Momma’s House 2 did like $150 million foreign. So again, these are assumptions. I think what we do is identify things that are great on their own terms and create a bit of FOMO about them. We say, “Hey everybody. This is really good. Everybody else says it’s good, you should check it out.”

Charlie Melcher:

So one of the things that this suggests is that there is an underappreciation for diverse voices in Hollywood and film and television?

Franklin Leonard:

I would start with the fact that there’s an underappreciation of writers, regardless of their background. Writers are undervalued. That’s why the Writers’ Guild had to go on strike two years ago because they were being undervalued and they had to fight for their economic and professional rights, but really they were also fighting for the long-term health and economic upside of the industry as a whole. And then beneath that, in the writerly world and elsewhere, actors, directors, producers, studio executives, marketing executives, et cetera, I think there’s also an undervaluation of folks from, let’s say, backgrounds that are not the dominant narrative historically, white male, upper middle class, straight, non-disabled, et cetera, et cetera.

And again, I think that’s particularly true when it comes to culture businesses because you’re ostensibly trying to serve a global audience. And if you don’t have people that are part of that global audience, among the people that make decisions about what gets made, about how it gets made, about how to tell the stories, what stories should be told, you’re not building a business that is optimally congruent with the audience you’re trying to serve. And if the goal is to make a profit, we should be rightly valuing writers, people with diverse perspectives so that we can better serve those audiences.

Charlie Melcher:

So you’re in a unique position being able to see good writing, or all range of writing for so many different media. And I’m wondering if there are any insights or things that you’ve learned by being able to look at screenplays, television treatments, theater, and now fiction. What are the golden learnings about writing?

Franklin Leonard:

Look, here’s what I’d say. There’s no secret, but I think for me, I know that I’m reading something that has potential. Whenever, I find myself turning off the critical part of my brain and having an emotional experience. Art is an emotional experience, first and foremost, and so telling an emotional story is critical. And when I finish a thing and I find myself a little bit sad that I can’t spend more time in that world with those people, I know there’s something there. And again, I don’t know that that’s guidance on how to write as much as it is guidance about how to recognize something that might be good. But I do think that, that standard is probably a good thing to keep in mind as one thinks about what story they’re going to tell. But fundamentally, it’s all storytelling. These are all just different forms. Screenwriting has a very specific dialogue, action, structure, prose, do what you will if the story’s told well, but fundamentally, we’re talking about communicating with another human being about what it means to be human. That for me, always should be the goal.

Randy Winston:

As one of my favorite editors once said, “I can tell if a story’s good by how the writer takes care of the people.”

Charlie Melcher:

I’ve believed for a long time that good storytelling is a craft that transcends any specific medium. That was one of the founding principles of the Future of Storytelling of our organization, was to say, “There’s something about storytelling and how we do it that’s innate to us as human beings.” And we used to be pigeonholed to be certain genres or certain media of storyteller, but that was maybe a leftover from the 20th century when the means of production and distribution were so outrageously expensive that you had to specialize and build credibility and build a network to get the opportunity to tell your story in any given medium.

And that as the prices and the barriers have come down so radically, the democratization of access to the tools and the ability to distribute has grown so wildly over such a short amount of time. If you look at the scope of how many millennia we’ve been telling stories as a species, that those distinctions, those are going away, and that we were seeing this explosion of multi-hyphenates of creators who start with the story and then figure out the medium instead of I’m a filmmaker, what story am I going to tell?

Franklin Leonard:

It’s always been true. I think whether it’s, you go back even a couple oof decades and it was musical artists directing their own music videos or art directing their own music videos. You go back 50, 60 years, some of the great American novelists being hired by the studios to write screenplays. But now as the cost of the means, like you said, as the means of production, the cost goes down, it’s, “Okay. I want to tell a story. How am I going to tell that story and which tools am I going to use?”

And again, I think that also just goes back to the challenge of being a “gatekeeper.” You all of a sudden have tenfold, a hundredfold, the volume of material coming to you, how do you curate it? How do you find the good stuff among the infinite field of haystacks that you want to invest in? And that’s really the the challenge and the task of the black list has set itself is like, how do we help navigate a world where everybody can be a creator? How do we help the people who have merit that global scale get access to those resources? And how do we help the people who have access to those global resources find the stuff that they want to invest in so they can do well financially and culturally?

Charlie Melcher:

So here’s the question. Are you helping to perpetuate a system that’s going away? We talk about the disintermediation, we talk about the ability for people to just create their own, put it up there. I certainly know authors who did not work with publishers and went on to make lots of money and get lots of books out there, or maybe not even books, maybe just digital versions of their stories. And are we going to continue to have the need for those gatekeepers?

Franklin Leonard:

No, I think that’s a really interesting question. And I think the answer is to be determined. As the industry changes and it will change, and we don’t know exactly how it’s going to change, our job is to be there in the middle between consumer and writer, and if there’s an intermediate stage of gatekeeper, we’ll help them too. But that is also in service of an audience that the gatekeepers ostensibly serve by investing their resources in work that they then share with audiences.

And one of the things that the Black List does uniquely by the way, is be a bridge between people who are writing books, and people who are making movies and television and may be interested in taking those books and making them into film and television shows. Because though every creator now can theoretically with access to inexpensive means of production, make a movie, you may have written a movie, you may have no interest in directing. You may have no interest in designing a poster for a movie. You may have no interest in raising $200 million to suitably adapt your book. I don’t want to live in a world honestly, where every artist is responsible for being the CEO of the business that distributes their work, because I think a lot of artists want to focus on the art.

Randy Winston:

And Franklin, to your earlier point about screenwriters and fiction writers, we’re seeing it already. I think one of the benefits of having fiction is that we are seeing screenwriters who have a very good understanding of the platform, who are now sharing their books on the site. And also too, when you self-publish, you have to do all the things. One of the things that the Black List provides as a form of, you’re using our platform, you have an evaluation on the site, you can now opt into opportunities that were not available to you before in that traditional world of self-publishing that are now available to you because you’re on the site. So it’s been really great to see how folks are taking storytelling as a whole and then shaping it as they see fit, and I love that.

Charlie Melcher:

As a last note, I would just ask you, what’s the message that the Black List sends out to young talent who are looking to get their stories told? Is there some good piece of wisdom?

Randy Winston:

I always get invited to talk in classrooms, MFA programs, undergraduate programs, and the thing that I always tell writers is to think about the ecosystem of decisions that are available to you. And always think about your financial situation first so that when you start to make decisions about money, you’re making a sound decision. So for instance, if I am a writer and I know that I have a draft of a novel, one draft, I should probably work on that before I query. I should probably work on that before I submit to a contest, and I definitely need to work on that before I think about spending money on the Black List.

But here’s what I can do that’s free of charge. I can find trusted readers who I know will give me critical feedback, and I can have them read my work and give me that feedback. I can also take some time on the weekends and when I have it and I can revise and work on that project, I can read it aloud and make those adjustments. That’s available to you for free. Obviously, time is not free, but from a financial standpoint, that’s something that I always ask writers to do. Do that work first.

And also, educate yourself on the business so that when it becomes time for you to decide, okay, this is now done. I’ve taken this project as far as I can take it, I’ve gotten all the feedback. Maybe I do pay for a workshop. Maybe I do pay for a freelance editor. Maybe I do sign up for an MFA program, or maybe I use the Black List. But in coming to that decision, I’ve already exhausted all the free resources available to me, and so that’s something that I beg writers to do.

Franklin Leonard:

Yeah. I would just echo what Randy said specifically, and this is maybe a statement against interest because obviously I own a company that takes money from writers, but don’t spend money in support of your work until you’ve exhausted all of the free resources at your disposal to make it as good as it can be. Really focus on making the work good. That should be the first priority. Everybody’s always like, “Well, how do I sell a screenplay?” My first answer is always write a good screenplay. Worry less about getting to know the right people and worry about writing something that makes the right people want to get to know you.

The other things that I’d say are, one, live a life that gives you the experiences emotionally and otherwise, that you have something to say when you write, get your heartbroken, dare to do something that people told you that they wouldn’t do. Have the experiences of joy and pain that will inform your transliteration of the human experience. I also go back to this quote from ironically enough, Tupac Shakur. Shortly before he died, he was asked, “Tupac, do you think your music will change the world?” And his answer was essentially, “I think that’s a dumb question. I don’t think my music’s going to change the world, but my music will change The minds that change the world.”

And I think it’s really important to remember what is it that you want to share with those people? If you have the opportunity to stand in front of 10,000, 100,000, 1 million, 2 million people, what stories do you want to tell them? How do you want to make them feel? And aim high because good enough is never good enough. Aspire for greatness. And if you fall short, it may still be all good.

Charlie Melcher:

My warm thanks to Franklin and Randy for joining me today. Once more, I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the Future of Storytelling podcast.

If you’re looking to stay up-to-date on the latest in the world of storytelling, check out our website at fost.org. There you can subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought, and find more episodes of this podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please consider sharing it with a friend. It sure would help us out a lot.

The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.