The Black List founder says Hollywood is thinking about risk all wrong

After altering how Hollywood discovers scripts, The Black List is now targeting the book world. Founder and CEO Franklin Leonard proved that overlooked scripts like Slumdog Millionaire and I, Tonya can become commercial and artistic hits. Now, grounded in his belief that the Black List can act as a giant metal detector for uncovering great fiction, he explains his reasoning and plans for this expansion.   This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Today I want to zero in on The Black List itself because you’ve recently embarked on an expansion. The Black List started as a side project for you, an underground kind of crowdsourcing effort aimed at identifying the best Hollywood scripts that weren’t getting made. In the years since, you’ve built it into a platform for scriptwriters and playwrights for training, identifying talent, linking talent to opportunity. Now you’re expanding into something new. So can you explain to us sort of where The Black List is, what the expansion is, and why you’ve gone down this road? Yeah, like you said, it started as this annual survey of Hollywood’s most liked unproduced screenplays that quickly became an arbiter of taste in the business and sort of served early notice of writers and scripts that the industry should be paying attention to with great success. For the last couple of years, a lot of folks in the book space had been asking me when we were going to expand into novels. I tend to be a research data-driven person, and I also knew that the reason The Black List worked was that it had been purpose-built for the film and television industry ecosystem. I was trying to solve a problem in that space. Something you knew personally, something you lived through, right? Yeah, I mean, I’ve been in the industry for more than 10 years before we launched the website. I’ve been there for more than 20 now. So we were building something that could optimize the system in the film and television, and then the theater space. And Howie Sanders at Anonymous Content was really adamant that I seriously consider this and set me up on a series of meetings with people in the book industry. What I was pleasantly surprised to find was that people were really excited about it, that there was a recognition that there was a lot of great writing happening in places that they didn’t know about and that they couldn’t find. And that we could be an industrial-size metal detector and take an infinite pile of haystacks and find the needles. And that’s really what we built. So The Black List expanded into fiction in early September. It means that if you are a novelist, if you have an unpublished novel, a self-published novel, or a published novel, you can create a writer profile on The Black List website, list all the things that you’ve created so that they’re searchable by people in the publishing, film, television, and theater businesses.  And if you want to get feedback on your work or you want to make it directly available to those people, you can host it on the site. You can purchase feedback. And when that feedback is really positive, we’ll tell everybody in the publishing world and in the film and television world that this is a book you should probably pay attention to. And again, the goal remains to identify and celebrate the best writing we can find. We’re going to find a lot of great books that a lot of people are going to put out and a lot of books that are going to get adapted into film and television. It’s a tide that raises all boats. So much of it seems to be about what is seen as risky, right? Like at the Emmys recently, Baby Reindeer‘s Richard Gadd echoed what American Fiction director Cord Jefferson said at the Oscars, right? The industry needs to take more gambles on original work. And it sounds like what The Black List is trying to do in some ways is to make that easier by kind of pre-vetting things, right? Yeah, I think that’s fair. I always have anxiety when people say that they need to make more risky work. Because I actually think that if you’re thinking about things rationally and you’re trying to optimize for your economic outcomes, making more risky work is not necessarily the strategy. My argument is, what if our assumptions about what is risky are deeply flawed? And so we’ve been making decisions about risk assessment that are wrong, right? And I think there’s considerable evidence to that effect. For years I was told in my career that female-driven action movies don’t work. They just don’t work. Everybody knows they don’t work. I remember thinking, okay, I guess that’s true. And loo