A new Craftwork episode featuring a conversation with Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of The Black List, a company dedicated to identifying and supporting remarkable screenwriting and fiction through its annual survey of Hollywood's most liked screenplays and its online marketplace for screenplays, television pilots, theatrical plays, and novels.

To date, more than 400 scripts from the Black List's annual survey have been produced as feature films, resulting in more than $30B in global box office and 300 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins, including four Best Pictures and nearly half of the screenwriting Oscars awarded since 2007.

Leonard has worked in feature film development at Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack & Anthony Minghella, and Leonardo DiCaprio. He's been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto, and Mumbai film festivals and one of Hollywood Reporter’s '35 Under 35', Black Enterprise magazine’s “40 Emerging Leaders for Our Future”, and Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business."

In 2019, the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAe) presented him with the Evelyn Burkey award for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters.

Leonard is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and served as an advisor for the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Exhibition "In America." He is a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Executives branch of the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). His TED talk "How I Accidentally Changed the Way That Movies Get Made" has been viewed more than 1.75 million times.n 1.75 million times. 

***

Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.

Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.

Subscribe to Brad Listi’s email newsletter.

Support the show on Patreon

Merch

Twitter

Instagram 

TikTok

Bluesky

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices