Black List featured on CBS “This Morning”
For those of you who may have missed it, today the CBS show “This Morning” featured a nice package on the Black List. You can see it here. From the piece:
“I think the list and the website draw attention to great work,” [Franklin] Leonard said. “And I think, because we’ve become a reliable arbiter of taste, it means that if we say ‘Hey, this is something you should pay attention to,’ a lot of people in Hollywood will pay attention to it.”
And that’s precisely what’s been happening over the first decade of the Black List’s existence:
Ben Affleck, who directed “Argo,” discovered the script on The Black List, and it’s how Meryl Streep found out about her film “Hope Springs,” as she told Charlie Rose in 2012.
“There is this list I gather that travels around through all the offices in Hollywood, and everybody knows about it — it’s The Black List,” Streep said.
The thriller “The Imitation Game” is considered a contender for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay this year. It was the №1 script on The Black List in 2011. Graham Moore wrote it.
“We’d try to go around town and pitch it to people. We’d say, ‘Hey we have this film about a gay, English mathematician in the 1940s.’ And you can imagine a lot of sort of Hollywood entities and organizations are not inclined to make movies about subject matters that are that difficult,” Moore said. “But when you have that conversation again and you say ‘Oh, and it was number one on The Black List,’ it’s, ‘Oh, okay. I’ll read it.’”
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch had already read the script for “The Imitation Game” because it was on The Black List before he was approached to play the role of British code breaker Alan Turning.
“Graham’s script hooked me in from page one, really. The introduction to this character — he’s utterly unapologetic, no vanity about him,” Cumberbatch said. “The edges are all there, the sort of slight eccentricities, but also the humor, the heart, the sort of — the thing that makes you lean in a little bit.”
This extends to spec scripts as well. Indeed here is the headline from Variety regarding the deal I blogged about earlier today: “Voltage Pictures Acquires Black List Script ‘The Search’”.
The Black List has become an important brand in Hollywood. For screenwriters, perhaps the most significant one. It puts a spotlight on writers and on noteworthy screenplays, many of which are the kind that deserve to be made, but unless they find a champion, won’t. Raising the visibility of material, as being on the Black List does, so that scripts get in front of significant talent like Meryl Streep and Benedict Cumberbatch can create the type of attachments and momentum to help get those movies produced.
Finally there’s this: I don’t know how many people watch “This Morning,” but however many hundreds of thousands who did see the package on the Black List today will have been reminded that those movies they see in their local theaters? Someone wrote those words. They didn’t just materialize by magic on the set. Rather screenwriters sat at their work stations and pounded out the scenes, action and dialogue, as all those nifty visuals associated with the movie clips reinforced in the CBS piece today.
And that is a message which needs to get out there as often as possible to help elevate the public’s perception of who screenwriters are and what screenwriters do.
If you’re unfamiliar with what the Black List is, you can go here and here for more information.
UPDATE: Franklin Leonard featured on The Blueprint Show podcast.