Black List Table Reads podcast debuts tomorrow!

Black List Table Reads? Yep. For background, there’s this. And this. There’s also this Bloomberg Business article:

Malcolm Spellman and Tim Talbott, a screenwriting duo known as the Robotard 8000, sit on canary-yellow chairs in a Hollywood studio discussing their darker days. “Both of us were dead,” Spellman says. Back in 2008, after a few decent years in the industry, work had dried up. “Our reaction was to flex our s — — to the max,” recalls Spellman, now a writer on Empire, the hit Fox TV show. The two friends are being interviewed by Franklin Leonard, host of a new weekly podcast, The Black List Table Reads, which features dramatic readings of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays. Leonard, who’s become a patron saint for movie writers over the past decade, is partly responsible for reviving the Robotard 8000.

Film development executives are always searching for new material, but it’s tough to trust unvetted talent with multimillion-dollar projects or gauge the potential of more offbeat stories. So in 2005, Leonard started his Annual Black List, which highlights the year’s best-liked unproduced scripts, as nominated by more than 300 industry insiders. “We’re just as interested in identifying scripts that are tiny but well-written as we are in box office material,” he says. Sometimes his discoveries are both: Ben Affleck found the script for Argo on the list; it went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

At first, Leonard’s hobby occupied him for three weeks each December. Now he’s made it a business that employs five people. In addition to the survey, which earns nothing, he’s introduced blcklst.com to connect screenwriters with and without agents to producers looking to make films. Writers pay $25 a month to have a script hosted and $50 for a professional evaluation. (Leonard’s company keeps half; the rest goes to the evaluators.) So far, more than 20,000 scripts have been uploaded.

“It used to be a closed-loop system where, if you didn’t have an agent, you were pretty much screwed, because nobody would read your material,” says Scott Myers, author of the screenwriting blog Go Into the Story. “Franklin’s created an alternate to the old, very narrow, confined way of getting in.”

The podcast is yet another example of Franklin Leonard’s forward thinking. The podcast goes live tomorrow. You can sign up here.

I talked with Franklin about the podcast and inquired about whether the scripts would be made available for listeners to download. His response: “We can’t make any absolute promises and we’re not making it a precondition of doing a podcast, but we’re going to make every effort to make every script available.”

That would be a great exercise: Read the script while listening to the table read.

Once again, the small, dedicated Black List community with whom I am partnered launches an initiative to uplift and promote talented screenwriters and great stories.

To support the effort, subscribe to the Black List Table Reads podcast by going here.

UPDATE: You can hear a preview of tomorrow’s podcast and read the featured script “Balls out” by going here.

Or you can listen to it here:

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