“How Hollywood Chooses Scripts”

Interesting article in The Atlantic about the Black List. Some excerpts:

The Black List is the brainchild of former Universal development executive Franklin Leonard, who was frustrated with the needle-in-a-haystack process of finding the best unproduced screenplays. In a speech, Leonard described the maddening process of separating the good scripts from the bad:

“It’s a little bit like walking into some kind of members-only bookstore that has all of the best and exclusive titles in the world. But it’s all organized alphabetically, and all of the covers are exactly the same. And your job is basically to not come home until you find the best book there.”

Los Angeles is a city of dreamers, and most of them are dreaming about hitting it big in Hollywood. Roughly 50,000 screenplays are registered with the Writer’s Guild of America each year. Hollywood studios release about 150 movies per year. All things being equal, an unproduced screenplay has a .3 percent chance of being made into a feature film by a studio. As of last year, 68 of the 168 films from 2005’s inaugural Black List had been made into feature films. That’s more than 40 percent. Even screenwriters whose Black List films haven’t make it into production have successfully parlayed their recognition into contracted screenwriting jobs. For a struggling, undiscovered screenwriter, making it onto the List is like being called up to the Majors. It worked for Abduction screenwriter Shawn Christensen, who only had two short films to his name before Abduction was Black-Listed; his next film, Enter Nowhere, is currently in post-production.

See that 40% number? That is one of the most compelling reasons to track the Black List as a script that makes the list has an exponentially better chance of getting produced. That is good news for screenwriters.

Beyond those numbers are the hundreds of writers whose scripts have made the list benefiting as a result of increased demand for meetings and landing writing assignments. Again good for screenwriters.

For more of the article, go here.