Q&A: Franklin Leonard

One year ago, Go Into The Story became the official Screenwriting Blog of the Black List. As part of the celebration this week, Franklin Leonard kindly offered to answer some questions, many provided by GITS readers. Today two more Q&A’s:

One of the most significant changes in the last 10–15 years in Hollywood movie acquisition and development circles is the increase of literary managers. How has that development impacted the business?

I came of age professionally in Hollywood after the proliferation of managers had already begun, so it’s difficult for me to compare it to the days when there weren’t very many. As in any profession, there are good ones, and there are bad ones. The good ones support their clients, as rigorous editors, developers, and interrogators of their material, as therapists and friends, and as advocates to the Hollywood community. The bad ones give terrible notes, insert themselves where they’re not welcome and not helpful, and ruin their clients’ good names by association, and then ask for 15% of their clients hard earned money. There are more of both now than there were when I started.

When you read a screenplay, what elements are you looking for that let you know this is a story by a professional screenwriter?

I don’t know that there’s a difference between the writing of a professional screenwriter and a non-professional screenwriter except that the former has gotten paid to write a screenplay at some point in the past. I’ve read great screenplays by writers who have never written a screenplay before and I’ve read terrible screenplays by writers who have been doing it professionally for decades.

I’m going to paraphrase our President (who I happen to think is an excellent writer and public speaker though to my knowledge he’s never written a screenplay) to answer this: “A great writer thinks three to four sentences ahead of the sentence she’s writing.” I think this is true for screenplays as well.

Great screenplays read as though the writer has thought of everything and knows they’ve thought of everything. They know on page one where they’re going to be on page thirty, on page sixty, on page one twenty, and the writing on each of those pages — all of it: the images, the turns of phrase, the character description — exists in service of telling a story that’s going to elicit an emotional reaction whether that be laughter, sadness, exhiliration, inspiration, or fear or some combination of all of them.

If you have a question for Franklin, please post in comments. Hopefully he can get to it. If not, I’ll be happy to take a crack at it.