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 the first two Q&A’s:

Are the screenplays you read nowadays better or worse than 10 years ago? Yes or no, how are they different?

Honestly, it’s a difficult data-set for my brain to process: the hundreds of scripts that I read during my first year in Hollywood versus the hundreds of scripts that I’ll read this year. That plus the reality that what I read then and now only represents a small subset of what’s being written (all of these issues were why I created the Black List, by the way.) The real difference, to the extent there is one, I think, is that my job is different. When I was an assistant, I tried to read everything I could get my hands on: anything that sold, anything my boss’s clients were writing, anything that I heard from another assistant was good. Now, such a high percentage of the reading I do is specifically related to something that I’m doing in my capacity at Overbrook Entertainment, which means that a lot of it is high commercial writing, though I still take the time to read scripts that people are tipping as probables for the Black List each year.

What do you think has been some of the key effects the Black List has had in terms of screenwriters in Hollywood?

This is always a hard question for me, if only because I never want to overstate the role the Black List plays in Hollywood or people’s lives. What I know is that the Black List draws a hell of a lot of attention to the scripts that are on it. Hollywood — from the lowliest assistant to triple A list actors — reads the scripts that are on the Black List. Period. And those reads typically result in interest in both the writer and the scripts, which hopefully make it more likely that those scripts get made and those writers get employed (and hopefully for more money than they do otherwise.)

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.
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