YouSaid · the spoken record

Franklin Leonard

lines on the record: 86
first: 2020-01-31
most recent: 2020-01-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I have two sons, and one time my son wrote an essay, and he didn't work very hard on it. It just wasn't good. And he's like, what do you think? I said, this sucks. And he goes, Yeah, but it's okay. And I'm like, what? I said, no, it's terrible. You didn't try. This isn't very good. And he goes, it's okay. And I'm like, what is in your friggin' DNA that you think it's okay to suck? Like it was really fascinating. It was sort of this comfort in the world that, you know, I can, I can I can punt it, and it was riveting.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On average, bad screenplays to our site. And that didn't come as a surprise to me because women know they're not going to get a second chance. So when they write a script and they decide to sort of take a step forward, they've done everything they possibly can to make sure it's as good as it can be. Whereas we have a lot of guys who, you know, type, fade out, send it, get a bad review, and then send abusive emails for six consecutive days because they're certain that their script is genius because of where they went to college or someone told them that they're a brilliant writer.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's shocking. I know. I know. It's terribly shocking. In fact, the most fascinating statistic there is if you look at the distribution of scores by gender in particular, they're virtually identical. It's a pretty standard Gaussian curve, the mean around 5.5, with one exception. And that is at the very bottom of the scale, so the worst scripts, women just fall off. Women are not submitting”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anybody, if they were talented, could be discovered. And then we've been really rigorous about looking at the numbers, the scores on the scripts, sort of where those things are coming from, and what we found is, shockingly, there's no demographic has a exclusive sort of right to talent.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And if you place in the top 100, someone will probably call you. And the other option was, you know, just move to LA and get a job at Starbucks and sort of network until someone wants to meet your script. And that's fine if mommy and daddy can pay your lease on your BMW and cover your rent. But if you're a single mother on the south side of Chicago or a suburban dad in Charlotte, North Carolina, if your kids come home from school and you're like, load up the minivan, we're moving to LA, you're probably a terrible parent. But it doesn't mean you can't write. And all things equal, I will read a script from someone who has that reality day to day over somebody whose parents are paying for them to live in LA and figure it out. So we wanted to create something that”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody has Well, the way we've done it is by trying to reduce the barriers to entry as much as possible and making the thing that matters, the script and not who you know. Part of the reason why the blacklist website exists is exactly this problem. I would go speak at Sundance or at film schools after the annual blacklist became a thing. And the first question that would be asked of me was, you know, I don't know anyone in the industry. I don't have a way in, but I think I've written something pretty good. Like, how do I get my script to someone who can then get it on the blacklist? And there was no really good answer. And I would come back from those sort of speaking gigs and seek out people who had been in the industry longer than I had and say, like, what is the solution? Surely there is an efficient process to identify talent that will benefit the entire ecosystem. And the answers that I got were profoundly dissatisfying. It was, you know, enter the nickel fellowship, which is the Academy screenwriting competition. They get about 7,000 scripts every year. And if you place in the top 100, someone to all.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who was participating in it at all the major festivals with the admiration of their peers and deliver a pretty consistent return that beats the typical film.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also true. No, and we chose not to because we wanted to make sure that we have as many eyeballs from the industry on the work of people who are paying to submit. It's the same reason, for example, where we didn't sort of set our prices as high as we could have. If you're an aspiring screenwriter, whether you live in LA or anywhere else, you probably don't have a ton of money to get your work considered. So when we set the prices, we set them as low as we possibly could to sustain me as a full-time job, doing him as a full-time job, and hire a bit of staff to try to grow additional things. We were never going to get rich helping screenwriters get to Hollywood if there's a way for us to get rich doing the work that we do, it's by investing in the films that we identify. And that sort of my process. Yeah, I mean, look, you know, the Harvard Business School study makes a strong argument. I think we have a number of films in development and soon-to-be in production right now that will continue to make that argument. But I'm very confident that if I had a film fund, I could make a series of investments that would put anybody.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same trust is true as everywhere. Also, true. Everywhere you go. And one of the things that's interesting about this is you were sort of doing a favor for these production companies, right? You're trying to help them. Do you charge them”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's literally at this point every executive at every major studio, film financier, a production company was a first-look deal with any of those financing entities. So it is a aggregate look at all of the gatekeepers that could conceivably make your movie in the main sort of traditional system. And then by 2010, this notion of a once-yearly survey that circulated via email was adorable, right? Like to go from lazy Sunday to 2010 is an epic in internet time. So I wanted to build something that could solve, again, a problem for me, which was how do I find a great comedy in March, not in December. And, you know, with the help of a friend of mine, Dino Simone, we built a two-sided marketplace that would allow anyone on earth who had written a good screenplay to upload.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, There's the annual Blacklist survey, which remains exactly the same as it's always been. We survey 700 people about their favorite 10 unproduced screenplays, and then we share the bliss plays.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One would hope is going that way. They're already doing that, just so you know. So you decided to make it into a business. And we get back. We'll talk a little more, but explain very quickly for ending out this session, how you decided as a business. What is the business? You created an annual blacklist, right?”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it, I didn't because I wasn't trying to create a thing when I first created it. I was trying to get some information that would help me in my job. And it only seemed fair that if people were providing me information, I share that information with them. I think the competitive advantage that I have now is that I have a fundamental belief in the value of a great screenplay and a fundamental trust in these processes and in aiding and identifying them. But again, I also think that there's a lot of talk about AI and the ability to sort of use technology to identify material. And I'm not terribly sanguine about the value of a purely technological approach to evaluating art. I'm much more interested in trying to aggregate large numbers of human responses to art and then use the data that that creates as a way to sort of identify things that have, from a probabilistic perspective, a greater chance of success.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because this would be your advantage, right? I mean, everybody's looking for their strategic advantage here, and they do that in hedge funds. Absolutely. They do that on Wall Street. They do the mathematical advantage. I have this formula. I have this algorithm in order to invest.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, then I might have made a terribly wrong decision somewhere along the line. You know, there's still time. But I think that the people who have endured what they have to endure to get into the big chairs in this business have no incentive to make radical change to how the business functions. 100%. And I think that it's unfortunate because there's an opportunity, I mean, it's unfortunate from a cultural perspective. It might be fortunate for me because there is an opportunity here. There's a sort of market inefficiency that can allow you to embrace the strategy of find great material, make it, and you may even be able to beat the market by doing that. That might be a viable strategy to invest in film by identifying great screenplays and then pulling the trigger based on that.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I learned a lot. I learned a lot both about sort of how movies get made and how I didn't think it was wise to make movies. And then I worked for Will Smith's company for two years. And that sort of when I began to develop the blacklist into a business. But what I realized fundamentally is that I think the industry has gotten away to some extent from prioritizing is the script good as the primary driver of whether you make the movie and into all these things like is the genre right? Do we have the right actor? Can we sell these actors in foreign territories? And there's a lot of conventional wisdom about what works and what doesn't. And what I've sort of concluded is that most of that conventional wisdom is all convention and no wisdom. Right.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did this and then I did. So after I worked for Leo, I went to go work for Sydney Pollock and Anthony Mangella for a year, and they both died while I was working for them. And then went to Universal Pictures and sort of had the experience of working at a studio.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a little bit better in TV, obviously So why, as in Hollywood applied really, you know, it's not scientific, it's more McKinsey kind of principles. Because, you know, people for years there was like, oh, Stanks on a plane is going to be a great movie because it's the top search on Google and stuff like that. They've always been trying to find sort of that kind of advantage of what works. But one of the things is movies get pushed down, scripts get pushed down, and they don't get found correctly. There are lights on their bushels, presumably. Exactly right. Why do you think that it works here in this case? Because you were getting input from people you think have taste, correct?”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could not agree more. And really, the fundamental premise of the work that we do is screenwriters are terribly undervalued in Hollywood given their relative contribution to the success and failure of the things that we all make. It's a little bit better in TV, obviously. But that continues to be the case, and I think it's been the case for a very long time. And I think that the blacklist to some extent lays bare the fact that if you take great scripts and make them into movies, you have a better chance of delivering a financial return. And amazingly enough, Harvard Business School did a study last year looking at the last 15 years of Hollywood results in the blacklist in particular and concluded that movies made from scripts on the blacklist controlling for every other factor make 90% more in revenue than movies not made from blacklist scripts.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the way it typically works is you have a group of agencies that by and large control most material. If it's an original piece of material that comes from a writer they represent, the writer then will then sort of tell their agent, hey, I have this script, and the agency will typically take it to their clients and try to package it up and then sell it to a financier or studio who will then make it. But all of those things are sort of driven by who do you have a relationship with, who can you put the script in front of? Can you convince this person that it's really exciting? And if you can package it up into something, you may have momentum to then get it made. But that momentum may be entirely unrelated to the quality of the script or even the quality of the package around the script.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do craft service on those movies We'll talk about the value in a minute because the way it's done is completely anecdotal and completely relationship based and just doesn't make any sense. The way movies get made, it's just, it's sort of a scratch your back system. Entirely. So you're trying to correct for a flawed system of how movies get made.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These weird scripts on this list, if you make them and make them well, you make money and win awards, which are the two primary drivers of any behavior in Hollywood. And that began a process of every year when we put the list out, everyone reads most of the scripts on the list, and it sort of shifts the demand curve for them. And it's a bit of a virtuous cycle because of that. But you look at the numbers, there have been about 1,200 scripts on the list in 14 years. Third of them have been produced. 50 Oscar wins from 275 nominations, four of the last 12 best pictures, 10 of the last 24 screenwriting Oscars, Jojo Rabbit.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And this agent was selling his client with the speculative nature, the speculative notion that it might be on this thing the next year. So I did it again the next year. The LA Times outed me as the person who had created it. And then the following year, Juno and Larson the Real Girl were nominated for Best Original Screen. These were all the original. They were number two and number three on the first list. And then Juno won. And I think that was sort of an inflection point because it made people say, huh.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Right. Yeah. So, how do you know what's going to be number one on the list six months out? Like, you just don't. But it made me realize that this thing that I created had significant value beyond helping me find good screenplays. It was initially a selfish endeavor to solve a problem myself.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But this person into the call in a way that sort of blew my mind. He was like, look, don't tell anybody, but I have it on really good authority. This is going to be number one on next year's blacklist. Which was fascinating because I had decided not to do it again. And even if I was, it's a survey. So, like,”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is all via email. So, you know, and so for the first three months, I just didn't tell anybody that I had done it because I was terrified that I had violated some unwritten rule of Hollywood and that surely other people had had this idea, hadn't done it for a reason, but I was too dumb to realize that you don't do that. And then about six months into, this is 2006 now, I get a phone call from an agent pitching me on a client script. And it was the same call I got like every Tuesday from somebody. I have Leo's next movie. You should read it immediately. I also sent it to Brad Pitts company. So stay on top of that. Just creating security. Exactly.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And I remember saying, oh, something interesting is happening here. And then I checked my email when I got back from vacation, and this list had been forwarded back to me like 75 times. I done it anonymously.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Industry the weekend that Lazy Sunday, the Saturday Night Live sketch happened, it sort of exploded on the internet. And I always referenced that because it was the first time I was aware of a television network like taking down these videos from the internet.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a dual reference. It's sort of an honor of all of the writers who lost their careers due to the McCarthy era. An unconscious inversion of this notion that black somehow connotes something negative. I grew up in west-central Georgia. I remember sitting in fifth grade and learning about color symbolism in literature. The cowboy with the white hat is definitely the good guy, the cowboy with the black hat is the bad guy. I remember thinking. And I remember thinking like inductively, I don't really like where this is going as a black person sort of learning about shirts. So I look for ways to play with language whenever the opportunity presents itself. So it was a dual reference and I sent it out. And I didn't really think much of it. And then I came back from vacation having read a lot of these scripts and realizing that a lot of them were good. And it had been forwarded back to me like 75 times. And I think it's important sort of temporal references. The blacklist went out to the”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so one night late in November, I was in my office and I was like, you know what? How would I solve this problem if I was at McKenzie? And so I took a survey of all of my peers that I had had breakfast, lunch, dinner, or drinks with that year and asked them a very simple question. Send me a list of up to 10 of your favorite screenplays that you found out about this year that won't be in theaters by the end of this year and that you love. And everybody participated. It was about 93 people. I ran everything through a pivot table, output it to PowerPoint, and sent it back out under the quasi-subversive name the blacklist. And I went on vacation.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything that I should read, and I'd have to say no because I'm not going to waste his time with something that wasn't worth it. And you do that enough weeks in my mother's weekly phone call asking me if my LSAT scores were still valid. Like I knew that I needed to come up with a solution.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not unusual. So Absolutely. Exactly right. So sometimes it would be things that it was hey, Leo should star in this, and we should produce it, or it was something that Leo, I thought he might be interested in, but that he wouldn't star in because there wasn't a natural role for him, but the company would produce it, and he could use his power to, yeah, Pitt does an extraordinary job with it, actually. Right, with plan B, right? Plan B. Most of the stuff that I was reading was mediocre to bad, and my job was to find good stuff. And it was frustrating week over week to sort of take a banker's box full of scripts home. This is pre-iPad and Tindle and all the things we read on now, and then come back and have my boss ask me”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I just add a lot of stars create production agencies? Just so this is not unusual. So there's not just for them to be in, often they are, like Rish or Spoon, absolutely, but it's also to create and produce them. Often with them, because that's the pull.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is what it is. We did not overlap. Okay. But we know a fair number of people in common. Okay. But I found myself about two years in as a junior executive at Leonard DiCaprio's production company. And my job was to find good screenplays and good screenwriters that I could pass up to my bosses and say, hey, either we should make this or we should be in business with this person. And by virtue of working with Leo, who at the time, this was right after the aviator, you know, he's the biggest movie star in the world, arguably. He's also a white male between the ages of 25 and 40. We were seeing everything. I was getting constant phone calls from agents of all stripes because they knew that if Leo liked the script, they had a go movie.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How screenplays are made. So I came to Hollywood after a brief stint as an analyst at McKinsey and Company. My great shame.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a lot of things I want to talk to you about. You've made the blacklist into a business now. So I want to talk about that. But talk a little bit about your background in terms of making it. Explain what it is for people who don't understand. It gives you sort of give us a glimpse into how Hollywood works and how screenplays are made.”
2020-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Franklin Leonard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT