Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 28: The TV Season Highlights & Franklin Leonard of The Black List

The King’s Speech, Juno, American Hustle, Argo, and now Spotlight and The Revenant – these are just some of the scripts featured on The Black List that have gone onto receive Oscar nominations and Oscar gold! Our guest Franklin Leonard is the founder of The Black List and it’s podcast compliment The Black List Table Reads. And this week we check back in with our favorite TV critic June Thomas, Slate’s culture critic, to hear her highlights from the recent Television Critics Association’s ‘Winter Tour’ held in Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 46m
Broadcast on:: 03 Mar 2016
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof like skims or all birds, sure, you think about a great product, a cool brand, and great marketing. But an often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business, making selling and for shoppers buying simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. It's home of shop pay, the number one checkout in the world. You can use it to boost conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going through to checkout. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout all birds uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/income, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/income to upgrade your selling today, Shopify.com/income. Franklin Leonard's Blacklist started as a survey of scripts via email. Today, scripts featured on the list have generated over $25 billion in worldwide movie box office. Plus, what will you be watching on TV in 2016? This is Pop Culture Confidential. Hi, I'm Christina Yerling-Biro, welcome to the show. I'm excited to interview Franklin Leonard, the former executive at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company who started The Blacklist, a compilation of unproduced scripts that has become a huge annual event and where Hollywood goes to find hidden gems, the most popular but unproduced scripts. Movies produced from scripts featured on The Blacklist have gone on to be nominated to 261 Academy Awards and 145, three of the last seven best picture winners were Blacklist scripts, including The King Speech, Juno, Argo, and not to mention this year's spotlight and DiCaprio's The Revenant. The television critics association panel or the winter tour has just wrapped up. The TCAs are a huge event where TV critics get all the information on upcoming shows. They do interviews, attend panels with creators, showrunners, and the castes. It's at the TCAs where the season's TV is introduced. I'm super happy to check in with one of our favorite TV critics, Slates June Thomas, who has just got back to New York from Los Angeles, and she gives us some of her own impressions of the TCAs and this season's coming TV lineup. June, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Christina. I feel like I've been in a tour of the world and of the ages, and I was only there for I think five days. Describe the overall experience of the winter tour, as it's called. Right. So there's a winter tour and a summer tour, and it used to be that the winter tour was very much the smaller one because it was mostly broadcast television in the old days, and so most of that in the US comes out in September, and so the winter tour was just a few mid-season villains. Well, now they're not exactly equal. Winter tour is about two and a half weeks, whereas a summer tour is about three and a half weeks. And basically, as a critic, you go there. Those people who don't live in Los Angeles stay in the hotels where they are located, and at eight o'clock in the morning, you go to the ballroom. There's breakfast outside, and you go and you take your place at the tables, it's a big room with a lot of tables with the usual plug-ins and so on these days so you can plug in your laptop. And basically, you stay there till about six at night. Wow. Life is hard. I'm just watching television. It's like a Cinderella story with television involved. I know. It's really hard to complain, but oh my god, it's such hard work because so you're sat there and you would think, okay, well, that's pretty passive, and for some people it is. Not everybody asks questions, but these days, again, it's changed a lot since it was first established, but these days, most people are either tweeting like maniacs, basically tweeting everything that people's, interesting that people say, or they're, you have to, you have to, but again, you know, so there are these panels there, some of whom are kind of amazing, you know, like the people that they've assembled are this just star-studded or really interesting combinations of people. So for example, on Saturday at eight a.m., because it goes on over the weekends too, after what had been a late night, the previous night, eight o'clock in the morning, everybody's there in the ballroom, and on the panel were JJ Abrams and James Franco and about five other really fantastic actors or showrunners on writers, and it is just kind of fantastic. Is that for the Stephen King show? That's right. That was for their 11/22/63, which is about the James Franco goes back in time and tries to stop the assassination of JFK. I'm going to tell you something that's going to seem crazy. I need you to go in this closet, take a look around, then I'll tell you everything. That was 1960, I need you to go back there to prevent the assassination of Johnny F Kennedy. And there are other panels like that where it's just a kind of a star-studded situation. Like for the stars show Dressa, which of course was a BBC film in England, so it's a kind of a, I don't know, it's a film of the famous play of that name with Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Anthony Hopkins. They had three nights of the realm on the stage, and then they had Sir Ian McKellen in London because he was filming something there. So it's kind of amazing, but you do have to, you know, I was going to say again, it sounds a little bit pathetic. But, you know, you have to think of questions worthy of them. You have to watch a lot of television, watch a lot of screeners in order to be prepared because there's nothing more pointless than being there if you don't know anything about what they're talking about. So tell us what's looks good, let's start with the Stephen King. Yeah, it looks interesting. I mean, it's got, it really does have a great cast, it has, you know, and this is one of the things about TCA's, so you get to hear from the creators, and it really gives you an indication of the people who kind of know what they're doing or just really have figured out how to approach a particular project because the woman who was, who wrote the script for 112263, a woman, I'm madly trying to look it up now because I remember her first name is Bridget, but don't actually remember her last name, like she is just really clear and smart and she kind of knew, her name is Bridget Carpenter and just really knew exactly like, you know, she talked a little bit about the process of adapting, you know, a big huge group like that about something that's so, you know, huge in American history and life. And so like just hearing from her and of course, JJ Abrams, you got a sense of, okay, yeah, they really know what they're doing. I trust these people, this is a good. That's exactly it, yeah, so that seemed really good. I really liked a couple of things from BBC America, London Spy, which is already aired in Britain, that I thought was fantastic, it's Ben Wishall as he's basically in every scene and it's really fantastic. And I was very interested when you were twittering about Samantha Bee's new show, which I'm super looking forward to, what do you think about that? Yeah, that was tricky because it's not the kind of show that I typically like, or not like, I just don't really watch them, I don't dislike them, I just, you know, I'm not crazy about that sort of, you know, even The Daily Show, which obviously where she made her mark. This is like a variant of John Oliver or The Daily Show type of thing. That's right, and John Oliver is a specially good comparison because it's also weekly. And but, so even though it's not quite my thing, it did seem really different, which is really again something that you want at TCA because- Well, the first woman for one thing to answer. Exactly, that's exactly right, and you could tell, you know, they didn't have much to show us again just because it's topical. So since they've not launched that yet, they didn't have a lot to show, but the thing that they did show was something that they'd been working on, which was about the VA, the Veterans Association or the Veterans Administration, which is the sort of healthcare for men and women who've served in the services and they get their healthcare covered by them. And it's typically not terribly good for men, but it's particularly not good for women because they're really even now not set up for female vets. And so even though we just saw a little bit about that, you know, just a small clip, it was clearly a very hard hitting piece, you know, just about things like they don't even have prosthetic limbs in the size for women. So a woman who had lost her foot had, you know, a giant man's foot on the end of her leg. So, you know, things like that that are really serious, but also, of course, she managed, you know, it's a amazing achievement, she managed to make that funny. Yeah. Who's the show, who's she working with on that one? Oh, my goodness. I wish I could remember the name of the person because she was fantastic. So that was a panel where sometimes there are, you know, thousands of them, but there were just two of them. It was just Samantha Bee and, oh, I know, Joe Miller, and Joe Miller was there and she was knitting. On stage. On stage. And it was just fantastic. I mean, obviously it was a bit, but it was so perfect because, you know, she was, you know, an older woman. She's the same age as me, you know, so I don't, I don't mean that with any tone, but you know, it was, there are more women these days. Another really great panel. Could she knit? She could knit. She was faking it. No. She was knitted like a maniac. You thought, I had my eye on that scarf because it's always a little bit cold in the wallroom, but again, another two women panel was the CW, which actually was really impressive. They had really interesting panels, but they had a panel that was just the showrunners of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which just won a Golden Globe the same day as the panel, actually, and Jane the Virgin. So two shows that in the US appear on the same night, you know, it's the eight o'clock and the nine o'clock show. And also, thematically link there about young women who are kind of figuring their lives out, making some mistakes and so on, also little, both of them with some, you know, magical realism at times. And that was just a great panel, just to hear the things that they talked about, which stuff that just didn't come up elsewhere, like, you know, how you reflect, you know, being a new mother and how you show that in a realistic way in a television program. So some nice shows, women-centric shows. Yeah. Yeah. And I have a, you know, I do a focus on LGBTQ characters, and there were also some great shows there, a documentary series that Ellen Page, Ellen Page's the movie star, is doing with her best friend called Gaycation, where they go to different countries of the world and just kind of assess how it is for queer people there. I saw one episode in Japan, and it was unlike anything I've ever seen before, really high quality. There's a show called Happen Leonard that's on Sundance that's based on some novels set in Texas that I'd never heard of before, but I started to read one of things. It's a really fascinating, you know, two guys who've been friends since childhood. One is a, we know they're both sort of early middle-aged, one is a white guy who went to jail because he wouldn't go to the Vietnam War. The show is set in the '80s. And then his best friend is a black gay man who is a Vietnam veteran. And they're getting, you know, they're kind of down on their luck. They're poor guys, you know, it's a realistic sort of show set out in West Texas. And just really, really interesting. And I was just fascinating that these shows that come out of nowhere, I think, seem of a quality that would have been, you know, the best show of the year, just a few years ago. Okay, what about vinyl, Martin Scorsese's rock and roll theme show? Yeah, that, I still don't really have a good sense of it. I mean, it's very, I certainly watch, just because it's set in New York and it's got amazing actors, I just remember Ray Romano, but the star of the show, his name is currently escaping me. And for that panel, they had, you know, these amazing actors on stage, and then they also had Mick Jagger, just Mick Jagger, no big thing. And Marty Scorsese, Marty, as I call him, and they neither of them could actually be in Los Angeles. Because just to know that sometimes they have like 14 people, that was an admittedly crazy panel. Say, even if it's just six or seven, many times they've traveled quite a distance, you know, the people from the Americans, they'll be coming from New York, you know, more and more shows, film outside of LA, and they fly in, and then sometimes they don't even get asked any questions, some of the panelists, you know, the people will focus on the show runners, because it's an interest, you know, it's an unusual chance to get them. What would you say you saw that we all will be watching? What do you think is going to be the big thing coming? Ooh, well, one thing that I think will be popular, although again, it's not really my thing. The BBC has a show called The Preacher, which again, one of the things that you discover at TCA is how many of the actors are, who are in these American shows, are not American. So many of the networks seem to just, you know, have a pipeline from Britain and Australia bringing people in and you don't realize, you know, don't realize because they do American accents on the show. The Preacher is, is going to be on AMC, it's based on a comic book, so it has that kind of level of reality, but young actors who people really responded to, a little bit violent for my test, but I think it will appeal to that sort of walking dead, maybe even breaking bad, although it's pretty different from that. So very dark and not so superhero type. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much so, sort of, again, another show that's set in Texas, but was written by a guy from Northern Ireland, who was living in New York at the time, but I'm not sure if he never had to visit Texas, but it was kind of a vision of Texas, you know? And then actually a show which might, could be an utter flop, but it was really unusual, so it really kind of grabbed my attention, which is called Outsiders. And it's on WGN America, another tiny channel that, well, not a tiny channel, but just has only very, very recently started to have original scripted shows. It used to be a channel that you'd go to watch baseball games and sports, but it is set. It's got really interesting, right, it's written by Peter Matei, Peter Tolen, who's a long time showrunner, is involved, and it's about a bunch of people who live off the grid and they have their own sort of rules, their own hierarchy. They don't have money. They don't really have any contact with the real world, you might say, except when they, there's some things that they don't have that they need sometimes. And so then they get in their, their all-terrain vehicles and ride off their hill or mountain and into town, and they just ride into, you know, Wal-Mart and just take stuff. It's sort of like a leftovers vibe, I mean, it's like a society that's not really. Yeah, that's so pipe, yeah, and it's just, again, it could be just weird and crazy and just die, or, but there was something about it that I found kind of appealing, so that it could be, it might, might be big. And any of the returning, one or two returning shows that people were like, or the new shows from last season that people were like, yeah, these, these are really, we're looking forward to these coming back. I heard a lot of buzz for Fresh Off the Boat, seems that the ABC comedies that, mostly the ones that are in their second year now, so ABC had this, I mean, if you wanted to be a little cynical or just kind of find their weird common denominator, you could say that they were kind of diversity things for, for ABC. They've tended to revolve around- Fresh off the Vortisation of American. Asian American, yeah. So Black-ish about a Black American family, the Goldbergs about a Jewish American family, and people seem to really be enjoying those shows. When I was talking to other critics, like, what are you watching not screeners? People would often mention Fresh Off the Boat especially. And there's another one which did panel that's starting, I don't think until March, but it's called The Real O'Neill's. And it's in theory, well, it shouldn't say in theory, it's based on, the idea came from Dan Savage's childhood, you know, Dan Savage, the sex educator, advice columnist, podcaster. But it's, it's pretty loosely based. So the thing that they got from him is three kids and their Irish Catholic family, Irish Catholic parents in Chicago, father a cop. And then, you know, they have the sort of perfect life, they're very involved in the church and in sort of the, you know, what you might say, Catholic society, I guess. And then, one day, their youngest son realizes that he's gay and tells his parents. Another son, the other son, tells them that he has anorexia and the sister is revealed to be a thief. And so it's, you know, not that those, I mean, some of those things are bad. Some of them things are problems. Some of them are just differences. But I guess it's all about kind of we're not, we're not as perfect as we appeared to be. And the kid who played Kenny, the young gay son, is really charming and charismatic. And I think it's kind of one of those discovery moments. Okay, that sounds interesting. Yeah. And so it's like, I was kind of thinking, well, what is this now, is gay the minority here? Is that? It's really more that it's enough. Because apparently, it's the Irish Catholic family, I guess, so yeah, yeah. Well, June, thank you so much. This is always fun. Maybe I can come back. Is it the spring tour or summer tour, you said it was called? Summer tour will be in July, yes. Well, maybe we can check back with you, if not before then, and see what you've been watching. That sounds awesome. Thank you so much, June Thomas of Slate. Franklin Leonard has a lot of big Hollywood titles to his name. He was one of the youngest executives at Universal Pictures, president of Creative Affairs at Will Smith's production company Overbrook Entertainment, and an executive at Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way. But it's a yearly publication, The Blacklist, featuring Hollywood's most popular, unproduced screenplays that has become his biggest success, and a real Hollywood institution. And it all started when he was about to go on vacation, but we'll get back to that. So many best picture winners have been Blacklist scripts. Recent ones include Argo, The King's Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, Whiplash, The Imitation Game, Selma, and The End of the Tour. And previously unknown writers such as Diablo Cody have captured Hollywood's attention through The Blacklist. I'm so happy to speak to Mr. Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of The Blacklist, and host of the amazing show, Blacklist Table Reads. Thank you so much for being on the show, Mr. Leonard. Thank you for having me. Could you start before we get into a little of the history? And just tell me some of the numbers. How many scripts have been produced and what about nominated? Yeah, if you, you know, we're actually going back through to double confirm those numbers right now, since the Oscar nominations were just announced. You know, approximately though, if you look at the first 10 years of The Blacklist, every year, but this past year, which are films that could have theoretically been made by now, there have been about just under 1,000 screenplays on the annual Blacklist. Just over 300 of those have been produced. I think at last count, they made over $25 billion in worldwide box office. I think the number with this year's Academy Award nominees is 261 Oscar nominations, 45 wins, including three of the last seven best pictures and eight of the last 16 screenwriting Oscars. This year's big awards getters that were Blacklist scripts include Spotlight, which is nominated for a number of Oscars as is the Revenant, an end of the tour, which you mentioned is also nominated for several independent spear awards. Tell me what is the Blacklist explain to the listener? Yeah. So 11 years ago, I was working for Leonardo Caprio as production company. My job was to find great screenplays and great screenwriters that we could be in business with. I felt like most of the reading that I was doing was, let's be generous and say, we're less than great screenplays, and so I took a survey of my peers, other executives in the industry. And this was before you were off to vacation, I understand. This was right before I was off to vacation. I knew that I was going to be reading some scripts over the holidays. I wanted them to be good ones, and I was just trying to sort of reverse engineer my way and do a list of those good scripts. So I surveyed my peers and said, essentially, send me a list of your 10 favorite unproduced screenplays that you most liked from this year. In exchange, I'll send you back the combined list, which is exactly what I did, slapped a quasi-subversive name on it, which took it to the writers and really everyone who was sort of silenced by the Hollywood Blacklist. You mean the Blacklist, but that's kind of a subversive. Right. Well, it was sort of double reference, right? On one hand, it was meant to be a tribute to writers like Dalton Trumbo and folks whose careers were really ended or significantly interrupted by the McCarthy era. And then it was also a conscious inversion of the notion that Black somehow needed to signify bad. Growing up as a Black kid in the Deep South in the U.S., you hear a lot of things, and you look for ways to subtly invert certain racial assumptions, and this was sort of one way that I thought I might be able to. I think it's important, though, that I mentioned, it was more of an inside joke when I named it the first year. I had no expectation that it would become what it has become and you're just following. Right, of course. So it's an annual survey of the industry as a whole's most liked unproduced screenplays. And it's literally, it comes out the Monday before everyone goes on vacation each year in December, and it really is meant to be a road map to the things that you may have missed over the year or maybe should revisit if you're in the position where you can actually move a project forward in the industry. And these are both completely new unheard screenwriters from outside of the industry, but also big names. I mean, you can get it. Lots of big names have been on there, too. So after the first few years, people would come and look at that list that when it came out in December, and what were some of the things they were finding? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, after Lars and the Real Girl and Juno got nominated for Best Original Screenplay, it was sort of a tipping point because they've been the number two and the number three script on the first list. All of a sudden, people said, "Wait a minute, you know, neither Juno nor Lars and the Real Girl on their face are, you know, box office gold, just based on their subject matter." And it turns out that if you have a really well-executed screenplay, you've got a better chance of making a movie that can go on to great success than you do if you don't have a great script. So I think people probably took second looks at things like the imitation game or draft day or the Revenant, which was in list 2007. So I think that we, you know, we do a very good job of shining a very bright spotlight on material that could theoretically go overlooked. There was a script that was acquired by a producer on the Sony lot two or three years ago that hasn't yet been made, but the producer who's a former head of Sony said, you know, the black, you know, finding the script because of the black list is a bit like finding an athlete who has passed over on the first few rounds of the draft, which I realize is a specifically American reference. Right. And like someone like Sorkin's been on there too, so it's not just-- Yeah. I-- that's actually one of the things that I find sort of most fascinating about the list, which is that, you know, the list ends up being on a year to year basis a collection of, you know, newcomers literally from outside of the industry and outside of Los Angeles to folks like Sorkin and Tarantino and David Benioff, who are, you know, as close as screenwriters get to being household names. And I think that shows, for me at least, that, you know, talent is not the exclusive providence of those who are in the industry, and the industry should do a better job of looking outward to find new talent. I mean, this is why we built the Blacklist website that sort of functions as a two-sided marketplace that allows anyone on Earth to upload their screenplays, have them evaluated, and if they're good, we tell the entire industry, hey, pay attention to this. And I'm actually really proud of the fact that the number one scripts on each of the last two years annual Blacklist were writers who were discovered by their representation via the website we created. Okay. Who were they? John Anderson, who wrote a Catherine in the Great Biopic, which was the number one script on 2014, and a guy named Isaac Adamson, who lives in Chicago, Illinois, doesn't even live in Los Angeles, uploaded a comedy several years ago, was discovered by his manager and agent. They signed him. They asked him what he wanted to write next. He said he wanted to write a biopic of Michael Jackson's Chimp Bubbles, exactly what he did, and that script sort of set the world on fire and was the number one script on the 2015 list. I see that coming in 2016. I would bet against seeing the Bubbles biopic in not because it's not great, because there are significant rights issues to making that work. I do very much hope to see the Catherine in the Great Biopic soon though. This is where if you're a writer in a small city in Sweden here, and you don't have, you're not in a WGA, you don't have an agent, you would upload to this part of the Blacklist. That's where you would get used to. Exactly right. If you're in a small town in Sweden, if you are anywhere in the world, and you have written an English language screenplay that you feel confident is the best work you can do, you would go to the Blacklist website for a small fee of $25 a month, you can host your script on the site. For $50, you can have your script evaluated by one of a team of readers that we've hired, all of whom have worked for at least a year in a job, in a Hollywood, wherein reading screenplays is a significant component of their job. Further vetted by me and my team, we hire fewer than 15% of those who apply with that one year of experience. It truly is the best of who you be reading your script if you submit it to any sort of major company in Hollywood, and if it's good, we tell everyone in the industry, "Hey, there's this great script, you should pay attention to it," and we've gotten literally hundreds of writers signed by agents and managers, helped themselves their scripts, we have partnerships with the studios, helped them identify certain kinds of writers, we actually just launched a partnership with the Austin Television Festival and five different television studios to help them identify writers for consideration for staffing during the next staffing season. We're trying to create a more meritocratic system so that the industry can find people who are talented. It shouldn't matter where you live, it shouldn't matter, the resources at your disposal, if you can go into a room and write a brilliant screenplay, you should have the opportunity to make that your career. Going back to what you were talking about a little bit about diversity, one of the things just with the Oscar nominations, it's been an outcry of the lack of diversity over the nominees and women as well as you were mentioning. Do you see the same diversity problems in terms of who's submitting screenplays and who's getting on the list, the annual list as well? I'd say the blacklist is they see some of the same biases that the Academy does, unfortunately. We're serving, fortunately for us, we are serving a younger, more diverse group of voters that have their ear more to the ground, I would suggest than the Academy does. Who are the voters who are voting for this annual blacklist? The annual blacklist voters are any executive at a major studio, film financier or production company who have a deal they're with. It's about 600 to 700 people every year that are voting and they range from the, you know, most recently newly promoted executive at a production company to studio presidents. And that group is more diverse than the Academy, the less diverse than the United States population as a whole, certainly more diverse on the gender front. And I think that, you know, the blacklist, I think, is a mirror that we can hold up to the industry to say that even within the industry proper, so not the Academy, but the working industry on the executive side, we have a long way to go when it comes to diversity of all sorts in the industry, racial diversity, gender diversity. I am really proud of the fact that last year we had the first woman who had had the number one script on the list, and I think we had five of the top 10 where women or something on those lines, I can't remember the exact first, but we, the blacklist, you know, as the name suggests, is very committed to raising the visibility of the cause of diversity in the film industry and taking practical steps to make sure there's more diversity. You yourself, you were a Harvard grad, you're a big executive on the other side, so I'm not a writer. What have you learned during these years since you started the blacklist that what makes a good script? I don't know that I've learned anything new about what makes a good script, but I will say that what has been confirmed by my experience over the last three years working full time on the blacklist is that the key to a great screenplay is not in any specific set of rules or any specific kind of story, it really is in the ability of a writer to elicit a strong emotional response from a reader. I've always said that I, people are like, what's the best, you know, what do you look for when you read a script? And you know, I used to have these like very complicated answers about, you know, trying to hit certain narrative marks by certain pages, and now, you know, I've seen enough screenplays that violate any rule I could conceivably come up with, that my answer is essentially keep me turning the pages to find out what happens next, and make me sad when it's over. Okay. Disappointed when it's over. Not that you're crying. Not that you're crying. Yeah. But look, if you can get me crying by the end of a screenplay, you've done a good job right? It's pretty, and I think that's probably true for anyone, you know, I think what we all, I think I don't have any scientific evidence for this though, I'm quite sure it exists. And I think that the human attraction to art is the human attraction to having emotion elicited. You know, we come to art as human beings in an attempt to better comprehend and more deeply emotionally comprehend the world around us. It feels something. Yeah, it feels something. And I think if you do that, you're well on your way. It may not be perfect, and there may be work that can be done, but if you can elicit an emotional reaction with your storytelling, that is the truly hard part of becoming a good writer of any sort. We've got revolutionary guards going door to door. These people die. They die badly. White House, who wants the six of them out. What we like for this are bicycles. Deliver the six bikes, provide them with maps. Or you could just send in training wheels and meet them at the border with Gatorade. It's going to take a miracle to get them out. Hey man, what are we watching? I got an idea. They're a Canadian film crew for a science fiction movie. I fly into Tehran. We all fly out together as a film crew. I need you to help me make a fake movie. So you want to come to Hollywood and act like a big shot without actually doing anything? Yeah, it'll fit right in. You need a script. Argo. Science, Fantasy, Adventure. Go and skate Mars, Desert, you need an exotic location to shoot. You need a producer. If I'm doing a fake movie, it's going to be a fake hit. You don't have a better bad idea than this? This is the best bad idea we have, sir. And now that you're sort of on the other sides representing the writers from everywhere, do you see execs in a different light? Like they're in the lazy, they should have caught that script. No, 99 times out of 100. I understand the reasons why an executive may have not pulled the trigger on a piece of material, even when it ends up very high on the black list. Now, Brandon, most of that understanding is an understanding of their position professionally. Like, I'll give you an example. When I was working for Lead Artist Company, I read the script for Lars and The Real Girl, and I thought it was exceptionally well done. I was actually emotionally moved by it, and rather significantly. And I remember going to tell my boss, "I read this amazing script. We should just be aware of the writer," and he's like, "Oh, what's it about?" And I was like, "Well, it's about a guy who buys a sex doll and treats it like his girlfriend in order to get emotional trauma." And as I was explaining it, I remember backpedaling on my enthusiasm about recommending the scripts for the author, and that's not because I didn't think it was great, but I knew how absurd the description was sounding coming out of my mouth. And so I think I have a great deal of understanding when I think about the fact that, you know, at the end of the day, executives have jobs, they need to keep their jobs, and there's only so far you can go standing on tables and sort of rattling pans in support of the script about, you know, the guy who buys a sex doll, or the script about the stuttering prince who has to give a speech of a big climactic moment, or the gay, the gay mathematician. These are not things that are historically thought of as box office gold, and the industry, you know, is priority as a capitalist industry that requires large amounts of capital to mount anything, you know, profit is always a sincere focus. So I think I remain highly sympathetic to the executive community, and truthfully, you know, we've sort of created the blacklist to make their lives a little bit easier. One of the things that's come up now, and then the blacklist, is the amazing podcast you do with interviews, is called the Blacklist Table Read. Tell me about that. Yeah, so the Blacklist Table Read is something we launched last April. It's a podcast that anyone on Earth can listen to, you know, just Google the Blacklist Table Reads, you can find it, it's on iTunes, wherever you listen to podcasts. We take the best screenplays that we find on the website, and we get a bunch of actors around a table and a radio studio. Lots of famous, I mean, big names you get. We've had Colin Hanks, it's probably the biggest name we've had on the podcast, Hailey Visual Osmond as well, and Francis Fisher from Titanic. So you know, we get them around the table and have them, you know, do a table read of the script, and then we sort of brilliant sound engineers at Wolf Pop, who's our creative partner on this, do some post-production on the audio, they had sound effects and things like that, and then we release that table read to the public. So every other week, there's a new screenplay, and then in the intervening weeks, you'll usually find an interview that I'll do with a working writer, often one that is likely to be considered for this year's award season. So for example, we released a script called Angels Flight, which is a Chinatown-type film noir set in the Latino community in Los Angeles this past Thursday. In the previous week, I interviewed Phyllis Nage, the screenwriter of Carol and Emma Donahue, the screenwriter of "Room." And these table reads that you do have, they resulted in any produced scripts? Not yet. I think that is likely in the very near future. We only launched the podcast in April, and given the glacial pace at which films get made, it would have been staggering if it weren't completed, but I'm optimistic. I mean, again, the hope for these is both that we create several hours of great entertainment for people all over the world, but also that we raise the profile of these scripts and these writers to make those things more likely to get made. And just now in December, the 2015 Blacklist was released. You had some big names announcing Reese Witherspoon and Channing Tate. They were on YouTube. That's where the Michael Jackson Chimp movie was one of those you announced. One of the things you really can see when you announced the latest, the yearly Blacklist is some trends. What do you think are the trends based on your list that are coming in 2016? Well, I don't know if there are necessarily trends that you'll see in theaters in 2016, but definitely the trends that we saw on this year's Blacklist. A lot of scripts about politics or the sort of outer edges of politics. But there's a sort of a satirical Ronald Reagan biopic, there's a script about gun control. Is this because it's an election year? It's interesting because in 2008, there were a large number of political scripts too. I honestly don't know the answer to that. The other sort of bizarre, I don't even know what to call it, sort of quirk of the list is that we've seen in recent years, multiple scripts about the same subject in the same year. So this year, there were two scripts about the making of The Godfather. Two years ago, there were two scripts about the making of the movie Jaws. There were two scripts about Mr. Rogers. I don't know that Mr. Rogers has an immediate outside of the United States, sort of a children's TV post. Yeah. So I'd say that's another sort of bizarre quirk. And I have no way of caring for that, but then sort of a Jungian notion of a collective unconscious group is very happy. I'm not sure. And anything else? No, I'd say those are probably the biggest ones. You know, look, I get asked a lot like if I was sort of, if I had no specific desire to write a specific script, what should I write to make it most likely that I ended up on the blacklist? The answer that I usually give is write a biopic about someone that a person between the ages of 25 and 45 to 50 is likely to feel a great deal of nostalgia. Find a way to tell, don't tell the sort of cradle to grave biopic, like pick a moment in that person's life before which everything is obvious and after which everything is obvious and tell the story of sort of how they made the transition from that first period of their life to the second period of their life. And in an ideal world, that character is either a woman or their life is strongly influenced by a three dimensional, strong female protagonist as well. And you're well on your way to likely having a good, a good chance of. Okay, that was very specific advice, but I think it reflects, it is very specific advice, but I think it reflects a certain kind of story that I think again sort of comes back to this idea of why we come to art. You know, at the end of the day, what I'm basically saying is most of your, the people likely to read your script and be making a decision about it, both from getting made but also from the blacklist are people between the ages of 25 and 45. If you write about something that they already have a strong emotional relationship to, and if you manage to recontextualize it and make them to make them look out in a different way, you're going to be fine. Right, right. And lastly, on Thursday, I'm actually headed to London to interview Tom McCarthy about Spotlight. He's telling us, hi, he's a lovely guy. Yeah, what can you tell me about because Spotlight was on your list? What year was that? Yeah. I believe it was 2014, it might have been 2013, I'm checking right now, 2013, 2013. So spotlight, yeah, it was on the list, I think it was all to be low on the list because the script wasn't widely circulated, but it's an exceptional drama, it's an exceptional drama in the tradition of those 1970s, all the president's men type stories, and it's really, it's an exceptional film and journalistic accomplishment from Tom and Josh Singer. Well, that was incredibly lucky for us that that was picked up on second viewing there on your list. Yeah. I don't want to take credit for any one movie getting made, I think it's sort of impossible for us to know what role we played, but I do hope that we, you know, shined a very bright spotlight on Spotlight and had some catalyzing effect on it getting made or people paying attention to it. Thank you so much and good luck at the Oscars with your movies and with next year's list. I really appreciate you taking your time. Thank you so much for having me. We'll be watching from my couch at home, like I think most people probably, but that is certainly the most comfortable place to watch them. I agree. Well, not that I've been there, so I know the opposite, but I love watching them from my couch. You and me both. I'm guessing I'm both. Thank you so much to Slate's June Thomas, and we will get back to you for the summer TCAs and to Mr. Franklin Leonard, good luck at the Oscars with your movies and next year's black list. We're looking forward to that. Thank you for listening. Follow us on Twitter @podpopculture or you can visit the website, popcultureconfidential.com. This show was edited by Tom Hanson, music by Call Boy, produced by Renee Vithishteth and myself. I'm Kristina Yerling-Biro. Thanks so much for listening. Hello podcast fans, it is I, Bruce Vilanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. In that time I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly built. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win. Why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, what were they thinking, available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]