🎧 Franklin Leonard on Why Hollywood is Running Scared
The Black List founder tells me why risks have become so subversive in the industry. Plus, a chat with the team behind ABC's 'High Potential'
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What is everyone in Hollywood so afraid of? I’ve been asking myself that question a lot over the past few months, and I’m not the only one — my colleague Richard Rushfield wrote a column in April titled “Creeps and Cowards Among Us,” after all.
But few people have called out Hollywood’s self-defeating, old-fashioned thinking as effectively as Franklin Leonard, the founder and CEO of The Black List, who has built an entire company around scripts that everybody in town loves but hasn’t yet made. When Sinners opened in theaters this spring and inspired some hand-wringing through media among anonymous sources fretting that it would never make enough money for its studio, Leonard was ready to call out a lot of industry-wide assumptions that turned out to be plain wrong.
On today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Leonard — who is also the host and mastermind of the Nobody Knows Anything podcast, whose season 1 finale dropped today (The Ankler is a co-producer with The Black List and LAist Studios) — joins me to talk about how that kind of conventional wisdom can hold studios back. We also discuss why it can be perfectly natural for people who come up in this precarious industry to still feel anxious when they rise to the top, and what it would take for the success of films like Sinners to actually inspire studios to back more interesting, original ideas. With remakes like How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch now dominating the summer box office, it’s not exactly looking great out there for anything that’s not IP. But as Leonard reminds me, “I learned a while back to resist the urge to pre-judge until I have information worth judging. And so, yes, there is a ridiculous trend of live-action remakes of things that we've already seen. But if it’s good, it’s good.”
The episode also includes the audio from my conversation with the team behind High Potential at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on June 2, a live event presented by ABC. (You can watch the video of our discussion here.) I talked to series creator Drew Goddard, showrunner Todd Harthan, director Alethea Jones and star Kaitlin Olson about the breakout show’s fight to film in L.A. — a hot topic in this year’s Emmy race, as you can read in today’s edition of the Prestige Junkie newsletter. We also discussed creating a show that keeps pace with Olson’s character, Morgan, whose high IQ enables her brain to operate at warp speed. Part of capturing that involves something the team calls “Morgan visions,” which Olson says took some time to wrap her head around.
“ I remember before we shot the pilot and I said, ‘I’m really nervous about the Morgan visions because on the page, I don’t understand what that’s gonna look like,’” Olson said in our conversation. When Jones told her the visions were what she was most excited about, Olson felt confident they could pull it off. “I’m such a control freak,” the actress said. “For me to be able to just fully let go and put something completely into someone else’s hands — it was such a relief to have such a safe partnership.”
Hear it all in today’s edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast, and as always let me know what you think: katey@theankler.com
