Any gathering of the most interesting, stimulating thinkers in Hollywood would include my guest this week: Franklin Leonard, the founder and CEO of The Black List, which started in 2005 as an annual survey of Hollywood’s best unproduced scripts and has grown into a “comprehensive resource for the creative industries,” according to its website, that connects thousands of writers to industry members around the world. That makes Franklin the rarest thing in Hollywood — a mogul who built a company from scratch in a space where nothing previously existed. Not only that, but it’s a company whose work makes the industry immeasurably stronger and better. With a background in politics, business consulting and development, he is one of the most clear and thoughtful voices on how to build a more competitive, strong industry that will benefit us all.
“If we’re being honest about things, Hollywood has historically only identified quote-unquote merit among a very narrow sliver of the population, and that’s bad for the people who are not part of that population,” Franklin tells me. “But it’s worse for the business because we’re not finding the most talented people. We’re not supporting the most talented people. And we lose because we don’t get their stories.”
Enjoy the show and stick with it until the end. There, Franklin responds to my question — “What reading or viewing would you assign Hollywood?” — and offers a barn-burner of a hypothetical nine-week course in which, truly, everyone reading this should enroll. Please give it a watch! And below, in his own words, is Professor Leonard Franklin’s Curriculum for Hollywood:
Week 1 - It’s all story. We’ve been doing this for thousands of years.
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics
Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch’s Mythology: The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry & Legends of Charlemagne
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
Week 2. Myths, Monomyths, and Miseducation.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces
hooks, bell. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies
Week 3: The Psychology of Storytelling
Lindsay Doran’s lecture on the The Psychology of Storytelling, which was profiled here in the New York Times. The video below is an abbreviated version and does no real justice to the actual lecture. From time to time, The Black List has hosted it at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, and we hope to do so again soon. If there was only one thing I would require for everyone working in Hollywood, it’s probably this lecture. If you ever have the chance, wherever and whenever it is, do not miss it.
Screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3 Michael Arndt on Endings: The Good, The Bad, and the Insanely Great.
Week 4: Just Do It
Vachon, Christine. Shooting to Kill: How an Independent Producer Blasts Through Barriers to Make Work that Matters
Lee, Spike, Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: Inside Guerrilla Filmmaking (Not available on Bookshop, sadly)
Coel, Michaela. “James MacTaggart Lecture.” Edinburgh TV Festival, 2018
DuVernay, Ava. “Filmmaker Keynote Address, Film Independent Forum.” Film Independent, 28 Oct. 2013. (What I love about this one, specifically, is that this is Ava DuVernay before Selma, before When They See Us, before Queen Sugar, before Array. And knowing what we now know about what she’s accomplished in the last twelve years, it hits with incredibly concussive force. You’ll see what I mean.)
Week 5: Final Drafts and Final Say
A rare departure from recommending actual paper books here to recommend listening to these, both read by the men themselves. Once you do, it will be obvious why.
Week 6: Once Upon a Time… On a Quarterly Earnings Call
The 2009 Netflix Culture deck (You’ll have to download it via SlideShare/Scribd)
Hastings, Reed, and Erin Meyer. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
Katzenberg, Jeff. Memorandum: Some Thoughts On Our Business. 1991
Week 7: Don’t Tell Me The Odds
Lewis, Michael, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Week 8: The Usual Suspects
Freeman, Jo. “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” JoFreeman.com
Dunn, Jonathan, Sheldon Lyn, Nony Onyeador, and Ammanuel Zegeye. “Black Representation in Film and TV: The Challenges and Impact of Increasing Diversity.” McKinsey & Company, 11 Mar. 2021
Anything from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative
Week 9: Shameless Self-Promotion
Leonard, Franklin. The Book I’m Working On Now, In Earnest, I Promise. If anyone would like to pay me to write it, please do get in touch.
For more episodes of The Rushfield Lunch, including conversations with Lena Dunham, Ted Hope and Parvati Shallow, head to YouTube.
