Hollywood Black List Starts Fee-Based Web Directory

By MICHELLE KUNG

There are thousands of screenplays sloshing around Hollywood at any given moment. Now, one Hollywood executive who has spent too much time inundated with the mediocre ones, has built an online directory?and, he hopes, a business?around the hunt for the handful that show promise.

On Thursday, the Black List, a closely watched compendium of Hollywood's best unproduced screenplays that originally began as a free, yearly emailed document, will move online and allow paying users to rank film scripts and view the results as they search for gems.

Membership costs $20 a month and will be limited initially to people working in the film industry.

Franklin Leonard, the creator of the list and Black List LLC founder, said the restriction is to ensure the site's information "doesn't get muddled" and to build a community whose livelihood depends on finding and reading good screenplays.

Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection

'Juno,' seen above, was on the first Black List in 2005. The quirky comedy went on to win an Academy Award in 2008.

The new Web-based service expands on the concept of the original list by letting users create personalized, real-time lists based on criteria they enter into the website's search function, such as searching by genre.

The list also changes based on the user's ranking history, as opposed to the static nature of the original Black List.

Mr. Leonard, vice president of creative affairs at actor Will Smith's production company, Overbrook Entertainment, published the first Black List in 2005.

Then, at a different production company, Mr. Leonard began polling film-industry colleagues for their favorite unproduced projects, tallying up the votes and sharing the top vote-getters with colleagues and contributors.

Three of this fall's best-reviewed movies?"The Ides of March," "50/50" and "The Descendants"?are alumni of the Black List. Mr. Leonard has distributed the annual list free of charge via email to the roughly 500 Hollywood executives, agents and managers from whom he solicits votes.

The first Black List included a script that would go on to win an Academy Award in 2008: Diablo Cody's quirky comedy "Juno."

"Making movies that are not widely commercial is an increasingly difficult and risky proposition," says Mr. Leonard.

Inclusion on the Black List, he adds, signals to industry insiders that a given project deserves a second look or brings a script to the attention of people who are in a position to produce it.

Unlike the bare-bones original list, the new incarnation is a searchable database of thousands of scripts?2,700 now, with more being added.

But an online Black List that reflects a real-time ranking of a given screenplay could anger agents and managers in a town where information is currency. Possibly undermining the list's credibility, those same talent handlers could try to artificially boost their own clients' rankings.

Amanda Schweitzer, an executive at production company Millar Gough Ink, says that a list that is updated on a continuing basis may be more useful than a yearly list, which may disproportionately represent screenplays sent out around the time the list is compiled.

Scripts themselves won't be available on the site. The only information provided will be the same as on Mr. Leonard's existing Black List, including a "log line," or pithy description of the project, and whether the project is represented by an agent or manager.

It is up to users to acquire screenplays they want to read.

"People who work in the industry will continue to talk about their favorite scripts over lunch," Mr. Leonard says. "This is just a way to help coalesce those conversations into one place."

Write to Michelle Kung at michelle.kung@wsj.com

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1923739/news/1923739/

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