Hollywood's Black List (Classic)

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode originally ran in 2020.

In 2005, Franklin Leonard was a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company. A big part of his job was to find great scripts. The only thing — most of the 50,000-some scripts registered with the Writers Guild of America every year aren't that great. Franklin was drowning in bad scripts ... So to help find the handful that will become the movies that change our lives, he needed a better way forward.

Today on the show — how a math-loving movie nerd used a spreadsheet and an anonymous Hotmail address to solve one of Hollywood's most fundamental problems: picking winners from a sea of garbage. And, along the way, he may just have reinvented Hollywood's power structure.

This episode was produced by James Sneed and Darian Woods, and edited by Bryant Urstadt, Karen Duffin and Robert Smith.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:03.4	Hey, it's Kenny Malone and today we're bringing you one of our favorite episodes from our
0:10.9	archive.
0:12.0	We first aired this episode in 2020 and we hope you enjoy it.
0:16.8	Okay, so Franklin, you are a movie producer, which means you know scripts.
0:22.0	What's the opening scene of this story, of your story?
0:26.8	It's honestly a really tough question because it really depends.
0:29.6	I think it depends.
0:31.2	There's an opening version that's me as a young black nerd realizing that being on the
0:37.3	mat team isn't going to do much for a social life and spending Friday and Saturday nights
0:41.9	by himself in empty movie theaters watching literally everything that came out from the
0:46.2	major studios.
0:47.3	That's a good one.
0:48.3	Yeah, that one works.
0:49.8	And then you know, in the movie version, we cross-fade, grown-up version of the nerdy movie
0:55.5	kid.
0:56.5	It's 2004.
0:57.5	He's in Hollywood now.
0:58.5	He's early 20s.
1:00.0	He's trying to get a foot in the movie industry.
1:03.4	Franklin Leonard had worked one low-level job, then a slightly better low-level job and
1:07.6	now he'd made it to the final round of interviews for an even better low-level job, but this
	...

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