“Franklin Leonard Wants to Diversify the Box Office”

Featured in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

A Q&A with Black List founder Franklin Leonard with Ana Marie Cox.

You graduated from Harvard and worked in politics, then management consulting, then Hollywood. What is the through line with those jobs? It has probably been advocacy for people whose stories have historically been excluded or overlooked. I had pretty much every advantage growing up — my father’s a doctor, my mom was a teacher — but when you grow up a black nerd in the Deep South while Steve Urkel is on television, you learn to identify with those on the outside.

After all this, you created “The Black List,” an annual anonymous survey of Hollywood executives about the year’s most well loved but unproduced screenplays. You’ve said one reason executives make movies without much attention to diversity is that their own lives and backgrounds are themselves not very diverse. It’s important that people who are in this system recognize that there is a viable, profitable business in making films that are representative of the diversity that exists in the country and the world. The assumptions that Hollywood makes about what is commercially viable aren’t always accurate.

When Franklin approached me nearly 7 years ago as a fan of the blog, we had several conversations about our respective visions for what we’d like to see happen in the movie and TV business. One thing was clear: Both of us wanted to explore ways for new, more, and different voices to have a platform to share diverse stories with the world. Franklin and his crew at the Black List have been on point on this front since Day 1. And in my own humble way here at Go Into The Story and my teaching, now at the DePaul University School of Cinematic Arts, I have done what I can to support writers and filmmakers from diverse backgrounds to develop as storytellers.

This is one of many reasons why I’m proud to partner with the Franklin Leonard and the Black List as its official screenwriting blog.

For the rest of the New York Times Magazine Q&A with Franklin, go here.