Latest in Franklin Leonard

UPDATE with final ranked list: The 15th annual Black List was released Monday, with Ken Kobayashi’s romance screenplay Move On leading the coveted rundown of unproduced screenplays in Hollywood with 29 votes. The screenplay follows Teddy, who thinks he's the only living person left in a world where humanity is frozen…

EXCLUSIVE: The Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE) and Franklin Leonard’s The Black List are teaming up for the CAPE List, a curated list of the 12 most promising unmade film scripts centering on Asian Pacific characters and experiences. The partnership, which is a fitting announcement for Asian…

UPDATE Saturday, Jan. 26: As soon as Dr. Stacy L. Smith announced the TimesUp 4% Director Challenge, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative tweeted out the news and more accepted the commitment to work with a female director within 18 months to increase the number of female directors in the 1200 top grossing films…

Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of the Black List, will receive the WGA East's Burkey Award, given in recognition of his contributions that have brought “honor and dignity to writers." The award will be presented at 71st annual Writers Guild Awards in New York on Feb. 17. "Since founding the Black List, Franklin has…

Franklin Leonard used the prominent stage of the Wall Street Journal’s Tech D.Live conference to announce he’s raising a film fund to produce some of the exceptional screenplays submitted to The Black List. The Black List’s annual survey of Hollywood executives’ favorite unproduced screenplays has a proven track…

After spending five years advocating for the best unproduced screenplays with The Black List, Franklin Leonard has taken a leap to become a moneyed backer who can now turn those gems-on-paper into feature films. In April, Leonard, a former development exec for companies including Appian Way and Overbrook, struck a…

EXCLUSIVE: Meridian Entertainment and The Black List have formed a multi-year partnership that will empower the screenplay advocacy service founded by Franklin Leonard to produce and finance three to five English language films each year. Pictures $15M budget and under can be fully financed by Meridian, but the…

EXCLUSIVE: In what marks the fourth year of the program, Cassian Elwes and the Black List founder Franklin Leonard have decided to expand the Independent Screenwriting Fellowship to sponsor not one but two unrepresented screenwriters this year with an all-expense paid trip to Sundance. The eligibility requires that…

UPDATED WITH FULL LIST OF SCRIPTS, WRITERS, AND REPS: Catherine The Great, about the rise and life of the famous (sometimes notorious) 18th-Century Russian monarch, was the top vote-getter among 70 scripts chosen for the 2014 Black List of the year’s best un-produced scripts. The screenplay, by Los Angeles writer and…

The tenth annual Black List announcement of the year’s best un-produced film scripts hits tomorrow morning with a star-filled, somewhat complicated online process that will depend on YouTube, Twitter and the patience and social-media savvy of the list’s many fans. Black List founder Franklin Leonard said the process…

Producer Cassian Elwes and Black List founder Franklin Leonard have created the Cassian Elwes Independent Screenwriting Fellowship. They will send one writer who doesn’t have an agent and hasn’t made more than $,5000 from scribbling to the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. They’ll cover the trip’s cost, and Elwes will…

EXCLUSIVE: After using The Black List as a way to scout screenplays worth buying, Warner Bros has made the first alliance between a major studio and Franklin Leonard‘s screenplay evaluation service. The goal is to give opportunities to scribes who might not otherwise get a chance. Using the diversity guidelines from…