Latest in Franklin Leonard

The Black List founder Franklin Leonard kicked off the virtual Sundance panel “ARRAY 10: A Decade of Disruption” by chatting with ARRAY founder and Emmy-winning Ava DuVernay, President Tilane Jones and VP of Public Programming Mercedes Cooper about the origin of the narrative change collective which puts shine on…

Continuing its effort to bolster stories from historically underrepresented communities, The Black List is teaming with MGM to launch a two-year feature film script writing partnership to discover new voices. The initiative is committed to identifying new writers who want to tell original stories with universal appeal…

American Cinematheque chairman Rick Nicita said Monday that producer Stephanie Allain, WME partner Esther Chang and Black List founder Franklin Leonard will serve as new board members at the organization. The AC also said that Ken Scherer, who had been a consultant to the board during the sale of the Cinematheque’s…

EXCLUSIVE: James Schamus has committed to direct College Republicans, a fact-inspired Dirty Rotten Scoundrels-style coming of age story about top Republican operatives. Logan Lerman has been set to star as a young Lee Atwater, Asa Butterfield as Karl Rove and Kristine Froseth to play Kate King — a composite character…

Jose Antonio Vargas’ media advocacy organization Define American is teaming with MACRO, Gold House, Color Of Change, the Coalition for Asian Pacifics in Entertainment and the UTA Foundation to host the live-streamed virtual panel, Black + Gold Forum: Building Solidarity and Support for Black and Asian Communities…

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…