Seven years ago Franklin Leonard, an executive then working at Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way, asked 90 of Hollywood’s movers and shakers to send their 10 favourite unproduced scripts for him to read over the holidays. After a little bit of spreadsheet jiggery pokery, Leonard ranked the screenplays by their popularity, wrapped the results in a black cover and emailed these notes back to the contributors.
The email went viral, with two of the top three films on that initial list – Lars and the Real Girl, written by Nancy Oliver, and Diablo Cody’s Juno – found themselves nominated for the Best Original Screenplay gong at the Academy Awards, with Cody ultimately nabbing the prestigious golden statuette. Leonard’s so-called ‘Black List’ quickly became the go-to document for producers looking for movies to green light, while its author was subsequently named as one of the top 35 people working in Los Angeles by The Hollywood Reporter.
Over 300 executives and their assistants now contribute to the Black List, which has been published online on the second Friday of December every year since. It’s nothing if not an egalitarian project, with The Social Network, written by seasoned screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, rubbing shoulders with unsolicited ‘spec’ scripts from relative unknowns, and the list has undoubtedly helped plenty of talented voices make themselves heard over the years.
Allan Loeb, the author of Things We Lost in the Fire and Wall Street 2, both of which have appeared in the list, has described its power in terms of transportation, having gone from riding the bus to riding to work in a BMW, literally overnight.
Ben Ripley had written a handful of straight to DVD films, and worked as a script doctor on some forgettable horror movies, before his Source Code screenplay made the Black List published in 2007, and soon found himself fast tracked as a writer to watch. The script finally hit the big screen last weekend, with Jake Gyllenhaal as Captain Colter Stevens, a soldier beamed repeatedly into the body of a passenger in a train targeted by terrorists.
As he re-lives the eight-minute sequence that precedes the train’s explosion over and over again, he attempts to unpack the puzzle of who was behind this attack and prevent a second atrocity. Part Groundhog Day, part Primer and part Donnie Darko, the science-fiction thriller serves as a thoroughly appropriate follow-up to Moon, the noggin-twisting, identity-bending debut of British director Duncan Jones.
So, to this year’s list. The hot tickets are College Republicans – based on the misadventures of Karl Rove and Lee Atwater – listed by 49 of those polled, and closely followed by Jackie, a Kennedy biopic that charts the first lady’s attempts to define JFK’s legacy in the days following his assassination.
All very worthy, but how about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a script in which Abe engages in stake wielding revenge following the murder of his mother by nightstalkers. Now that needs to be made.
Source Code is in cinemas now. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has been picked up by Fox, began shooting this month, and is due to open June 2012.
Source Code – Tales From The Black List (text) by Kingsley Marshall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
