Notebook: Launch Pad or Slush Pile?
Ann Kjellberg, editor
Still from Spotlight, a 2015 film about an investigative unit at The Boston Globe that was produced from The Black List, an annual survey of “Hollywood’s most-liked unproduced screenplays”
There was an interesting announcement last week that The Black List, a writers’ service that grew out of “an annual survey of Hollywood's most-liked unproduced screenplays,” is expanding to fiction. The Black List had its beginnings in 2005 when Franklin Leonard, then a junior film executive, secretly surveyed his colleagues on their favorite unproduced screenplays and anonymously shared the results. The list, which refers ironically to the blacklisting in the forties and fifties of film industry figures accused of Communist sympathies, became an annual tradition and brought attention to a number of subsequently successful scripts. In 2012 Franklin Leonard opened a for-profit business, a platform that hosts unproduced screenplays for a $30 monthly fee and provides in-house readings and advice for $150. In 2022 the service expanded to theater and last week to fiction, creating a platform for unpublished manuscripts that faces both toward publishing and toward Hollywood, potentially dilating the direct-to-entertainment-industry fiction pipeline being pioneered by self-publishing sites like Wattpad. (In another example of reenvisioning book publication as a way-station toward a more expansive branding, merchandise, and rights enterprise, two influencers named Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur recently announced a romance-based venture called “831 Stories,” which they describe as “an entertainment company with books at the foundation,” providing themes for merch, in-person events, and cross-genre rights sales, like the original song recorded for their first book Big Fan, coming out next week. Another effort to relocate decisions about who gets published is the recently announced book publisher, Compass Rose, that solicits input in publishing decisions from an advisory board of independent booksellers.)
The Black List website echoes complaints about traditional avenues to publishing when it bemoans the way film industry’s “archaic material discovery processes are exclusionary and inefficient, harming writers, their work, and the industry's creative and financial prospects … The industry consistently rewards material written by those who can bypass the cost or impossibility of moving to Los Angeles or New York and subsist until they can penetrate the highest echelons of social and professional networks—networks that are deliberately inaccessible to all but those who were either born into them or could buy their way in. But where you live, who you know, or who you are shouldn't determine the opportunities available to your written work.” “A lot of great material is excluded,” from production, they argue, “leaving potential creative genius and billions of dollars on the table.”
The annual Black List survey boasts a string of successes in bringing scripts to fruition in films that became successful or celebrated, such as “Juno,” “Spotlight,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” and “The King’s Speech.” There’s less information about how successful the platforms are. Franklin Leonard said in a Ted Talk in 2017 that hundreds of the screenplays from the platform had “found representation” and seven had made it to production. Publishing professionals quoted in The New York Times’s credulous report on the announcement seemed optimistic that the platform will create a useful discovery avenue for writers.
But I have questions. The success of the films on the annual Black List is contingent on the initial vet of those industry executives who chose them as “favorites.” (One skeptical commenter in the Times characterized the original survey as a “cheat sheet” for executives who didn’t want to make the effort to evaluate scripts for themselves.) What is interesting about the list is that executives like the screenplays but make a judgment, wrong in some cases, that they won’t succeed. Coverage of the announcement this week did not carefully distinguish between the vetted annual list and the gatekeeper-for-hire platform. The platforms behave like what we used in publishing to call a slush pile, but in the place of employed editors they put faceless readers-for-hire who will examine a novel and write a five-hundred-word report for $60 (to the reviewer). Writers have an incentive to pay for more and more readings, as it is positive readings that elevate their visibility on the platform. Some literary agents—notably the pioneer of the book auction, Scott Meredith—used to charge submitters reading fees, as an agent friend reminded me recently, but the practice was determined to be unethical by the Association of American Literary Agents in 2022.) A similar “on-line computerized data base that allows publishers, agents and producers to scan the works of writers” at a $195 cost to writers, announced way back in 1990, the brainchild of a former television producer based in Boca Raton named Sid Poland and called The Literary Connection, appears to have disappeared without a trace. “We’re completely revolutionizing the entire industry,” said Sid Poland at the time.
The Black List will not take a cut on published or produced manuscripts; their revenues are derived not from success but from growing their cohort of fee-paying hopeful writers. Another feature is that publishing and film executives can search the platform by theme, so, if you are looking for an action film set on twenty-fifth-century Mars involving women in cat ears and bikinis, you can find someone who has already done that at no cost to you. The Black List has some famous people judging an annual prize for an unpublished novel (actor LeVar Burton, novelist Victor LaValle, literary agents Mollie Glick and Eric Simonoff, and Vanity Fair editor in chief, Radhika Jones). The initial reading of hundreds or thousands of manuscripts for the prize will presumably be those same in-house readers, a similar labor pool to those reading manuscripts for agents, publishers, and producers.
One potential variant that does not seem part of the current program would be if amateur readers could also weigh in, as is the case on serialized self-publishing platforms like WattPad, and an element of crowd-sourcing and virality could come into play, but in spite of the web site’s averral that “writers who pay for feedback on their written work have a right to know the qualifications of the people evaluating their work. They have a right to readers with expertise in the format and genre they read,” the vetting process for getting distinguished from the crowd on the platform is opaque. Publishing observer Jane Friedman calculates in a recent newsletter that the old-fashioned free method of submitting manuscripts to publishers delivers just over twenty percent of their first-novel deals to people with no apparent industry connections, in an analysis of recent deals from the industry news source Publishers Marketplace, which skews commercial. The Wall Street Journal had the latest in a series of profiles of Slow Horses author Mick Herron, whose now resounding success is the result of having his nearly-ignored work catching the enthusiasm of a sequence of not one or two but five publishing professionals whose dogged advocacy over many years brought him stardom.
I’m not so sure that such a system really creates new opportunities for writers, since either an initial vet is being made by someone or decision-makers are encountering an unmanageable volume of material; perhaps The Black List premise is that people who do not have a stake in the outcome make more unencumbered aesthetic judgments. But it does seem possible that such an approach could eventually encroach on the still-prevalent author-driven submission process. The Black List approach, were it to linger and spread, seems a akin to online job and college applications, where much larger pools of applicants create necessarily more automated decision-making. The real equivalent to the original Black List would be to poll a bunch of publishing staffers about books that they really liked but did not take on. But as the Slow Horses example shows, in publishing there are many more ways for that book to find a way forward, and many more opportunities for those intermediary enthusiasts to give it some kind of chance. The limit is really in the available audience for new writing, not barriers of production and distribution. An invested human, a dedicated community, are at the heart of dark-horse successes in literature. Maybe, in a time of potentially more accessible production and distribution infrastructure for film, Hollywood should be looking to us for models rather than the other way around.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. You can read her other Notebooks here. Recently she has considered Christian bookselling, city book fairs, and the publishing environment for nonfiction.
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I am still scratching my head over the agents/publishers who commented favorably on The Black List for novelists in the New York Times article. When writers try to convince me the query or submissions system is broken, I often explain that while writers may not like it, it actually works quite well for the agents and publishers, for the most part. They're not hurting for quality material, at least as far as I can tell. But reading this piece, you'd think that agents/publishers DID think the system was broken. Obviously, there are many ways the system is flawed, weak and unfair—it's just that in terms of offering initial consideration based on the quality of the material, I think it's more fair to writers than other creative industries. No one ever has to see you, meet you, or talk to you on the phone; agents/editors in many cases will in fact judge things based on words on a page. (Nonfiction can be quite different of course—that's another discussion.)
For the debut novelist analysis I did (thank you for mentioning!), I made a huge error in how I framed the "no obvious connections" bucket. I never meant to imply people in other categories have connections that the average writer doesn't. All I wanted to indicate was: I saw no evidence of professional writing or publishing activity whatsoever for that 20%. They seemed to land a book deal out of thin air. In the other categories, at least you could see an effort to write and publish in some kind of professional manner, even if that was just having an MFA degree. In other words: you could see the writer making an investment in themselves and there was some investment from others before they landed that first contract. But I don't think they had connections that outweighed the quality of the work.
I can't bring myself to suffer through most (if not all) contemporary movies, partly because the screenplays are so unbearably bad. I think there's a lot of room for Hollywood and Independents to improve the quality of text they accept and work with. The Black List could have been a promising opportunity for improvement, but what you say about the sameness of the judges strikes me that it's more of the same: looking backward to see what worked last week, or last year. Fearful symmetry.