Franklin Leonard

Franklin Leonard is a film and television producer, cultural commentator, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Black List, the company that celebrates and supports great screenwriting and the writers who do it via film production, its annual survey of best unproduced screenplays, online marketplace, writer incubators, and live events. More than 400 scripts from the annual Black List survey have been produced as feature films earning more than 250 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins including four of the last fourteen Best Pictures and eleven of the last twenty-six screenwriting Oscars. Franklin has worked in feature film development at Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, and Leonardo DiCaprio. He has been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto, and Mumbai Film Festivals, one of Hollywood Reporter’s 35 Under 35, Black Enterprise magazine’s “40 Emerging Leaders for Our Future,” and Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business.” The recipient of the 2019 Writers Guild of America, East (WGAe) Evelyn Burkey award for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters and the 2022 Presidential Proclamation from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, he was an advisor for the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Exhibition “In America”, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). His TED talk – “How I Accidentally Changed the Way Movies Get Made” – has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.