#21 - Franklin Leonard, Founder and CEO of the Black List, Pt 2

What It Covers

Franklin Leonard discusses The Blacklist's writer-focused features, including suspending struck company access during the WGA strike, implementing content sensitivity tags for reader assignments, and his philosophy on writing audacious scripts over budget-conscious ones.

Key Questions Answered

• •Strike solidarity implementation: The Blacklist banned all struck company employees from accessing their script database during the WGA strike while maintaining services for agents, managers, and non-guild writers to continue receiving feedback and making connections without undermining strike goals.
• •Sensitivity-based reader matching: Writers tag content elements in their scripts, readers indicate sensitivities they prefer avoiding, and the system automatically routes assignments to prevent mismatched evaluations. This ensures readers with horror expertise don't avoid gore scenes that might trigger personal trauma while maintaining evaluation quality.
• •Reader qualification standards: Every Blacklist reader must have minimum one year industry experience as an assistant in their assigned format, submit vetted previous feedback samples, complete a test evaluation, and face ongoing monitoring with immediate customer support escalation for poor feedback quality.
• •Audacious writing over budget constraints: Early-career writers should write emotionally powerful, ambitious scripts without production budget considerations. If the story captivates readers, industry professionals will reverse-engineer production feasibility, potentially offering paid rewrites to adapt the concept rather than rejecting bold ideas outright.