The Black List’s Franklin Leonard on the power of ‘Based on a true story’ in Hollywood

 I am awed by people who can walk into a room by themselves and sit with a laptop or a legal pad or a pile of paper and will worlds into existence. It is truly godlike, and it is, I know from my own experience, brutally painful. … I just think it's really important that we acknowledge that. I don't think we talk enough about that. We know how hard it is to be an athlete. We know how hard it is to be an actor because we see those things in front of our faces, but we don't see what it takes to write something great. But that doesn't mean that it's any less remarkable.

One of the advantages that writers have is that you don't need anybody else to do your work. If you're a writer and you need a job, you can lock yourself in a room and write a script and sell it. And I think the ability to do that is something that I think even some writers underappreciate. There's always going to be a market for that because there's a desperate need for good stories well-told that studios can then sell to an audience. 

 I felt like I was doing a bad job because I wasn't finding a lot of [scripts]  that I could walk into [my boss’s] office and say, "Read this." I knew that either I was bad at my job, which was finding good scripts, or the job itself was just reading and passing on mediocre-to-bad scripts. And either way it was something that I needed to solve. … I guess I kind of defaulted to this sort of strategic thinking that I picked up when I was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company right out of college. I contacted 75 of my peers anonymously via email. I said, "Send me a list of your 10 favorite unproduced screenplays. In exchange I will share with you the combined list that everybody mentioned." Copied and pasted those responses into a spreadsheet. Literally Microsoft Excel. Ran it through a pivot table, outputted it to PowerPoint, slapped a quasi-subversive name on it, and emailed it back out from my anonymous email address. I think it was Blacklist2005@hotmail or something. And it went viral in the industry almost immediately.

 I think the "Based on a true story" thing is just a subset of the IP conversation, right? The reason why "Based on a true story" is compelling to Hollywood is the same reason why Marvel is compelling to Hollywood, or why people want to make the Hot Wheels movie. I know people will sort of clutch their pearls about that, but it's the same dynamic.

And the question is, how many people know this true story? That's really how valuable the element is. … It's potentially complicated. There are always rights issues, and is this part of the public domain? How are we going to treat the true-life subjects of this story, if they're still alive or if they're not alive? How are we going to handle their progeny? There are upsides, but there are also challenges. 

 This will be my big confession time: narrative nonfiction is really my go-to as a reader personally. Ryszard Kapuściński … I've read everything he's written. Two of my favorite screenplays that were on The Black List [were] the Jackie Kennedy biopic script that became the movie ["Jackie"] with Natalie Portman by Noah Oppenheim, who was a journalist himself,  and David Seidler's “The King's Speech.”  David Seidler got permission to write the story of “The King's Speech,” I believe, from the Queen Mother, but literally had to wait until she died before he was allowed to do anything with it. 

 [Director and writer Anthony Minghella said], “On some level what you want to do with any story that's based on a true thing or a novel is to deeply consume it and have reverence for it, and then you have to put it aside and retell the emotional story as accurately as you can.” Those aren't his exact words  — that was what I took from it  — but that rang really true to me. And oftentimes that's hard for a journalist because you've been educated as journalists to report the facts. And that's not the job of a screenwriter. That's not the job of a television writer. The job of a film and television writer is to take the audience on an emotional journey.

So reconciling those two things can be difficult. And to be clear, I do think that if you're [writing] a movie or television show based on a true story, there are obligations. And there are no official rules on it, but I think that tension, the goal of journalism to tell the truth and the goal of film and television to tell an emotional truth, they're often aligned, but they're very often in conflict, and navigating those things can be a real challenge, especially if you come from one camp and want to transition to the other.

 The best advice I've ever heard for being a screenwriter is [from Scott Myers], and it's six words: read scripts, watch movies, write pages. I'm always loath to be prescriptive about, “Well, listen to this person or read this person or watch this.” I think it's just to read and watch a lot. The best writers I know are voracious readers, and they're omnivorously voracious. They read high and low. They read deeply on many, many different subjects. And I think the same thing is true of filmmakers. The filmmakers that I love watch everything.