The origin story of the Black List is almost mythic: In 2005, film development executive Franklin Leonard sent an anonymous survey to every Hollywood producer he had met with that year, asking them to name their favorite screenplays they’d passed on during the year because the scripts didn’t match their needs. In the movie industry, producers often encounter the same set of screenplays, both because writers’ agents and managers blitz the studios with new work and because the executives share their favorites among themselves. Leonard compiled a list of the favorite unproduced scripts and, at the end of the year, sent the producers the results. It went viral. The top two screenplays on that list were Things We Lost in the Fire and Juno. Subsequent editions of the Black List contained Oscar winners Argo, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, and Spotlight. {read}