About this Advisor Studio
Advisor Studio sessions feature intimate, moderated conversations with Sundance Advisors who are working artists and media industry professionals that contribute their expertise to the Collab community via courses, classes, office hours and events. In the Studio events, Advisors share field experiences and insights into their specific areas of craft, including writing, directing and producing for TV and film.
These are turbulent times, but there are still many ways to get your stories out into the world. Franklin Leonard, CEO & Founder of The Black List, returns to Sundance Co//ab to share his advice on what to do with your next screenplay. We'll get his perspective on current events, hear about his journey as a Hollywood production executive, and learn why he became a champion for storytelling. We’ll explore the opportunities available when you've completed a script, discuss what executives consider in reviewing a project and reveal some common mistakes to avoid. In the process, Franklin will divulge what he’s found to be true about successful screenwriting and gives us an insider’s tour of The Black List.
Get caught up - Check out Franklin Leonard's last conversation with Co//ab: The Art of Feedback: Giving and Receiving Notes
Advisor StudioTeam
Franklin Leonard
Advisor
Franklin Leonard is a film producer, cultural commentator, professor, 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, live staged script readings, screenwriter labs, and film culture publications. More than 400 scripts from the annual Black List survey have been produced as feature films earning 250 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins including four of the last twelve Best Pictures and ten of the last twenty-four 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, Guanajuato, and Mumbai Film Festivals and for the PEN Center Literary Awards. He was also a delegate and speaker at the White House’s 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. He’s been one of Hollywood Reporter’s 35 Under 35, Black Enterprise magazine’s “40 Emerging Leaders for Our Future,” The Root’s 100 Most Influential African-Americans, and Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business,” and was awarded the 2015 African-American Film Critics Association (AAFCA)’s Special Achievement Award for career excellence and the 2019 Writers Guild of America, East Evelyn Burkey award for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters. He is an occasional commentator for the BBC and MSNBC on matters of culture, politics, and race, an associate professor at the American Film institute, a trustee of PEN America, an advisor to Glitch, Inc., and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Associates Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). His TED talk was viewed more than one million times in its first two months of release.