The Importance of Representation in Film: ‘If You See it Enough, it is Going to Affect How You See the World’
Revisiting The Black List Founder Franklin Leonard’s 2020 Chautauqua Lecture
Throughout Black History Month, we’re showcasing recent programs from Chautauqua stages and online platforms that have given voice to the Black experience in America. These words and images provide critical context for the important and difficult work — and action — to which this moment calls us, to advance the cause of justice.
This past summer, we were honored to welcome Franklin Leonard to our CHQ Assembly platform during a week on “Forces Unseen: What Shapes Our Daily Lives” to discuss his work as founder of The Black List. The mission and work of The Black List is to push back against the unseen forces that sustain the deeply entrenched disparities of opportunity in Hollywood. Leonard introduced the thinking behind The Black List through the example of Frederick Douglass, the most photographed American of the 19th century.
“Douglass believed deeply in the power of photographs to define the reality outside their frames,” Leonard said. “If Douglass believed so deeply in the power of a single frame, one can only imagine what potential he would have seen in a motion picture — stories projected high and wide and transmitted around the world with a single keystroke.”
The Black List, originally as an emailed list and now as a robust website and community, seeks to unearth the best unproduced screenplays of the 50,000 pieces registered with the Writers’ Guild of America each year.
“The conventional wisdom — the unseen, even within the industry, (the) forces that determine what has value in Hollywood and what doesn’t — is wrong,” Leonard said. “It is all conventional and no wisdom.”
Picking up The Chautauquan Daily’s coverage:
Because it’s “all conventional,” the young Leonard who adored movies never saw a place for himself in the business. But the success of the Black List forced him to consider a question: If the industry was wrong about the talent that was already in the system, what about the talent that wasn’t?
Seven years after the first Black List, Leonard turned the list into a website that allows anyone who has written an English-language screenplay to have it evaluated and available to industry professionals. He has also launched three screenwriter’s labs.
“Much is right, with me, of this effect: If you can see it in life or in fiction, you can be it,” Leonard said. “Less, I think, is made of its corollary: If you see it enough, it is going to affect how you see the world.”
The trends Leonard sees in films worry him. Girls aged 13 to 20 are just as likely as women aged 21 to 30 to be shown on various screens in “sexy attire with some nudity and referenced as attractive.” Despite studies challenging the likelihood of these notions, half of Latinx immigrants are shown to be engaged in criminal activity and 64% of gang members in films are Black, he said.
“Should we be surprised then that an estimated 1 woman in 6 in America have been the victim of rape in some form?” Leonard said. “Or that 3 in 5 have experienced gender-based harassment in the workplace? Or that Black Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by police as their fellow citizens?”
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There has not been a year in this decade when women have accounted for more than one-third of the speaking roles in major Hollywood movies, Leonard said. In 2014, only 28.3% of all speaking roles went to people of color. Only 2% went to LGBTQ characters. Less than 9% of Hollywood films directed between the years 2013 and 2017 were directed by women.
In its 15-plus years, The Black List has had success promoting screenplays — many written by writers of color and from other deeply underrepresented populations — that make strides to buck these disturbing and disheartening statistics. Leonard reported that of the 1,200 scripts that have made The Black List, a third were eventually produced; collectively they have amassed 300 Academy Award nominations, with 50 Oscar wins. And a 2016 Harvard Business School study found that a screenplay listed on the Black List was twice as likely to be produced, and would make 90% more revenue than “mainstream” films with similar budgets.
“There are unseen forces that create the images that we see and stories we consume, and those images and stories set in motion unseen forces that define how we see the world and, as a consequence, how we live in it,” Leonard said. “I don’t know how to change (the world), but I know if I keep talking about how dirty it is out here, somebody’s going to clean it up, let’s hope. Since the better part of optimism is action, let’s act.”
[Full recording of Leonard’s Chautauqua Lecture on CHQ Assembly]
[Full coverage in The Chautauquan Daily]
