Franklin Leonard

Franklin Leonard is founder of the Black List, the yearly publication highlighting Hollywood’s most popular unproduced screenplays and the company birthed to continue its mission of identifying and celebrating great screenplays. Over 325 Black List scripts have been produced as feature films earning 275 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins including four of the last nine Best Pictures and ten of the last twenty screenwriting Oscars. Franklin has worked in development at Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, Leonardo DiCaprio, and John Goldwyn. He has been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto and Guanajuato Film Festivals and for the PEN Center Literary Awards and a delegate and speaker at the White House’s 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. He was 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, 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. He is a member of the Associates Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.