I had the good fortune to get to attend a great talk last week by Black List creator/founder (and an old friend of Ethan’s) Franklin Leonard. Those of you who are writers out there understand how any insights into the world of moviemaking that come from those who actually run the world of moviemaking - well, they’re sort of like the scraps your dog begs for at the side of the table. We’re desperate for them. We’ll make puppy dog eyes until we get some. And, like your dog, we’re never satisfied. We want more.

In all seriousness, the talk was inspiring, thoughtful and informative (thanks, Franklin), and it really shed some light on how Hollywood execs look at the moviemaking process, comb for quality scripts and, subsequently, try to get those scripts noticed and eventually made. (For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Black List is a list of unproduced screenplays compiled by junior Hollywood execs each year – it’s essentially a list of their favorites, ie. the scripts they couldn’t put down, the ones they just had “that” gut feeling about. A script that gets listed by enough execs scores enough points and makes it onto the list). The Black List has done wonders for screenwriters (from The King’s Speech’s David Seidler to Juno’s Diablo Cody to The Beaver’s Kyle Killen and many more) and also helped junior executives voice their opinions along the way. But what I’m most interested in discussing here is the idea of democratization, and how it plays a role (or, perhaps I should say, what role it might play) in the future of screenwriting and moviemaking.

Franklin touched on this a bit when he talked about the idea of the Black List representing the voice of the crowd. In Hollywood, it’s hard to be that person who steps forward and says, “I love this script, I think it’s amazing, and we should plunk down X million dollars to make it.” Going out on a limb like that is scary/difficult/worse than calling up that cute girl from the coffee shop and asking her to go to Sing-a-long Little Mermaid with you. Say you love a script about a beaver puppet, but you’re just not sure you’re willing to go to bat for it (it’s about a beaver puppet, after all). A list that proves dozens of others agree with you? That might just be the support system you need to step up and go to bat for the puppet. Franklin was essentially tapping into the power of the crowd when he started the list back in 2005. And now? We’ve seen that that power has legs. So many of the scripts from the Black List have been made and become Oscar winners that it’s hard to ignore it now when a few hundred experts vouch for a particular script.

So…what I’m curious about is how far we can (and how far we will) take this idea of the crowd and democratization of content in the future. Take a site like Scriptshadow, which reviews scripts – both produced and unproduced – and, in the past, used to provide links to said scripts. The creator of this site came under so much fire for this that now he’s a lot more careful and only sends you the scripts directly from his email list (if you’re lucky). What were people so up in arms about? Well, for starters, the material he was posting is copyrighted, and it wasn’t his to post. His argument? The scripts were offered to amateur screenwriters for educational purposes. That’s certainly reasonable… to a certain extent. It could also be “educational” for business school students to see the top-secret, confidential financials of Fortune 500 companies. Doesn’t mean they get to.

There’s another reason established writers weren’t happy with the scripts going up for the whole world to see: Carson, the site founder, sometimes gave unproduced scripts a bad review. His prerogative? Perhaps. But what if studio execs or producers saw that review without reading the script first and formed an unfair opinion based on it? (This could very well happen. And it might be unfortunate, given that Carson is just one dude with one opinion. Plus, the script might have been posted in an earlier or wrong draft, or it might still be unfinished. How fair is it for a writer’s work to be judged before he/she is ready?) And, finally, what about the fact that endings to movies were being cavalierly shown to the public years before a film might hit the big screen? Though Carson’s intentions have always been to help writers, perhaps he’s inadvertently been doing a disservice to the film industry itself by posting those scripts. (With all that said, I absolutely see why he did what he did, and I appreciate him breaking down that Hollywood “opaqueness” that drives most creative types bat-shit crazy).

This is clearly a complicated issue, and one I certainly don’t have an answer for. But I do wonder – how much can we democratize moviemaking? If scripts simply aren’t ours to be read (us being the general public) – and maybe they shouldn’t be – the opaqueness of Hollywood is bound to continue. Even the Black List feels a bit like a mysterious (albeit magical) phenomenon that only a few insiders have a true understanding of. (Because the actual scripts aren’t available on the list – only the titles, log lines and writer info – a whole host of people are illegally providing links to the screenplays online for the public to read. You have to catch them while you can; they inevitably get taken down within days of being posted).

I’ll be fascinated to see how things pan out in the future, as we all become infinitely more connected, and informed, in this digital age. As for democratization, it’s the whole reason Tammy Camp and I are creating a web series about Silicon Valley and bootstrapping it just like we would with a start-up. The digital world is going to radically change the way we view, create, consume and distribute content – in fact, it already has – and I have no doubt the movie biz will be similarly affected. Books are already experiencing this sea change with self-publishing (see my past post about young adult author Amanda Hocking). We no longer live in a world where only a select few can tell us if we’re good enough. Of course, we also live in a world where anyone with a flip cam can make a movie about the adorable shit his two-year-old says. It goes both ways.

PROCRASTINATION QUESTION:

What’s your take on the future of content as we immerse ourselves even more fully into this digital and social media-controlled world? What do you think of the ijustines of the world, series like The Guild, and web personalities who get their fans to crowdfund their lives?