The Black List was announced last night.
For those of you who aren’t aware
of it, the Black List is a US website and online community for the film
industry that aims to bring new writing talent and producers together. Writers
can upload feature film scripts for feedback and industry execs can search for
new projects. It’s great for all involved, like a film development gang-bang.
Once a year the producers vote on the
screenplays they’ve read and
their favourites are compiled into the official Black List. Get your script
onto that list and you are well on your way to a production deal.
Films that started life on the Black
List include Juno, The King’s Speech
and Argo. Yeah. It’s a big
deal.
So I awaited this year’s Black List eagerly. To be eligible
the script cannot be in production during that year, so all titles on this list
will not be made until January 2015 at the earliest. This means that most will
start to hit cinema screens from 2016.
It’s really interesting to see what producers are feeling at the moment
and what audiences can expect in a year’s time. You can begin to identify trends and it paints a clear
picture of what ideas attract producers. As a writer or development assistant,
being aware of what sells is essential.
For instance, the report from 2013 shows
that the most popular genres were drama and comedy (no surprises there really)
but it is interesting that the top tags were
“the 2000s” (time period), “violence” and “male
(25-34) (principal roles)”. So is Hollywood full of close-minded, violence-loving chauvinists? No, surely not!
Most scripts came with an estimated
budget of $20-40 million and were set in either LA, NY or London. The majority
were rated R, came with a happy ending and popular themes included love,
courage, grief and redemption. These facts are just pulled from the overview
report. If you looked more closely at each script’s logline you could discern a lot more about the kind of stories
people identified with last year.
It would actually be super interesting
to compare the Black Lists reports for the last ten years. I imagine what you
would come out with is a pretty accurate detailing of how cinema has evolved, interesting
data on what historical/cultural/social influences lead to film trends, and
what producers have been mad for but what didn’t do so well in the box office.
So I highly recommend you check out the
Black List 2014. They run a fantastic accompanying blog too, called Go IntoThe Story, that is full of advice, interviews and script reviews, and I have
been devouring it daily.
Getting back to 2014’s Black List, I wanted to share my
thoughts on the scripts and trends that caught my eye (all descriptions lifted
straight from official log-lines).
Top of the list is a female writer with
a female protagonist – hoorah! Kristina Lauren Andersen’s screenplay follows a young woman taking control of her life, marriage
and kingdom to become Russia’s most
celebrated monarch: Catherine the Great. I am not surprised this was picked up;
audiences are demanding stronger female leads and Russia continues to dominate
a lot of new stories.
Links to Russia were one trend I
noticed, with three more scripts including the Cold War. Conflict continues to
be a prevailing theme, with a further five scripts set in a war (four in WWII).
To break it all down for you, here are
the more significant genres/themes I found in the 70 scripts of the Black List
2014 *
War/Conflict – 9
Biopic/True events – 8
Sibling feuds – 7
Coming of Age – 7
Detective – 7
Murder – 5
Disaster/Apocalypse – 5
Futuristic – 5
Self-discovery (male) – 5
Russia – 4
Psychology – 4
Road Trip – 3
Conflict is the essence of storytelling
so the war genre will always provide great source material for films. But I do
think the current unrest in Russia, Syria and the Middle East is telling and a
major influence over writers and audiences. However to confirm this speculation
you would need to compare the genre’s popularity during more peaceful times.
The large number of biopics I think is a
reaction to Hollywood’s fakery
and reliance on special effects. Maybe audiences want something a little more
authentic and relatable – what better than the true story of a real person? I’d be interested to see Road to Oz by Josh Golden, depicting the
early days of L. Frank Baum, author of The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Love and feuds between siblings seem to
be the relationships a lot of writers are exploring at the moment. There are a
few parent/child dynamics too and these complex family connections seem to have
replaced the traditional romance format. I think families are a great source
for stories and drama that a lot of people can relate to. One that particularly
caught my eye was Gifted by Tom
Flynn: a man attempts to raise his deceased sister’s seven year-old daughter, a kid genius, while battling his own
mother for custody. I just hope they take it more in the direction of Little Miss Sunshine than Big Daddy.
Of the coming of age dramas The Swimsuit Issue by Randall Green
really appeals to me. It is about a nerdy high-school photographer, who
attempts to create a “Swimsuit
Issue” featuring his
classmates in the hope of raising enough money to go to summer camp. There’s something so innocent and simple
about this story and I think that is why people respond to this genre over and
over again, for pure escapism. I think it’s doing especially well now due to the disenchantment so many are
feeling with adult life at the moment (those quarter-life crisis sufferers
a.k.a moi).
Similarly, there were a lot of stories
about middle-aged men going on a journey, resulting in self-discovery (Professor Pasghetti by Jeff Feuerstein, Everybody Wants Everything by Abraham
Higginbotham, which is reminiscent of American Beauty). So apparently life doesn’t get any less scary as we age (for
men, anyway, unless they are just more self-indulgent than female writers).
Other titles on the list that I hope
make it to the big screen are Matriarch
by Eric Koenig (a prison psychologist has 48hrs to convince a serial killer to
tell her the location of her final victim before she is executed) and Morgan by Seth W Owen (a corporate risk
management consultant is summoned to a remote research lab to determine whether
or not to terminate an at-risk artificial being).
I wanted to count the number of female
vs male writers but there were too many questionable first names for me to be
sure. However I did count the number of female protagonists…
Of 70 scripts:
Female Protagonists – 14
Male Protagonists – 43
That’s a huge difference. That leaves 13 scripts whose loglines didn’t specify if the main character was
male or female. If all 13 of them opt for women, the gender representation gap
will still be largely in favour of
male actors. Not cool.
I highly recommend you take a look at
the full Black List yourselves. It’s a really interesting read, whether you want to write, produce,
direct or act. It’s given me an idea of what to expect from the crazy film industry
over the next year, I’ve
discovered some great writing talent to keep an eye on and it's really just pretty inspiring!
