Ep. 339 A Hype Man for the Writing Community with Franklin Leonard

Written By Megan Caballero

Actor and producer Franklin Leonard joins The Stacks this week to discuss his groundbreaking work with The Black List. Known for revolutionizing the way Hollywood discovers screenplays, Franklin recently expanded The Black List into the world of fiction. This new initiative gives writers a platform to showcase unpublished manuscripts and connect with key players in the publishing industry. In today’s episode, we dive into why Franklin wanted to venture into the book world, how The Black List works, and what this expansion means for emerging writers.

The Stacks Book Club pick for October is The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. We will discuss the book on October 30th with Franklin Leonard returning as our guest.

 
 

Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

To support The Stacks and find out more from this week’s sponsors, click here.

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TRANSCRIPT
*Due to the nature of podcast advertising, these timestamps are not 100% accurate and will vary.

Welcome to The Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host Traci Thomas, and today I am so excited to welcome Franklin Leonard to The Stacks. Franklin is a film and television producer and the founder of The Black List, which is a platform that has revolutionized the way Hollywood discovers and produces screenplays through use of a database for unproduced work.

The big exciting news is that Franklin has now expanded The Black List into the world of fiction, which we talk about a whole bunch today on the show. Franklin shares why he wanted to get into the book space and what anxieties he's had about making that jump, how The Black List actually works, and what success looks like for him and the team at The Black List. Remember, our book club pick for October is The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

Franklin will be back on Wednesday, October 30th to discuss the book with me. So be sure to read along and tune in. Quick reminder, everything we talk about on each episode of The Stacks can be found in the link in the show notes.

If you love this podcast, if you like what you hear today, if you want to support the work of The Stacks, go to patreon.com/thestacks and join The Stacks Pack. This is an independent podcast that I cannot make without the support of listeners like you. It is just $5 a month.

You get to be part of an incredible bookish community. You get to join our Discord, do our monthly virtual book club meetups. You get a bonus episode each month, and you get to know that by being a part of The Stacks Pack, you make the show possible.

Head to patreon.com/thestacks to sign up. Oh, and a fun perk of The Stacks Pack is that you get a shout out right here on the show. So thank you to Jordan, Chelsea Kay, Nicole Blancet-Denson, AJ Wall, Jean Nudel, and Julia Azari.

Thank you all so much. And for those of you who are like, I don't need to go to a book club, but I do want to support the show, you can subscribe to my newsletter Unstacked by going to traciethomas.substack.com. I'll be giving you book reviews.

I'll be giving you pop culture takes. I'll be giving you a lot of my really mediocre to middling opinions. So if that sounds more like your speed, head to traciethomas.substack.com and subscribe.

All right. Now it is time for my conversation with Franklin Leonard.

All right, everybody, I'm so excited. Today, I am joined by Franklin Leonard. He is the creator of The Black List, which we will talk about, but you might know about this new part of The Black List that he's endeavoring into, which is fiction for all of us book lovers.

So Franklin, welcome to The Stacks.

Thank you for having me, I am honored to be here.

I'm so excited. I wanna start not with The Black List or with books. I actually wanna start with the fact that you were a math person.

I was, I was a big math person, yeah.

So normally you wouldn't even be invited on this podcast because I am such an anti-math person. I hate math. I'm so bad at it.

That even speaking to a math person is like stressful for me. But you're here, but you're not really a math person anymore. So what happened?

I was gonna say, I've evolved. I've grown. Yeah, I was just a big math nerd as a kid.

It came easily to me and I really enjoyed it. So I was like captain of the math team in high school. And I was taking math classes at Columbus State University when I was still in high school.

I took number theory in high school at the local college just because I was like, oh, this will be exciting. Just to give you, I was Steve Urkel, while Steve Urkel was on television. And I think I have to give a lot of credit to my mother who was like, look, it's great that you're good at this one thing, but you should be good at other things and try to do the things that you're not good at.

And I was a reader as a kid. Like I was the kid with the flashlight underneath the blankets after bedtime reading. But I think by high school, I was just like, oh, the math's my thing.

That's what I want to focus on. She was like, no, you're good at that. That's easy, do the hard thing.

And so I remember forcing myself to read a lot as in high school and in my early 20s, because that was the thing that I found impenetrable. And I think I grew, I think I had a reverence for writers, but the more time I spent reading, the more that reverence grew for the notion of somebody going into a room alone and with, you know, an either free hand or on a computer, sort of willing worlds into existence. Like it's God-like to me.

And the people who do it exceptionally well are special people in my conception of the world.

What was challenging for you about reading? Why did you think that it was impenetrable?

I think it was an attention thing. I think, you know, like so many people, I have ADHD, but I was like diagnosed when I was in third grade back in like the 80s. Which I guess was relatively unusual then.

And so the idea of sitting down and engaging with something over an extended period of time was a challenge for me just like constitutionally. But I think that's also why like, you know, when the hook is set and the time disappears and you're just in this world, it became really special moments for me. And the people who were doing that to me, I was like, man, you changed my conception of time and space.

And that is not something that happens a lot. So I think that's probably what it was.

Can you think of like one or two books specifically that did that for you when you were younger?

I mean, I remember reading Invisible Man in high school. And you know, I grew up in the deep south. I grew up in Columbus, Georgia.

This was not something that was assigned in school. It was something that I picked up. I think because I knew it was important and I feel like the AP exam, there was a list of like the most referenced books on the AP exam.

And that was the number one book. And that was the type of student I was. I was like, well, then I have to read this if I wanna do well on the exam.

But that book, I remember really shaking up my world and my conception of what literature could do. And again, I was probably 15, 16 years old reading that book in Columbus, Georgia on the Alabama border. And I think I was probably having like a racial awakening at the time.

And that was a great place to start. I mean, I think literature, I'm a big believer in the fact that like politics lives downstream from culture. And so this notion of learning about the world through fiction, that felt like a brain breaking and world breaking moment for me.

I have one more math question, then we're gonna leave the subject. I feel like, so I'll tell you my story. I was a theater major, but before I was ever an actor, I was a dancer.

And when I was applying to college, I was like, I wanna go to theater school because I can take dance class anywhere. No matter where I go to school, I can get into a good dance class. But like to have good acting training, I should go to a good institution.

Obviously I do none of those things now, so what the fuck did I know? But my question is, you can read anywhere. You can be involved in writing.

You can pick up a good book no matter what. But do you miss high level math? Because you can't just be doing that just casually.

I think we should distinguish between actual high level math, which I, to be clear, was not and never did. And sort of like high level math.

Well, if you can divide, I feel like that's high level for me. So.

So this is sort of the story of my math career, right? I was very good at math in high school and early stage calculus, like the introductory college classes. And I went to Harvard for undergrad and I thought I was gonna be a math major.

And Harvard certainly admitted me thinking I was gonna be a math major. And I walked into that first math class freshman year at Harvard and I looked around. It was just very obvious to me that the people in that room were smarter than I was.

One of them had won the Westinghouse Science Competition. I think he is a math professor at Princeton now, if I'm not mistaken. There was a 15-year-old who had proven part of Fermat's Last Theorem.

It had been in the New York Times the week before we arrived on campus. Cool. So I've never done high-level math, to be clear.

The stuff that they were doing by sophomore year was out of my reach. I do miss it. And I think that it's interesting that, and we'll talk about it in the context of The Black List, a lot of the operations work around running a company like this means engagement with statistics and data sets and things like that.

And that is sort of where I get it. And I may or may not seek out the high school math competition every year and see if I still got some game.

Like do the problems.

Yeah. It may or may not happen. I'm not.

Yeah, that's why I won't be too my punishment.

I won't be too specific about just how ridiculous I am.

But yeah, okay.

I we have had coffee together and I already have a sense of your intensity, which is why I feel that I like you because you are my kind of intense person.

There's something that used to be called the American High School Math Exam that is, you can find every year's update, like new version on the internet. And yeah, it's just fun to see, like, do you still got it? It's like, if you were about, you know, as you get older, you go out and play a sport and you're like, oh yeah, yeah.

Time comes for us all.

I couldn't do the math test in high school, so I don't need to go back and see if I still got it because I never, I never had it. Okay, so fast forward, you get into Hollywood, you work like with some production companies, you decide I'm going to start this thing called The Black List, where you take the slush pile of scripts that were not turned into things. You put them in a database.

People can read them. They can decide this is actually great. We want to make this.

It has been successful, I think is a real understatement. If you've heard of Slumdog Millionaire, if you've heard of The King's Speech, if you've heard of Argo, those are just a handful of spotlight of the books or the scripts that have been made into best picture movies or whatever. So Black List was great.

And I'm sort of fast forwarding through Black List a little bit because I want to get to this new development in fiction because this is a book podcast. But before we go there, I want to know what it was like for you as a black man entering into Hollywood with this sort of like disruptory idea in a space that I think we all know, especially 20 years ago, was like really white and really not welcoming to outsiders. And I've heard you talk a lot about that for actual writers who are trying to break in, who don't have connections, who aren't from LA.

But what was that like for you? Because you weren't from LA and you were not an executive and that level, and you're black and that's hard. So I'm wondering what that part of it was like for you.

That's a really interesting question. I'd say it's probably not something that I think about a lot. You're right, Hollywood is a bit of a closed, it's a walled garden.

And the people who are in are in and the people who are out are out. And sort of going over that wall is difficult. I think I was lucky, I went to Harvard.

I got my first job as an assistant at Creative Artist Agency in the Motion Picture Lit Department, because I had a friend from Harvard who had a friend who was working there. And when I came out to Los Angeles for the first time, I had a drink with that person, and a friend of hers stopped by and said, hey, there's an agent at CAA looking for an assistant. You seem like you would do well in that job.

I'll send over your resume. So I literally sent her my resume on a Wednesday, I interviewed on a Thursday, I was offered the job on a Friday and I started on Monday. So I was able to sort of sneak over the wall because of this access that I had to that network, right?

That was only born of the college that I had gone to. There's no other way for me to get from Columbus, Georgia to Hollywood if I hadn't had that. And then I think, you know, my attitude about most things, and it's funny because we're gonna talk about Nickel Boys at some point in the future, and I feel like it was resonant for a lot of reasons this being one of them.

You have the knowledge that it's harder for you. You have the knowledge that you're a black executive and this is not a system that was built for you. But on some level, I had to put that to the side and say, okay, I understand, I'm not gonna get the calls from the referee, et cetera, whatever metaphor you wanna use, but that's the nature of the world, and I'm still going to have to figure out a strategy that's gonna allow me to succeed in this, and that will probably mean being better than my peers just so that I can be on equal playing field with them.

And that ended up manifesting itself in, okay, I will read more than everybody else. I will read more screenplays. I will be the person who just has the information.

And that's sort of how The Black List came into being. I would read 20 scripts a weekend. I would take home a banker's box full of scripts.

None of them would be things that I could slap down on my boss's desk and say, this is our priority now. And I needed a solution to find the good stuff because I wasn't finding it, and by this point I was working at Leonardo DiCaprio's company, and I was seeing all of the good stuff. So how do I build something that can solve that problem for me?

And I just took a survey of my peers, some of your 10 favorite unproduced screenplays, and that became the first Black List. It's funny, in your description of it, you give me way more credit than I deserve because it seems very intentional. But I was just like, I gotta find the good scripts.

How do I find the good scripts? And The Black List was an outgrowth of that search, and I didn't realize at the time that everybody was looking for good scripts. And so I was solving a problem not just for myself, but for everybody, and I think that's really how it took root.

Okay. You read a lot of scripts. Yeah.

Estimate, give me some math here. What percentage of your reading is books versus scripts?

For most of my Hollywood career, it's probably over 90 percent, which is terrifying when I really step back and think about it. But again, this is the level of commitment to the job. It was all consuming.

And I would take some time. There'd be a book that would come out that I was really personally excited about, and I would read it. I tend to default to non-fiction, interestingly enough.

And then there were books that you would read in consideration of turning them into film and television. So you get submitted a manuscript and you read that. I remember reading The Hunger Games in manuscript form because it was circulating in the studios and I was assigned to read it.

But yeah, for the most part, it was almost all screenplays.

It's funny, when I first started the show, or one of the reasons I didn't want to do the show is because when I moved to LA, everyone's like, nobody reads in LA. It wasn't until I started posting about what I was reading on social media, that I realized I was working in fitness, that all of my people who came to my classes, who were executives or worked in Hollywood, were reading so much. But people talk about the reading as a means to the end, as a part of making a movie as opposed to, oh, I just read five books that we might option.

But I'm like, yeah, you still read five books. I feel like LA is actually an extremely literate city. People are reading scripts, people are reading books, people are reading treatments, people are looking at content and trying to find something to make, or looking at other written content, trying to find something to make.

And I think we don't maybe get credit for that.

I think that's an incredibly astute observation. I think that LA is, yeah, a very literate city, but they're reading as a means to an end. And the end is not just having read the thing.

Yeah.

And I mean, I know this for myself. I'd be trying to decide among things that I would want to read, and you prioritize the thing that might be a movie, that might be a TV show. No matter how far fetched the idea, okay, well, this one I'll prioritize because not only will I have read something good, but then I also might want to option it.

And I also think that there are people in Hollywood, I think it's like, there are definitely some people in Hollywood that don't read, like let's just be real. But I do think that there are also a large number of people in Hollywood who came to Hollywood because they are just generally enraptured by stories and their love of movies or television comes from the same part of their brain as their love for books. And so there's, you know, it's a different form, but it's not a different thing.

Fundamentally, it is, you know, storytelling and the communication of ideas via narrative. And for writers, especially, it's just a different form. And it all starts with a writer doing their job.

All of it.

When you read a screenplay or a book or anything, are you visualizing what the thing could be? Are you casting it in your brain? Are you thinking like, this could be such a cool shot?

Or are you really reading it for more of like the story elements and sort of just like trying to figure out what the person's saying? I know it's probably a mixture of both, but there are people who don't see the thing when they read.

Yeah, I can't imagine what that's like. I think, you know, sometimes you read like these studies about like the brain and perception and you're like, wait, other people, their brain is running entirely different software than mine. Yeah, I can't really, I don't think this is a product of having worked in film.

I think I've always read as though I was watching a movie in my brain. And I don't know that I was casting, you know, I wasn't casting specific actors certainly when I was a teenager, but I was also always imagining what I was seeing, you know, via the words on the page. And I think, you know, what you hope is that when you read, the critical brain turns off on some level.

Like I know I'm reading something good when I'm not, but I don't have my Hollywood executive brain on, where I'm like, oh, that's a second act note, we want to change that or oh, you know, it would be interesting to reverse the order of these scenes if we made it into a movie. The best stuff, and this is true even when I'm reading screenplays, that part of my brain at some point just like clicks into the off side, and I'm just watching a movie, right? Like I am just enjoying the thing and enraptured by the story that I'm being told, and that's more often than not the sign that that's something that I should pay more attention to.

And then you have to go back and say, okay, well, how would this be a movie? But the, I already saw the movie part is sort of the best compliment that I can give, because I wasn't thinking about how would I make this better. How would I make this better?

Right. Okay, so, okay, we got to get to the actual fiction stuff. So you, you are, I've heard you talk about this a little bit.

A friend of yours sort of was like, Franklin, you should get into books. And you were like, eh, I don't know, like not really my thing. What did you need to see or hear or find out about the publishing space that actually led you to wanting to execute this idea of going into fiction versus just like having an idea and thinking about it?

Yeah, I mean, so by 2012, we built this website that allows screenwriters to submit their work and get feedback. And if it was good, we tell everybody in Hollywood. And it was purpose built to solve very specific systemic issues in Hollywood that prevented people who had really great material from getting that material to somebody who could do something with it.

And conversely, the people who could make things had a hard time finding good things. So how do you find all of the needles and all of the haystacks? And over time, Howie Sanders and anonymous content sort of most vocally, people would say, hey, this would work in books as well.

And I just didn't want to be presumptuous and be like, hey, I'm from Hollywood and I'm here to fix things, guy. Because that's just a terrible look on every level. But this happened more and more.

And I think at some point, I told Howie, I was like, listen, this is not my area of expertise. This works in film because I know film and I know how things work. I know how information moves.

I don't feel confident that it would be the right thing to do to just jump into this new space and assume. He was like, look, I'll set you up on like a dozen meetings with people in the publishing industry and all manner of stakeholders in the system. Tell them how you would do it.

And I'll tell them and you should tell them to just give it to you straight. Like, are you wrong? I was wrong, right?

Like what I heard sort of unanimously was the systemic problems that exist in publishing exist in film and television, also exist in publishing and this system that we had built could help solve those problems. And that's where fundamental problems are. There are a super abundance of material.

There are more people writing novels than any one person or even group of people can read. There are a limited number of people who are what's called gatekeepers who are responsible for going through all of those haystacks to find the needles. And as a result of that, people were triaging the massive inflow because you can't just drink from the fire hose and read everything.

And by nature, I think we all default to, okay, well, I'm just going to source things from the traditional paths. I'm going to go to the big agencies if I'm an editor. I'm going to go to my friends if they have access to people who they say are good writers.

I'm going to go to the universities that traditionally produce the good writers to find the stuff that's good. And that means that if you're not in one of those pipelines, if you're not already represented by an agency, if you didn't go to the quote unquote right schools, if you don't know somebody who's already in the system, it's impossible to get into the system, no matter how good your work is. And once I realized that those dynamics were at play, it seemed obvious that we probably could take what we had built, adjust it in ways that were specific to publishing and make it work, and then still, over the next 18 months, I probably took another 100 meetings with stakeholders in the space, editors, agents, writers, hey, this is what we're thinking, this is how we would do it, tell me where I'm wrong, tell me how we can make this better, tell me how this can be improved.

I brought on Randy Winston, who was the head of writer programs at the Center for Fiction at the top of this year, because I knew I also needed somebody who was of the world, rather than being a total outsider trying to figure it out. And we took a bunch of meetings together doing the same thing. And yeah, we launched it early September, and it's been really exciting and really gratifying to see how well it's been received.

Okay, and for people who aren't familiar, can you sort of loosely explain what it is and how it works?

Yeah, so I'll explain it mainly from the point of view of a writer. I'm a writer, I've written two novels, neither of them have been published. I've been querying to agents and editors and maybe I've gotten some response and some people like it, but nothing's happened yet.

First and foremost, you can go on the Black List website and create a writer profile, which is bio, information, a photo. It's your typical landing page on the internet. Think of this as your writerly IMDB page or your Wikipedia page.

I was thinking MySpace, but sure.

MySpace works, Black Planet. There's a lot of options. The early Facebook.

But as part of that, you can list all the things that you've written. So here's the title of my novel. Here's a brief description of it.

I've tagged it in any number of ways, like by location or era or various literary devices. We do that too. And then, so that's your home on the internet.

And it also means that all of that information is now in our database, because on the other side of the equation is our folks, our industry professionals and the publishing film, television and theater worlds. And all of those members have had to apply for membership. We have vetted them based on their expertise and ability to function at a high level in those spaces.

So that if, let's say hypothetically, a director wakes up tomorrow morning and says, you know what, I'd really love to do a sci-fi film with a cast from different parts of the world, hypothetically. I, as a director, can go on the Black List website and search for something like that. And if you wrote a novel by that description, even if it's just listed associated with your profile, I can find out about it.

And if the description sounds interesting to me, I can then write to you via internal messaging system and say, hey, you have this thing that sounds interesting. Can you send it to me? Or if you have your agency information listed, if you're represented, I can call your agent and say, hey, this novel sounds interesting.

I'm looking for something like that.

So the novels are not separate. They're part of the whole entire tranche of everything.

That's exactly right. And the reason for that is mainly because it never made sense to me that the book industry and the film and television industry sat separate from each other. Like I said earlier, these are two things of a kind.

And they're, I think, more and more related as movies and television can help kickstart book sales and more and more adaptations are the stock and trade of the film and television industry. If we can find things that are commercial and have a built-in audience by virtue of the fact that the book was very successful, that's very exciting for the industry. But even just finding something that isn't necessarily commercially successful but has a great idea in it, we need good ideas in film and TV.

So why not loop all of these things into a single marketplace so that people can find the things they're looking for? So that's the writer profile and that's entirely free. So if you're a writer, take the five minutes it takes to create a profile because you've literally lost nothing but those five minutes.

You can also upload your manuscript to the Black List website along with a 100 page excerpt and make it directly available. So it's fine if you're represented and people are calling out. It's fine if maybe your book has been published and it's on your writer profile and a director finds it and they can either go buy it or they can reach out to your agent.

But if you don't have either of those things, then it makes sense to make it directly available to reduce the friction on somebody who wants to read this thing, reading it. Hosting it on the website also allows you to purchase feedback on the excerpt. So we provide feedback on the roughly 100 page excerpt of your novel and we generally recommend that that be the first 100 pages, because that's what people are going to start reading.

I'm sure there are exceptions, right? Like I can imagine a scenario where you've got like a tripartite novel in the middle section for whatever reason you feel like it, but like make it the first 100 pages. And all of our readers have worked for at least a year in a professional capacity evaluating fiction in the publishing industry.

So they know the market, they are experienced readers, and then we vet them further based on

their ability to provide high quality feedback. When that feedback is really enthusiastic, when one of our readers says, oh, this is really good. People should know about this.

The site sort of goes to work in an automated way, telling everybody in our industry professional membership, hey, one of our readers really liked this excerpt and says the book is really strong, you should check it out. And that means that that information is going to right now about 5,000, probably closer to 5,500 now, industry professionals in the publishing film television and theater space. So instead of querying 30 people saying, hey, you should read my thing, I think it's good, it may have won these other awards or whatever, it's a third party saying, hey, one of our people who we trust and you trust us to choose those people, think this is worth paying attention to.

And the result of that is all of a sudden, a lot of people are reading your work, a lot of people may be calling you once they've read it because they love it to say, hey, let's talk about how we can do something together. And it doesn't make sense to me that you first go to an agent and then you go to an editor and then the thing goes to the film and television person and then a director and then an actor. Like, if something's great, let's tell everybody about it.

Right, right.

A friend of mine was like, so you're basically just like a hype man for the writing community. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, it's not the first description I'd give, but I'll take that title if someone wants to offer it. Like, I'm nothing if not a fan of things that I'm a fan of.

Okay. And I think a lot of people have this question, which is how do you make money? How does The Black List make money?

Good question. So yeah, we charge a hosting fee to host your work on the site. So it's $30 a month per thing, screenplay, play, manuscript, whatever.

We also charge for the feedback. So on the manuscript side, it's $150 for the 100 page excerpt feedback. We pay our readers 100 of that, which we sort of guess between.

There's a very nerdy way we backed into this. We did a word count on all of the screenplays that have been submitted in the previous year before we set the price. Found that screenplays are roughly 22,000 to 25,000 words.

A 100 page excerpt is roughly 30,000 words. We pay our screenplay readers is roughly $60 plus bonuses based on volume and quality of their work. So we scaled that up to the fiction and also assumed that fiction is more dense to read.

That's how we ended up at 100, which means that over the course of a year, if you're reading for us and you were reading 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, you'd probably pull down 60K plus bonuses. It was just important that, you know, I'm not gonna say $60,000 is like an amazing salary, but to read novels and provide feedback from anywhere on your schedule is something that I can sort of stand 10 toes down and say, yeah, this is what we're doing.

Okay, so now I know people in my audience want to know how can they become a reader?

If you have a year of experience reading professionally, in a professional capacity for the publishing industry, we will be looking for readers in the very near future. Follow us on social media, follow our, you know, sign up for the mailing list and we'll be letting people know when that opportunity is available.

Okay. How's it going? Have people been signing up?

Have novels been coming to you? What's, you know, I think we're maybe a month or so in the announcement with-

Three weeks ago.

Almost, almost a month in at the time of this recording. What's been the response? What have you seen?

What's exciting? What has you being like, Uh-oh, did we fuck this up? Like, because I'm sure there's some of both.

I'd say there's really nothing that makes me think we fucked this up, which is very exciting. Yeah. And I think-

Congratulations.

Well, I don't want to be to pat myself on the back about that too much because Lord knows by like this afternoon that might change.

Yes. Send an addendum.

But what I will say is, we spent, initially me and then me and Randy, spent a long time for reasons, talking to everyone we could and being very transparent about, this is how this is going to be organized, this is how it will function. We took on a lot of feedback and we incorporated that feedback into how we did this. I think that the fact that there hasn't been any major like, oh gods, is a good sign.

I think we've also been lucky in that there was, I had a bit of a concern that we would be overwhelmed by submissions initially, like thousands, I know how many writers are out there. And so there was a risk of everybody being like, damn, I got my novel, let's go. And fortunately, I think, you know, we've seen several hundred submitted in the first few weeks, but that means that we're gonna be able to ramp up our reader core, make sure that the feedback that we're providing is of the highest quality.

And we've already seen some things that were really exciting to start recommending to people. I think the thing that's maybe most exciting is how well it's been received on the industry side of things. The folks who have signed up to get access to the things that we have found, you know, I can't say in specific names and companies, but, you know, it's the people that you're querying, it's those people's bosses, it's those people's bosses' bosses.

And then we already had a wide variety at all levels of the film and television industry, but I think there's a particular interest there in the books that we're going to find as reflected by the fact that we have a partnership, we launched with a partnership with Simon Kenberg, the producer of The Martian, and he was like, yeah, I know you're going to find stuff that's great. I'll commit to optioning one of the manuscripts that you find for $25,000 for an 18 month option. Help me find things that look like this.

And we have also, we're doing something called The Blacklist Unpublished Novel Award. So, you know.

I'm a judge.

Yeah, no, I know. It's, and it's a murderous row of judges.

The judges are obscenely amazing.

It's pretty cool.

I was looking at the list like, you guys are such overachievers. It's disrespectful to the rest of us.

No, I think this is, but again, I think this is just sort of, I think it's reflective of sort of what we do, like the level that we work at and who we serve. But yeah, well, Vara Burton is judging sci-fi and fantasy, Roxane Gay is judging thrillers, Mike Franck.

My favorite editor, Kathy Belden, is doing Lit Fiction. She is, she's like the book whisperer.

And it's crazy, it's like every category, you're just like, come on. Come on. I can't first, so just go check out the judges, if nothing else, because I'm very proud of the group we put together.

But we're gonna give $10,000 to one writer in seven different genres. And I also, you know, I can't say specifics now, but there are more partnerships coming from the film and television space, which again, I think reflects the real interest in finding great stuff. And I think that's probably the most exciting thing.

So if you have a novel, do your research, come to the website, make sure that this is, you know, your novel's ready and that this is an infrastructure you're comfortable sharing it with. But yeah, there's, I think the next couple months are gonna be very exciting.

Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.

All right, we are back. I have to know, because I think this becomes sort of a contentious issue when Hollywood and books are so tightly linked. Is there either you or, you know, Randy or anyone over at The Black List, is there any concern that because of your background in Hollywood and The Black List's background as a Hollywood institution at this point, that books for books sake aren't getting the attention that it's like, oh, we wanna push this towards what's being optioned or like that it's connected to Hollywood so tightly, that just like a great novel that's a great novel that will never be a movie, maybe isn't gonna get the same kind of attention in a space like this?

It's a great question. I, part of the reason why I wanted to bring Randy onto the team is that I didn't want that to happen. I think that one of the worst case scenarios for what we do is that we're so successful at sourcing material, but our sourcing is prioritizing film and TV and not books for books sake.

And all of a sudden, the process by which people are thinking about what has value is determined by film and TV and not the word on the page. So here are the things that we've done to make sure that doesn't happen. One is, Randy is very much an advocate for fiction writers, period.

And that's one of the reasons why I hired him when we were having our initial conversations. He was grilling me as a writer. Okay, well, what about this?

How are your readers assigned to individual evaluations? How are you talking, are the readers people from Hollywood? Are they people from the publishing industry?

All of these questions that were the questions that I was already trying to figure out on my own, but the fact that he was pressing me on them, I was like, this is the guy we need in this circle. No, he's incredible.

We should just say, Randy is, if you guys don't know Randy Winston, truly.

You'll know sooner or later if you don't. But that was the voice and the energy that we needed inside the tent to make sure that we were not doing that. But the second thing is, so all of the readers are not Hollywood people.

The readers are people who have experience in publishing for publishing sake, and they are not reading things, will this be a good movie adaptation? They're reading things for book sake. And that determines the visibility they get on the site.

Not, is this adaptable? And I think that sort of makes, that's one really strong guard against it. I think the other really strong guard against it, frankly, is the community itself.

You know, one thing I appreciate and seek out is constructive criticism. And so if there is ever that sense, we want to know. And if anybody has suggestions for how we can better guard against that, we want to know, but know that it is a priority of ours to make sure that that does not become an issue.

And safeguards have been put in place in that regard. Oh, two things I do want to, well, three things I want to really highlight really quickly before we jump to my book taste. The first is that when you submit a book to, like, I think there's a reasonable concern that, like, when you submit your work to something like The Black List, that, and I think that there's a concern because people have done this in the past.

It's, oh, well, if somebody comes and offers me a million dollars from my book, The Black List is going to have their hands in my pocket, like that I somehow owe The Black List. The answer is no, you owe us nothing. We would love for you to tell us about the amazing book deal that was born of an introduction that we hasten via the site.

But you don't even have to do that. But again, tell us so we can further amplify your success. But you don't even have to do that.

We're definitely not coming asking for a percentage of the sale or a check. You own the rights to your material, period, full stop. The second is the way we assign material to our readers.

Obviously, like I said, you are only being read by people that have an expertise in the format in which we're writing. So screenplay, film people are reading screenplays, TV people are reading pilots, book people are reading books. Second category is genre.

People are only reading in the genre in which they have interests. If you're a romantic person, you're not reading horror or vice versa unless you happen to be interested in both. Then the third, and this is something that I'm maybe most proud of, and I think it's pretty singular, a shout out to Kate Hagen and Shelby Covent on The Black List team who came up with this, and that is content advisory.

When our readers come on to read, and we offer them the ability to read for us, there's a checklist and they tell us the things that they don't want to read about. I may not want to read about gun violence or domestic abuse or whatever. Then when you upload your material, you indicate what's in your manuscript and your excerpt, and we negatively match based on that.

The reason for that is we want to make sure that if you're a writer, you've got the best chance for the reader to have a positive response to your work. Secondly, we want to protect our readers from reading bad executions of things that they may find unpleasant, traumatic or whatever, and may render them just by being a human being, unable to render judgment on the things that they've read in a fair way. So I'd say that's two.

Third thing is...

That was three.

Was that three?

Yeah.

Okay, all right, well then I have one more, which is... I think it could be four. Four is that once you had one evaluation on the website, all of those opportunities that I mentioned, the Unpublished Novel Award, the Simon Kinberg thing, the more to come, you can submit to those, click of a button at no additional cost.

One thing we do not want to do is create an incentive structure where once you have an inkling that what you've written is good, there's an incentive for you to pay more money, right? Like normally there's like all these opportunities and you're like, well, people keep telling me my thing is good, I should plunk down a $100 here and $50 here and whatever. If your thing is good, you shouldn't have to pay more money and you should have all the opportunities that your work merits, and we want to create that dynamic.

Not only is it you don't have to pay more to submit, but when you get a very high score, we give you more free hosting and more free feedback. If that generates another high score, you're getting more free feedback, more hosting, so on and so forth. Once you get like five, eight out of 10 scores, we're like, okay, we get it, it's good.

We'll make sure to promote it very specially and we'll host it for free for as long as you want to, but we're not gonna like give you more free evaluations for another reader to tell us, yes, it's great.

It's good, great. With The Black List on the film and TV side, there's like an actual list that comes out that's like, these are the great things. Will there be that for the books or is that the awards?

I would say stay tuned. I think the awards will reflect what has come through the website. And I think there's a bigger question about how and if we come up with an annual list that is book related.

Okay.

I mean, I think there are a lot of book lists already for published novels, I think is the other reality, right? Yes Yeah.

So I don't know that it makes sense for us to be trying to do that, but there's definitely some things I think that we can do that would be mutually beneficial to a lot of different communities. So we'll see. We'll see.

Okay. This is the last one about the book list. I'm going to go get to your books.

What does success look like for you here?

Success looks like for me here that, and this is, we'll never get there, this is sort of asymptotic to be clear.

Okay. What a word.

Another math word. It means that success will looks like, basically the gap between opportunity and you is just quality. So I think right now as the world exists, you can write something great, but if you don't know the right people, didn't go to the right school, don't live in the right city and have access to the right social networks, it is still extremely difficult to get your work in the hands of people who can do something with it.

Success for me looks like that no longer being true. Success for me looks like no matter where I live, no matter who I know, if I can write a banger, I can upload it to The Black List, confirm that it's a banger, have everybody be told about it and start getting incoming phone calls near instantaneously. The results of that, the material results of that success mean a lot of things that excite me.

It means more better books for all of us to read. It means more better movies and TV shows for all of us to watch. It means a more diverse cultural canon.

But that's again, you never actually achieve that. It's just what you're running towards.

Well, I will know that you are successful in my book when I get to feature an author on the show who came up through The Black List fiction.

That will also feel like success. Like materially speaking, 100 percent, yeah.

That's like such a cool... I mean, I met Randy right when he started. He hadn't even left his other job, but he like, you know, whatever, but he couldn't tell me anything.

And getting to watch and follow this, I think that I will personally feel like, what a win for you all when that happens, which I know that it will, I don't know, probably years out, but like, if I'm still doing the show.

No, I, yeah, someone asked me for an over under on how long it will take for a script to end up on the annual Black List that's an adaptation of a novel that was found via the website. I think I put it at 2030. But yeah, like stuff like that.

But again, for me, like, those will all feel like successes, but for me, oh, but look, here's the other big success, right? And this is probably the thing that for on the film, on the film side has always felt like moment to moment, like the biggest success is getting an email from a writer who says something on the lines of like, your reader just destroyed my script, got a really low score, but points were made. And for the first time, I feel like I understand the gap between where I'm at and what a professional screen, like the level of a professional screenwriter, and I'm really excited to go rewrite my script because of the feedback that your reader provided.

That, that, like, if we're doing that on a consistent basis, that will probably be the first indication of success. And then just closing this gap, you know, sort of removing the things other than merit that results in success for people is sort of the long-term goal. But again, it's like, that's an aspiration you never actually get there.

Yeah. Okay. We're gonna pivot.

I'm very sad because we didn't talk about soccer at all. I had a really fun movie question.

There's so much we can talk about.

I'm like, we need, we only need to get coffee, but anyways. Okay. We do a thing here called Ask The Stacks.

Someone has written in a little paragraph asking for a book recommendation. I'm gonna read it to you. You're gonna help me come up with a book recommendation.

Oh, wow. Okay. Let's do it.

So if you want a book recommendation read on air, email AskTheStacks at thestackspodcast.com. This comes from Kara. And Kara says, since becoming a mom, I don't always have big chunks of time for reading.

I would love some recommendations for propulsive reads that will keep me coming back even when I only have a few minutes. I'm open to any genre or topic, but would love some non-thriller options. I have a few that I've written down.

Do you want to have a second to think about it? Please. Kara, my first pick is a non-fiction book that I freaking love this year.

It is Challenger by Adam Higginbotham. It is about the challenger explosion. It is so propulsive because the book starts and you know where you're going.

You know what's going to happen by the end of the book. You're already locked into the story from Jump, and he does such an amazing job telling the story. That's my first one.

My second one is actually a book that Franklin mentioned earlier, which is The Hunger Games. I don't know if you've read that. I don't know if you've revisited it.

It is a banger. The whole series is so good, I don't even know how it's still so good. It shouldn't still work, but you know what?

It does. Katniss, my queen. And then my third recommendation is an adaptation of Anna Karenina, YA.

It's called Anna Kay by Jenny Lee, and it's a modern retelling of Anna Karenina, and it's giving crazy rich Asians meets gossip girl, like high schoolers being rich and doing drugs. So those would be my three recommendations. I actually read Anna Kay at the start of the pandemic, right after my twins were born.

So I know it is the perfect book for that part of your life. Franklin, what do you have propulsive reads? You can just do one.

You don't have to do-

I have a few. It's funny you mentioned The Hunger Games though, because like I said, I was assigned to read that when I was a studio executive. And I remember not being psyched that I had to read it overnight.

Because we just didn't know anything about it. Like it seemed on premise, like it wouldn't be a movie. And I remember coming back the next day and being like, listen, I am not an expert in the genre.

I don't think this is targeted at me. But I also read this without stopping. And I haven't read a book like that in a very long time.

I feel like we should option this. And I remember being told like, it's female-driven action, female-driven action doesn't work, which is like a conventional wisdom that still exists in the film industry. And most of the studios passed when they read it in a manuscript form.

That's how it ended up at now Lionsgate. But yeah, it's a hell of a read. I've not been back to it since, but I do remember reading it and just being like, yeah, it just works.

I am, start to finish. It works. Yeah, it just works.

Okay, when we say not thrower, what exactly do we mean? That's sort of my question.

You know what? It's okay if it's a little flurry.

Yeah, so the first book I'm going to mention is one that I feel like it's propulsive in part because you want to find out what happened. You want to find out what's going on. There's like a dramatic event and it sets up a world.

And so you're like, even if you're like get distracted and a month goes by, you're going to come back to it because you're like, I just kind of need to know. I need to know how this resolves, right? And that's Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist.

I never read it.

Oh, cannot recommend this book highly enough. I'm still desperate to see it made into a film. I don't know when it will happen, but I just love it so much.

But again, it paints this world incredibly well in the opening with a character that you want to know how she's going to navigate this seemingly untenable situation. And yeah, the second, and this is maybe a cheat because I have not read the book. I've only seen the movie adaptation.

Okay. And that's a movie that's coming out later this year called Conclave, which is, and again, this is just, it probably falls in the thrower category, political thrower, but here's the thing. I personally weirdly have a fascination with papal conclaves, and this is like a book set at a papal conclave as they're choosing a new pope.

Right, right, that's enough, right? And the movie is great, the movie is propulsive. What I've heard from people who have read the book and seen the movie is that the book is the same.

And if you have a fascination also with just like beautiful detailed descriptions of like calligraphy and you know, ornate costumery of the Vatican, this is probably something for you.

Okay, I love that, that's amazing.

And then the last one is is sort of not a piece of the other two. And that's David Blythe's biography of Frederick Douglass.

I've heard that you love this book.

I did love this book. And part of the reason I love this book is because I think that Frederick Douglass's story is still underappreciated and unconsidered as part of American history. And I think that what's amazing about Blythe's book is part of it is just that it's incredibly long and thorough.

But there are, and again, reading things with an eye towards a different end than just reading them. But there are eight movies in Frederick Douglass's life.

Yes.

And I probably take the over on eight if I'm being real. And so what's amazing about this book as something that you can put down and return to is that he did so much in his life, and there's so many different sections of his life that it's totally reasonable to read one section and feel like you have read a whole thing, and then come back and read the next section. So it's almost as though you're reading eight small narrative non-fictions instead of one giant non-fiction.

I also just want more people reading about Frederick Douglass and thinking about Frederick Douglass. He was the most photographed American of the 19th century. How was a man who was born enslaved?

How did they become the first, the most photographed American of the 19th century, and probably the most photographed non-royal on earth?

Right, wow.

What does that mean? How does that happen? I'm also fascinated by the fact that Douglass died a month before the Lumiere brothers screened their first ever motion picture.

So he's obsessed with individual photos and what their potential and meaning is, but never sees a movie.

A movie, wow.

And what does that mean? That 130 years later, we're still not fully appreciating the cultural impact of movies and the way they define how we see each other.

I love it. Okay, Kara, if you read any of those books, you have to report back, tell us how we did. Everyone else, email AskTheStacks at thestackspodcast.com to get some recommendations.

Okay, Franklin, two books you love, one book you hate.

I think I already mentioned the two books I love, The Douglas Biography and The Intuitionist. One book I hate. I'm not good at this.

Oh, come on. Here's why. Here's why.

Because I will put a book down if I don't enjoy it. I think the nature of my reading professionally is that if it's not going to be a thing, I'm like, okay, moving on. So I never do enough research to hate with security.

What about in school? There's never been a book in your life where you're like, this book is my nemesis.

The Fuck Catcher in the Rye.

Yay, there it is. That's one of mine.

I just never got it. I'll be honest, that was the book that we read it in school. And the teachers just talking about how important it is and blah, blah, blah and how Holden is a a stand in for all adolescents.

And all of my classmates, particularly the literary ones were like, oh, Catcher in the Rye, Catcher in the Rye. I was just like, dude's an asshole. And I do not identify with this experience at all.

And I think with a little bit of remove, I'm like, yeah, that's not a story about a black kid. And my reality and thinking about my behavior in that context is a very different thing. So yeah, all right.

Yeah. Fuck Catcher in the Rye.

Yay. What are you reading right now?

What am I reading right now? I'm looking over at a stack of books on my side table here. I've got Priyanka Matu's Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones that I've been sort of reading essay by essay.

Sarah Lewis's The Unseen Truth, which I believe just came out this weekend. Godwin, Joseph O'Neill on the Soccer Front. That was an easy sell to me.

I just started reading a biography of Juergen Klopp, the Liverpool soccer coach. There's a lot of soccer non-fiction reading mixed into my, and that's the really dumb pleasure reading. There's another book that I bought recently called The Stadium, which is about the role of stadiums in our cultural and political life, which I'm really interested to dig into at some point.

That sounds great.

Yeah. That's just like, again, the stack that's right most visible to me right now.

What's the last really good book someone recommended to you?

Well, that's a really good book that I read that I guess is a recommendation would actually be The Nickel Boys because I read it because I was asked to moderate the panel about the movie. I guess that's a recommendation. Sure.

It was the one Colson Whitehead book that I hadn't read yet, and it was, we'll talk about it.

Yeah. That's our book club pick, so we'll dig deep. Do you set any reading goals for yourself?

I don't, but I probably should.

You don't have to. I'm a goal person, I have to, but it's also my job.

I think the closest thing I have to that is these stacks that sort of sit around reminding me that I haven't read them yet. Well, it's also judging me, but it's intentionally there to entice me. It's like, you have 15 minutes and there's this book about soccer sitting right there, or there's this book about stadiums, or Priyanka's book is just right there.

You can read an essay right now, and if it's within arm's reach, I know that I'm more likely to read more. I think if everything was put away, I would be less likely to. So it's about creating incentive structures that incentivize good behavior.

I love that. What is your ideal reading situation? Location, time of day, snacks and beverages?

Talk about it.

Coffee is probably there.

And how do you take your coffee?

Either black or with way too much sugar and milk. It's an either or proposition. I don't know that I have an idea.

I don't have a reading nook or something. I just wherever I am, I'll get it in. And I think I probably default to just lying on my couch.

Like, are you like a snuggled up reader or are you like a sitting up right kind of reader?

Oh no, I'm definitely like a lying down reader. And I'm sort of like, you know, rotating side to side as necessary as like shoulders and arms fall asleep.

Do you have a favorite bookstore?

The Strand is like, I've never managed to escape without spending more money than I should.

Yes.

So I don't know if that's favorite or least favorite, but like-

Most effective bookstore.

Yeah, I mean, it's just one of those things. I don't know that I've made a trip to New York without stopping by. And when I lived in New York, it was, again, if I passed it, I would go in and then I come out with books that I probably didn't need or wasn't going to read in the immediate future.

Skylight is not far from me here in Los Angeles. So that ends up being the default.

Yeah. What's the last book that made you laugh?

Oh, Bird, Milk and Mosquito Bones. It's really pre-alhambit to who I've known for years. She was an agent at WME when I was coming up.

It's just an absolutely delightful writer. It's just her work is infused with so much joy and pathos. It's just a delight to read.

Last book that made you cry?

Nickel Boys.

Last book where you felt like you learned a lot?

Any book? I'm reading that Juergen Klopp biography right now. I don't know if there's ever been a book that I've read that I didn't learn a lot in one way or another.

Again, I hate to keep coming back to Nickel Boys, but it's very present in my mind, having just seen the movie and then read the book for the podcast. But I learned a lot of, it's about the 1960s in the South, and I realized towards the end of reading the book, that the characters would have roughly been my father's age. So thinking about the reality of his life as a teenager and the context in which he grew up, I think it feels like I learned a lot.

Yeah. Are there any books that you are, or is there any book that you're embarrassed that you've never read before?

Way too many to mention. No, I mean, there's not one, but there are many. I've never read King Lear.

I love King Lear. I feel like, I know I've seen Succession, but yeah, I've never read King Lear. I mean, there are, I think the reality is, and this is sort of that problem of super abundance.

There are more great books. If I started now, I'm 45 years old, in red, nonstop until I died, there would still be books that I was, not even embarrassed that I haven't read, but just like sad that I didn't get to read. I think that's, I don't really have any shame around what I haven't read.

Like, I read a lot. I'm a pretty literate person. Like, I haven't got to it yet, or it just hasn't enticed me.

But there are things that I'm like, I really should make the time to read that. When am I gonna have the time to read that? I have denied myself the joy and sort of, you know, world-changing experience of reading these things, and I don't know if I'll get to.

If you were a high school teacher, what's a book you would assign to your students?

Does it have to be fiction?

No, it could be anything. It could be math.

No, I'm probably not gonna assign them a math book. I'd probably assign that Frederick Douglass biography.

Yeah.

Or actually, I'd assign this Frederick Douglass biography, and Sarah Lewis's The Unseen Truth.

Yeah. Is there a book that you would want to see turned into a film or TV show?

Yeah, I mentioned The Intuitionist already. I think that's probably the big one for me. Also, somewhere out there in the world, there's a novel about soccer that has, I have not yet encountered or hasn't yet been written that I would like to turn into a film or television show.

So if you're working on that novel, like keep going.

Load it to The Black List, tag soccer novel.

Yeah, I mean, look, I have this dream. I was watching the World Cup, the last World Cup, and, you know, Morocco went to the semifinals, which was a really big deal.

Amazing.

And there were all these images of the players with their mothers, right? And celebrating. And I remember thinking, like, someone should write either a narrative nonfiction or a fictional version of this, that each chapter is about the experience of one mother of the player, and then sort of chronicle the qualification and the World Cup itself as like this big, epic, fractured narrative about Morocco and the diaspora.

It's giving Joy Luck Club but soccer.

Oh, much bigger than that. I'm talking like, I'm talking like, like, this is, this is like, we're talking a thousand pages, like, mission or style, like, we're going big, big.

I'm not reading in a thousand pages of a prank, but.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I get it.

Give me the Joy Luck Club 288.

I'm the one, I'm the one, like, I mean, the reason this book will never exist is I'm the one person who would buy and read it. Right, but this, this image of, like, how do you tell the story of a diaspora and you do it through familial relations and sport intrigued me somehow. So, like, adapting that fictional novel would be the thing that I would like to see done.

I don't know what that, it's probably a terrible answer.

It's a great answer. What's a movie or TV show that is better than the book?

I mean, the frustrating part about this is I know there are good answers to it and nothing is occurring to me right now.

I know, it's a hard one. That always happens to me that I can't think of it. But I think part of it is because when the movie or TV show is better than the book, that is what is in our mind.

We don't even think of it as an adaptation.

That's exactly right.

Whereas when the book is better, we associate it with the book more than the movie.

That's exactly right. I'm thinking hard and I immediately go to like, okay, what are the best adaptations? I'm like, Lord of the Rings, it feels weird to say that that's better than the book.

I never read those books or see those movies.

I read some of the books and I guess the movies are better because it was more easy. I was more excited to keep watching. I'm curious, how have other people answered this question?

I don't ask a lot of people this question, actually, because I feel like a lot of people aren't as into movies. I can tell you my answer if it's helpful. My answer is Black Clansman.

I thought the book was very mid and I thought the movie actually, I didn't think the movie was great per se, but I thought it was good and I thought it had a point of view and it had a style and an artistic design in a way that the book just did not. The book was so flat and so politically kind of iccy mild and I thought the movie was like, it really brought the story to life.

This is a cheat of an answer, but The Wire.

Okay. I didn't even know that was a book.

Well, it's technically not. David Simon did a year in a homicide group and wrote a book about that and then he did The Corner, which was directly adapted into The Corner. And The Wire is essentially a synthesis of all of that work along with his reporting that he then translated into fiction.

Total cheat. But for whatever reason, but there was like underlying narrative material that became The Wire and so screw it. I'm going to take probably the best television show of all time and say it was better than the book.

That's a terrible answer. That's going to haunt me for years.

It's fine. Well, when you come back to do Nickel Boys, if you come up with a different answer, we can start. I will re-ask you at the top before we even dive into it.

Perfect.

Okay. Last, last, last, last, last one. If you could require the current president of the United States to read one book, what would it be?

Give Joe something fun at this point. Like honestly, I'm assuming that he's not reading anything until he's done with being the president. But like just give Joe something light and airy.

I feel like he's, you know, yeah, I don't, you know, if we're talking next president, former presidents, I might be able to make recommendations. But like, yeah, Joe, Joe's, I want Joe on a beach with a cocktail and Jill.

We're giving Joe Emily Henry. We're giving him Kennedy Ryan. Okay, amazing.

Yeah, or like Conclave feels like, actually Conclave is the book that I'd give Joe.

Oh, yes.

Joe is Catholic. Joe probably loves a thriller.

He loves a succession narrative.

Yeah, he loves a succession narrative. There we go. That's the answer.

I love that.

Put Joe on a beach with a cocktail, Jill reading a book beside him, maybe some ice cream on an hourly basis. Let that man reconclave and enjoy his life.

I love it. All right, everybody, this has been a conversation with Franklin Leonard. Check out everything on The Black List.

I'm linking to everything we talked about today in the show notes, including social media, all of that. And Franklin will be back on October 30th for our discussion of The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, which will have spoilers. So read the book.

You guys have five weeks. Franklin, thank you so much for being here.

No, thank you so much for having me.

And everyone else, we will see you in The Stacks.

All right, y'all, that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you again to Franklin Leonard for being my guest. And I'd also like to say a huge thank you to Elisa Suarez and Randy Winston for helping to make this conversation possible.

Don't forget, The Stacks Book Club pick for October is The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and Franklin Leonard will be back to discuss that book with us on Wednesday, October 30th. If you love this show and you want inside access to it, head to patreon.com/thestacks to join The Stacks Pack, and you can check out my newsletter at traciethomas.substack.com. Make sure you're subscribed to The Stacks where you listen to your podcasts.

And if you're listening through Apple podcasts or Spotify, be sure to leave us a rating and a review. For more from The Stacks, follow us on social media at The Stacks Pod on Instagram, threads and TikTok and at The Stacks Pod underscore on Twitter. And you can check out our website at thestackspodcast.com.

This episode of The Stacks was edited by Christian Duenas with production assistance from Megan Caballero. Our graphic designer is Robin McCright, and our theme music is from Tagirages. The Stacks is created and produced by me, Traci Thomas.

Megan Caballero
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