Franklin Leonard

EO

I want to begin with a paraphrased line from Wynton Marsalis on Alvin Ailey: “The necessity of developing a unique vision lies in having the endurance to sustain it—especially when that vision is countercultural.” That feels like a perfect parcel to describe your project.

FL

That quote strikes deep for me for two reasons. I completely agree the fundamental challenge for any artist is to have a vision and then preserve it against the forces that would edit it, particularly in a capitalistic creative society. In that capitalistic society, artists have to focus on both. There’s the art making, and then the protection of the vision and navigating of the system. I personally think that artists would be better off if they could spend more time focusing on the art making and less time on the art protection. My work, in its ideal form, focuses on artistic protection, so that writers have more freedom to have a singular vision. In a specifically capitalistic creative enterprise like film and television, the best business model is finding the stuff that has a singular vision.

I would argue that the problem is not that counterculture is unsupported as much as it is a failure of our cultural system. The ideal form for everyone is the ability for great artists to create incredible work, and for people to source it well and put it into the marketplace in a way that benefits all participants. I see my work as trying to fix the system to protect artists, but ironically, in protecting artists, the business interests will inevitably have better business outcomes. That’s my operating theory, which I suppose on some fundamental level is a countercultural point of view.

EO

What was The Black List to you when you first started it and what is its executive function now?

FL

When I first started it, it was a way for me to find good scripts to read over the holidays. I was working at Leonardo DiCaprio’s company, Appian Way Productions, where my job was to find good stuff, and I felt like I was not doing a very good job. I defaulted to some thinking that I had learned as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company—again, not exactly countercultural—but I took a survey of my peers and asked them about their favorite unproduced screenplays, ran it through a pivot table, output it to PowerPoint, and that was the first Black List. It was a PowerPoint deck.

Now, I think of The Black List as an organization that tries to identify and celebrate great written storytelling. We want to do that by building tools at scale that allow people with extraordinary talent to have opportunities that fit that talent, and for people who are looking for great written storytelling to find it more efficiently, so that they can invest more time in making the thing rather than in navigating the systems that allow them to find it.

EO

Can you detail the process or conditions that drove you to leave your job to work on the Black List full on?

FK

It wasn’t because of my actual job or the people there. I had a great boss at the time, we’re still very close friends. He was at my wedding. Rather, it was very much the way the system is structured. Again, I don’t place fault here with anyone, it’s an inevitable consequence of a system that was built before the internet when it comes to sourcing material.

If I’m an executive at Leo DiCaprio’s company—or an executive in the industry at a broad level—I’m getting sent everything, because if Leo likes it, it’s a go-movie. There is an incentive for everyone to send me everything. But if everyone is sending me everything, I don’t have time to read everything. The process by which I prioritize determines the inevitable bundle of things that get made. If I’m an agent at CAA, I have so many submissions. Why would I read something from somebody that I don’t know? But there are definitely people that you don’t know that have good stuff that can’t get to you because of myriad calcified historical legacies that prevent it. It’s a market failure. In a world where we have the internet and you can upload a screenplay to the web, there should be a mechanism whereby a person can say, “I think I have something good, what do you think?” If it’s good, then everybody in Hollywood reaches out to that person.

The past Hollywood model is a little bit like saying, “Well, if you want to play basketball in the NBA, you should move to Los Angeles and play pickup basketball next to the Staples Center. If you’re really good, someone will see you.” If the Lakers put together their roster like that, I don’t think they’re going to win a game. But the Lakers know that there’s a financial upside in going out and finding the next LeBron James. So, the NBA invests significantly in infrastructures to evangelize the sport around the world and identify talent for everybody’s benefit. When it comes to written storytelling, which is the basis for all of our  modern myths and legends, it’s critically important that everybody who has talent has access to the opportunity, because those stories are going to be projected 40 feet high around the world into all of our eyeballs.

EO

What’s the internet’s relationship to film, and in turn to what you do?

FL

We can talk about that every week for the rest of our lives and maybe not make any progress. But it’s an interesting question. Could I have done The Black List in a pre-email age? Could I have sent a ballot to executives about their favorite things, collected those ballots, gathered the scripts, fact-checked them, everything? Yeah, absolutely. I was able to, with an anonymous Hotmail account.

The Academy’s been taking votes from a large sample of Hollywood people every year for 100 years, but they have an infrastructure for that. As a 26-year-old, I was able to email 100 people who worked as proper gatekeepers in Hollywood, asked for their opinion about the things they loved most, aggregated those votes, then sent them back to that group, who were able to forward that list everywhere. All from my tiny office above Sunset Boulevard. The other big moment for The Black List, which is maybe more relevant to the internet, was when I realized that it was catching on. I started going to Hollywood events or little assistant parties and realized through word of mouth that people were actually discovering this thing. It basically went viral, which at the time was a relatively new idea, especially as to why going viral mattered. Hollywood is very much a follower culture. Once everybody knew that everybody else liked these scripts, it was sort of inevitable that at a minimum they were going to read them.

But it also made it harder for them in a social context to express dislike because now there was a social reputation established for the quality of these things. If I’m honest, I think that The Black List has that danger. There are scripts on the annual Black List every year that I don’t personally like. It would be wrong for people to say something is good because it was on The Black List. Good is a subjective assessment. The Black List is fundamentally a list of things that a bunch of other people really loved. That doesn’t mean you’re going to like it. That doesn’t mean it’s objectively good. I do think that sends a signal regarding what audiences will like, but I don’t think that we’re out here making a best-of list that’s somehow inarguable.

EO

It’s a forum. But as the internet’s developed and in tandem with your business,, it’s also allowed for businesses to occupy it with a service. You are so very clear about the capitalistic aspect of the infrastructure—but how are you reckoning with your mission from a business standpoint?

FL

I’m only smiling like this because I haven’t been called out on this before, but you’re absolutely right. We’re a business. With investment, we would be able to be a very successful business while still being a service to many people who will never pay us any money. More broadly, people will benefit because we’ll have improved film and television culture. There will be more good stuff to watch. On some level all of this work is selfish. I just want better stuff to watch.

But I don’t know what to make of the fact that I don’t have people throwing money at me to accomplish that goal. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s that business interests disagree with the aspiration that I’m pointing towards. The older I get the less I worry about it. I built the business in a very specific way. When we were initially building it, I did not take money. I didn’t pursue it because I have a fundamental belief that if someone invests a lot of money in you, your job now is getting them their money back with more, and they have a right to expect that their financial return is your priority. In launching the work, it was important to me that I could be the one to decide the extent to which we prioritize financial gain.

I know that I am invested in this community, and I want to see the community succeed, and my work comes from a desire to see the community succeed. I don’t know the extent to which I can trust financial partners who are doing this for other reasons. They’re entitled to their reasons, whatever they are. It’s my responsibility to protect what we’re doing from those reasons. I knew that people would have other incentives. I wanted to remove those incentives so that we could build it to a place where we could then convince investors that our theory of the universe merited significant investment. I wanted to prove the idea and then have people invest in it. Am I confident that I could make somebody a lot of money if they gave me some? Yes. Am I confident that we can present a lot of incredibly talented writers to the world who wouldn’t otherwise have that opportunity if someone gave me a lot of money? Sure. Am I confident that there’d be a lot of great books and TV and film that will come as a result of that? Yeah. I’m looking for the right partner. At this point, it’s less about needing the money and more about who the right financial agent is.

EO

The conventional process of investment and return in Hollywood has never been to invest in something unique, but The Black List—which now has a proven track record—has shifted that idea. What has changed in the industry from when you began The Black List? How do you feel like it fits into the system of Hollywood?

FL

We continue to challenge a lot of the assumptions that the industry makes about what’s viable. I often say that Hollywood’s governed by conventional wisdom: it’s all convention, no wisdom. At a minimum, we do a very good job every year coming out and saying, “Hey, here’s a bunch of scripts that people love that may not be getting made yet. You may want to take a second look.” The shift in framing when people read those scripts from, “This is a weird thing that I got sent,” to “This is a script that’s on The Black List,” functions as a market-level shifting of supply and demand curves.

Having been in the business now for 20 years, I’ve learned that money isn’t the problem. If money were the primary driving force, you would see more diversity in film. We know the statistics show, for example, that Black movies or movies about people of color make just as much money abroad as they do domestically when controlling for budget and marketing and things like that. These are facts. Yet, if you ask someone who has any decision-making power over green light or significant investment, they will tell you, for example, that a Black film is more of a risk internationally, so they can’t invest in it as much.

The additional problem comes when executives try to appeal specifically to their higher-up’s tastes.If I’m a senior vice president and I know that my boss, the president, feels a certain way about a potential film, when I decide what to bring to him—and it’s almost always a man—I’m going to err on the side of his conventional wisdom. This idea cascades down: the SVP has a junior executive. The junior executive knows the same thing about their boss and their boss’s boss. They make the same decisions. There’s a shift towards those who already have access to perceived valued goods, and the consequences of it are potentially catastrophic. I’m sure there’s an actual term for this.

Imagine a scenario where a Black woman director is undervalued by just 1% at every gate she passes on the way to a studio green light. By the time she gets there—through no fault of her own—that compounding bias leaves her two or three times behind a white male peer. And 1% is generous. Two or three times behind is, too. The real problem is structural, and I don’t know that there’s a solution short of radical transparency around how films succeed or fail—and a radical transformation in who’s doing the hiring.

EO

You brought up the numbers, and how important making money is to the Hollywood system, and yet underrepresented groups often comparatively outperforms.

FL

It works, man. Coming to America made $160 million outside of the US in the 1980s.

EO

But what to you is Black content? But then also, there is this other problem of Black people only being able to make Black content.

FL

I struggle with this constantly, because it’s probably made even more challenging by the fact that I chose The Black List as the name for my company. People’s immediate reaction is to think about The Black List as some sort of diversity program. It’s not, period. It’s about great writers, period. When I named it, I was not expecting it to become my life’s work and my business. It was a list of screenplays that were undervalued. That’s what I knew. I was at my office at like midnight, trying to come up with a name for it before I sent it out, and then went home to pack to go on vacation the next morning. So it has a dual meaning. It’s a tribute to the writers who lost their careers during the McCarthy era, who I’ve always admired.

Then it was also a conscious inversion of the notion that Black was a negative signifier. I grew up in West Central Georgia. I remember sitting in middle school English class and being told that a cowboy with a Black hat is the bad guy and a cowboy with a white hat is the good guy. I didn’t use these words at the time, but I remember thinking inductively, “that’s fucked.” I could walk back to my middle school and walk into the classroom where I remember having this thought. I remember thinking, “One day I’m going to write a novel that inverts that.” I am not terribly disciplined about writing, so I’ve never done that, but I definitely enjoy exploring ways to interrogate language at that level. That’s how it happened.

But I’m most proud of the work that The Black List does on diversity fronts. I’m most proud of the work that The Black List does on market fronts. I’m most interested in the work that The Black List does to shift market dynamics to create a better cultural and economic outcome for Hollywood. That is my primary frame of thinking.

Now, is it inevitable that diversity and representation will be part of that work? Yes, I believe it’s intrinsic. I believe you can’t do good cultural work without interrogating the systems that have historically prevented it. But that’s not all I am or all I do. Every visible Black person, whatever you want to call it, is frustrated by the idea that their only value is that they are Black or that they’re commenting on something related to their Black experience. We all went to the same schools. We all learned the same things. We have areas of expertise beyond our Blackness that can contribute to the conversation. In fact, those are the ideas that I think most people should probably be most interested in hearing from.

EO

You graduated Harvard in 2000, but at school, you were the president of the poetry club?

FL

I was on the poetry board, which is like the poetry section of the Harvard Advocate.

EO

Do you feel like that experience pushed you to pursue the film industry? Because poetry and screenplays do share the ideas of language and fragmentation and structure. They’re each contexts by which language is used to convey something very specific. But also, Harvard is so different from how and where you grew up, so the person that you had to present yourself as to get into Harvard was not the person that you became once you left. How did that time shape you compared to your adolescence?

FL

I was born in Hawaii, lived in El Paso, Texas, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, then Germany for three years as a kid. We moved to Columbus when I was eight, So 1986 or maybe ’85. I went to high school there, and I was a big friggin nerd. I was captain of the math team. I was basically Steve Urkel while Steve Urkel was on television. At an all white segregation academy. That was my high school experience. I got into Harvard, I assume because I tested extremely well. I knew that the way that I was going to “get out” and see the world was just crushing school, doing every extracurricular, playing soccer as well as I could. I was just going to present as the best possible candidate.

Then I was lucky enough to get in. I came to Harvard as a 17-year-old, and what was amazing about that experience for me was there’s this assumption that like you go to a place like Harvard or you go to any sort of school like that, and it is welcome to the powerful white America. I would actually argue that the undergrad community of Harvard is actually a lot more diverse than the film community. This McKinsey study found that the highest level of Hollywood is the least diverse industry in America. My Harvard experience was, “Oh my God, I am around thousands of peers who are as diverse as the world and see the world and have completely different experiences of life.”

There was also the white Harvard thing. I definitely participated in that, too. But when I think about my Harvard experience, it was getting to meet people who were so different from me, who were brilliant and interesting and interested and ambitious. All of a sudden I had a crew of gay friends. It was like, “Oh, shit, I just met a Black person from Brooklyn. This is the life I was meant to be living.” That was my reality. College was very much like a coming of age that probably a lot of other people did in high school. It was an opportunity for me to explore all of these things that I had been conceptually or intellectually interested in as a teenager, but didn’t really have the language to interact with. I was able to take Cornel West, Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin’s class, take a course in the meanings of abstraction in 20th century art, or poetry writing from Henri Cole.

When it comes to poetry specifically, there were a few forces, not all of them necessarily speak well to me. There was an era in the late ’90s when slam poetry was just cool and I wanted to be down. The community of people that were around that world—Saul Williams, Jessica Care Moore—those were the people that were interested in what I was interested in, that were talking about things that I wanted to talk about, were hanging out at the places that I wanted to hang out at, were listening to the music that I wanted to be listening to. They had swag. But I also think that the role of language and storytelling in the way in which we see the world and ourselves is inescapable. I think I had a nascent interest in that. I suspect that my interest in poetry and in the disruption of The Black List come from the same wellspring: how do you put together a series of words on a page to elicit an emotional reaction in the most economical form in poetry? How do you project a series of images in front of global audiences, and what is the consequence of doing so?

EO

You touched on this earlier, but The Black List seems to do two things at once. It’s a forum that gathers and celebrates screenwriters, but it also gives them a structure—a way to write beyond the boundaries of identity.

FL

What will probably remain my proudest professional moment was receiving the Evelyn Burkey Award from the Writers Guild of America, which is given each year to someone who’s elevated the honor and dignity of screenwriters. I mention it because, in his introduction, James Schamus—the producer, screenwriter, and Columbia professor who was a huge influence when I was at McKinsey and thinking about moving into film—said that I’d somehow “aggregated community around the celebration of things that are and also might be.” It’s grand language for what we do, but I think it’s accurate.

I’ve never said we should raise a pile of money just to finance everything that comes through The Black List. That’s not a sustainable business. And I don’t think writers owe me the chance to finance their movies if they get a better offer elsewhere. I’m more interested in using any hypothetical pile of money to build better tools—systems that help financiers find writers to invest in, and that help writers create the conditions to attract more investment and negotiate from a position of strength. That’s more my goal than simply producing projects.

But the point is fundamental: we find great material. And what’s the natural response to discovering great storytelling? To share it. That’s what we do. Our brains are wired for it. It’s why social media exists, and it’s why we’ve been telling variations of the same stories for thousands of years. We are, as they say, a storytelling species. The inevitable outcome is community—around the people who tell stories and around the stories themselves. And, selfishly, that’s also the best business model. I’ve never understood why Hollywood doesn’t invest more in cultivating that global community of movie lovers, reinforcing the idea that these stories matter—that we love them, and that they change our lives. Whether we like it or not, they do.

EO

Angela Bassett and Viola Davis, for example—both incredibly talented, both coming up through the same kind of institutional pipeline. Bassett went to Yale; Davis went to Juilliard.

FL

Yeah, I mean, because it’s Angela Bassett. Obviously the world should be open to her, and we should be gifted with as many great movies starring Angela Bassett as humanly possible. That shouldn’t be controversial. It goes back to what I was saying about that one-percent gatekeeper effect. If the gates are even one percent harder for every Black woman—and that’s a gross underestimate—then even someone like Angela Bassett, a major awards nominee, is going to face more difficulty.

There are more recent examples, too. Ava DuVernay self-financed her early films. She won the Sundance Directing Award—Best Director at Sundance—and struggled to get the meetings at studios that a Sundance Directing Award winner typically gets . And it’s not that she wasn’t trying; those executives simply didn’t call. She got Selma because of her relationship with David Oyelowo, and then completely blew it out of the box. She should have been nominated for Best Director for that movie.

To be clear, I do think some of that is changing. There’s a generation of Black executives who’ve risen through the ranks and are now in positions to seek out those filmmakers and make sure they get the opportunities their work deserves. The Woman King doesn’t exist without Nicole Brown at Columbia Pictures, for example. Black Panther doesn’t exist without Nate Moore at Marvel. There are many such cases. When you look closely, more often than not, there’s a Black executive—one who will never be publicly celebrated—quietly managing the day-to-day work that Alvin Ailey once described.

That’s the level where real change has to happen, because it’s not only about Black artists. The ways Asian stories, queer stories, and stories from within the disability community have been handled are deeply troubling. The disability community, in particular, is one I’ve recently come to understand more fully—there have been enormous failures that need to be addressed. But that requires people choosing to do their jobs differently. And some of those people are already in the system—they just haven’t been given the authority to make the transformations that would allow everyone to succeed.

EO

There’s a dichotomy between representation and content—between who gets to be in the room, and what actually makes it onto the screen.

FL

The bigger problem is actually how the system pressures people once they're in it. If you're an executive from an underrepresented background, you almost certainly had to be sharper, more prepared, and more fluent in certain social dynamics to get your job than someone who came up through more traditional channels. You probably also have a more nuanced understanding of the audience, because you’ve had to. But you also know that your boss may not share that understanding. And your boss's boss almost certainly doesn't. So you're constantly running this program in your head: Do I fight for the project I believe in and risk my credibility, or do I play it safe and greenlight something that fits the prevailing assumptions about what works? That's not a hypothetical. I lived it daily, and so do many other folks. The result of this is that the people who are arguably best positioned to identify what audiences actually want are the ones with the least institutional permission to act on it. Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom keeps reinforcing itself, not because it's correct, but because nobody with the authority to challenge it substantively has real incentives to do so. It’s an overwhelming structural problem

EO

In creative industries—especially film—it’s natural for us to use storytelling and think in narratological terms when we’re trying to achieve something. We want a movie moment. In starting your company, what were you reaching for? What were your reference points?

FL

When I first started The Black List, it was really just about finding good scripts to read. I felt like I was bad at my job, and most of the scripts I was reading were bad. I told myself that if I couldn’t find good ones, I should probably just go to law school, like my mom wanted. It really was that simple.

Now, after twenty years in Hollywood, I’m wary of the idea that when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But storytelling does hold a singular place in human experience—and that’s true of all art. All art, at its core, is storytelling. There’s an amazing essay by Hayao Miyazaki from the ’80s that I first read about in The New Yorker. I can’t vouch for the translation, but the spirit of it has always stayed with me. He writes about the filmmaker’s responsibility to the audience—to let them forget their troubles for a couple of hours, and then send them back into the world somehow lighter, more capable of facing it. A popular movie, he says, should be full of genuine human feeling, even if it’s simple. The entrance should be wide enough for everyone to walk through, but the exit should lift them higher than where they started. It shouldn’t linger in the lowness.

That’s been my guide ever since. Fundamentally, storytelling is participatory—it’s a collaboration between the storyteller, the creative team, and the audience, because the audience brings their own lives to it. Another quote that’s a touchstone for me—actually, it’s my Twitter banner—is from Alan Rickman: “The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.”

For me, that’s the North Star. I’m trying to build a business that allows me to live sustainably, provide for a family, and create opportunities for great writers to do the same—to be valued according to their merit and make a living through storytelling. I wish I were more of a ten-year-plan kind of person, but if it became clear tomorrow that a different path would better achieve that goal, I’d make the shift.

EO

You were twenty-seven when you were fired from DiCaprio’s company. How intense was that?

FL

It was my second year, so it would’ve been 2007. I was twenty-eight. To be clear, I’m sympathetic. Leo is famously press-shy—disciplined about not wasting time on nonsense. So when the L.A. Times called to say, “Hey, we’re about to run an article about an employee of yours who made a list of Swedish plays,” I can understand the frustration. There’s nothing but love for me in that direction. I also think they probably just wanted a different direction. Leo didn’t hire me because I was Black. He hired me because we both love movies and want to make good ones—and there’s a lot of overlap in what we respond to. If anything, it was probably a case of them wanting to shake things up, to bring in new energy.

There are very few actors I could say wouldn’t benefit from my suggestions about what to read next. But Leo’s well taken care of. The man chooses great material, works with great directors, and has every right to his own counsel about what he makes and who he works with.

EO

What happened after? You planted this seed accidentally, and then it started to grow.

FL

I actually really like that analogy. This seed sort of fell out of my pocket while I was on vacation. At various points, I’d come back and water it—just make sure it was doing okay, make sure it was protected. I was lucky enough, a couple of weeks later, to work for Sidney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, who loved the idea of The Black List and probably hired me primarily because I’d created it. I managed to find a new home among like-minded people. Sadly, they both died within a year of my starting to work for them. I wish I could have worked for them my entire career. They were incredibly supportive and enthusiastic about what I was doing.

Then I was lucky again: Donna Langley at Universal Pictures hired me and allowed me to keep running The Black List while I was a studio executive. Later, James Lasseter at Will Smith’s company came to me and said, “I know you have other entrepreneurial ambitions. We’ll hire you, and we’ll carve The Black List out of your contract.”

Over time, I built these relationships that allowed me to take those vacations, water the thing a little, split my time, and make sure it survived its earliest stages as a real tree. Eventually I thought, You know what? This is a beautiful tree. This is where the analogy falls apart a bit, but I realized maybe I should just build my home under it. I moved to the place with the stronger trunk—the one that could give me shade while I kept building. Ava DuVernay has a great way of putting it: I wasn’t trying to get a seat at the table; I was going to build the room around me.

EO

There are obviously so many moving parts in the movie industry—from screenwriting to directing to studio notes. The Black List seems to address each of these problems in some way. How is creativity and autonomy negotiated in that context?

FL

This gets at one of the biggest misinterpretations about The Black List and its priorities. People often focus on the DEI component, but the truth is simpler—and more universal: writers get a bad deal. They don’t get the respect they deserve. Period. Full stop.

When I first got to Hollywood, I heard stories about major writers—people who had written hit movies—not being treated with the admiration or professional regard they deserved, given the quality of their work and the economic value they’d created for the industry. Writers know this. The Writers Guild knows this. Everybody knows this. And yet, somehow, it persists. I still don’t understand how anyone can look at the role writers play—how much of our collective success depends on the quality of their work—and not revere them as a community and as a craft. It boggles my mind.

EO

It’s such a huge feat that these people aren’t given credit for. Lena Dunham comes to mind—someone who not only wrote but had to act her way to success.

FL

Not everyone is a talented actor like Lena, right? You shouldn’t have to be a talented actor—or a producer—to get your work seen. This goes back to the larger problem at the top of the system. If you’re a talented artist, you should be able to focus on the art. If you’re truly great and other people are profiting from your work, you should be able to live a sustainable, thriving life doing that work—not everything around it. That’s why we have agents and managers and lawyers and publicists. It’s just the nature of the system—and to be clear, some of that’s inevitable. But some of it isn’t. We can solve a lot more than we give ourselves credit for.

Within the system as it stands, artists are often forced to take on all the extra labor themselves, which makes it that much harder for incredibly talented people like Lena to navigate toward the same visibility—to have their work recognized, celebrated, and properly supported.

EO

Where do you think we are now, both culturally and structurally?

FL

When I look around this industry, I see so many reasons for optimism and joy. It’s impossible not to look at what Ava DuVernay has built and not be optimistic. It’s impossible not to look at Ryan Coogler, Shonda Rhimes, Issa Rae, Keke Palmer, or Jordan Peele and not be optimistic. Over the last twenty years, I’ve been part of a community of Black and non-Black executives who genuinely root for one another and celebrate each other’s wins as our own. That’s one of the great joys of my life.

But we still work in an industry that, at the highest levels, remains one of the least diverse in American business—less diverse, for a long time, than Donald Trump’s cabinet. Across its hundred-year history, Hollywood’s global influence has been both profound and uneven, largely because it has never truly reflected the audiences it serves. Now the business is facing storms unlike anything before: streaming, the pandemic, and seismic technological shifts. And historically, when economic shocks hit, the first people out are the last ones in. The diversity we’ve gained could evaporate quickly.

Still, I think the path forward—and the industry’s future success—lies with the extraordinary executives rising right now. The future depends on them having access to the resources and power to transform this business into one that serves the global audience fairly. Entrusted with that power, I have no doubt they’ll succeed.

It goes back to where we started: we are the culture. Gina Prince-Bythewood articulated it perfectly in her essay for The Hollywood Reporter about her Oscar campaign for The Woman King. She wrote that we’re not looking for white approval—that the myth of our inferiority will no longer continue. What we want is recognition that we are as intrinsic to the culture as anyone else, and that our judgment matters just as much. As a community, we have a right to our own aesthetics, our own opinions, and a fierce defense of both. That’s how you build an industry that produces the most interesting, vital, and varied work.

I’m not asking for anyone’s approval. I’m saying people need to do better for themselves. We’ve been setting the terms of this conversation for a long time, and failing to see that only hurts you. I can’t control whether someone is racist, but I can make a case for not losing us both money. If I have to work with someone I disagree with, we can still find common ground. The goal is simple: make good work, and make it profitable. If we can agree on that, rationality points to a clear path forward—for both quality and success.

EO

It reminds me of what your dad says to you: “Don’t tell me your priorities—show me your budget.”

FL

That man. I hated it as a kid, but the older I get, the more wisdom I see in it. That’s old military thinking, but it’s true. Don’t tell me DEI is a priority—show me your budgets. Show me how much you’re spending on nonwhite films compared to white films. Show me what you’re paying your Black women directors—if you have any—and how that compares to what you pay white male directors for similar projects. If you believe diverse movies can be marketed abroad, show me the international spend in each territory. If what you’re saying is true, your budgets should reflect your values.

In the Deep South in the 1980s and ’90s, my parents made it very clear there wasn’t a room on earth we didn’t belong in. Not because we were Black, but because we had done the work to be there. No one was ever going to tell us otherwise—and if they did, that was their funeral. The work would prove them wrong.

The other thing my parents taught us was that the only thing worse than not doing the work, or wasting the opportunity to be in that room, was being the kind of person who wouldn’t protect someone else who also deserved to be there. My mom would’ve been angrier if I were the one showing someone out than if I’d messed it up myself. Hypocrisy was the greatest sin. To this day, I’ll be damned if I’m ever on the side of the bullies.