Franklin Leonard is host of the “Black List Table Reads” podcast and founder of the Black List, Hollywood’s most popular unproduced screenplays. He has worked in development at Universal Pictures and at the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack, and others. Leonard serves on boards for Young Storytellers Foundation and American Public Media’s “Marketplace,” has been a juror at Sundance and Toronto film festivals, and was a delegate at the White House’s 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit. He has been named one of Hollywood Reporter’s 35 Under 35 and Black Enterprise’s 40 Emerging Leaders, and he received the 2015 African American Film Critics Association Special Achievement Award.
Previously
![Understanding the Podcast Explosion](https://aspenideasfestival.imgix.net/nullc088818d-29d0-490e-92b5-15c470c946ea/28020547205_bd8351d77b_h.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=min&fm=jpg&h=225&q=80&rect=0%2C34%2C1600%2C899&w=400)
If you’re in journalism, the content business, or are associated with a nonprofit or dot-org, “How’s your podcast going?” is the question of the day. How did these obscure bro...
![The Gatekeepers: Expanding America’s Cultural Power Structure](https://aspenideasfestival.imgix.net/nulladf0e65f-f356-48e1-8506-fd000dd950da/27917793822_d562ba0310_h.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=min&fm=jpg&h=225&q=80&rect=0%2C119%2C1600%2C899&w=400)
When the ranks of a cultural institution or a creative field tend toward high levels of homogeneity in terms of race, class, and/or gender, what are the challenges and opportu...
![America's Identity Crisis and the Mirror of Pop Culture](https://aspenideasfestival.imgix.net/nullaf84f399-b175-4e40-b0d6-309b29e10c0f/27887561161_9b88879e73_h.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=min&fm=jpg&h=225&q=80&rect=50%2C0%2C1550%2C872&w=400)
Whether it is #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite today, or whether it was All in the Family and Ms. Magazine in the past, America’s identity crises have always insinuated th...
![Upending Hollywood From the Inside](https://aspenideasfestival.imgix.net/null14d3d33b-d173-402e-b071-3a90464a4bd1/27904741821_564807ffe7_h.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=min&fm=jpg&h=225&q=80&rect=0%2C151%2C1600%2C901&w=400)
What was the best script you read this year that still hasn't been made into a feature film? That was the simple question to film-industry executives that catalyzed the Black...