“You are a store. You probably want to sell more than one product.”

Five people who decide what gets read, what gets sold and what gets made, in a room full of writers who want to know how. Franklin Leonard spent part of it checking the Carabao Cup score.

Edited for length and clarity.

Has the market changed?

David Boxerbaum: It’s definitely gone through an evolution. Less buying, and more bespoke buying — more curated. But I still think it’s an amazing time to be a storyteller.

Scott Glassgold: To me it’s about the curation process at the top, in terms of what you choose to focus on and develop. When we say selling, what we really mean is selling to studios. And if we’re talking about selling to studios at this point, it’s about being really thoughtful about curating something that’s going to play commercially. The bar has risen very high.

What makes you sit up?

Kate Oh: People with a real singular voice and perspective. A clear, generally high-concept idea, executed in a way that feels subversive and interesting and solely yours.

When you’re watching a movie you want to have a bombastic, raucous time. So for us it’s trying to find the filmmakers who are these multi-hyphenate rascals, unafraid to smash and blend different genres together.

Franklin Leonard: We ask our readers to evaluate material on a scale of one to ten. I fundamentally do not believe in an objective standard of quality. Look at Rotten Tomatoes — anything that isn’t at a hundred means somebody loved it and somebody hated it. That’s the norm for art.

What we’re trying to capture is who loves it, so we can recommend it to other people who’ll also love it.

We’re always looking for the scripts people read and say: oh my God, I have to tell everybody about this. That’s what the annual Black List is. Separate from whether they think it’ll make money. That’s the thing you want to create in a reader — I have to tell everybody.

And the other half of the job?

Franklin Leonard: That’s a different question. How do you present yourself in a room? Are you a person who plays well with others? Are you someone I’d want to be stuck with at an airport if we got snowed in?

Those are corporate hiring considerations, on some level, because these are jobs and this is a collaborative art form. Yes, you go into a room by yourself to write the thing. But at some point you’re going to get feedback. And if you can’t take feedback from your manager, your agent, your studio executive, your producer, your friend — if that isn’t a pleasant process — people are not going to want to work with you again. They’re just not.

Lee Jessup: Nor would you enjoy the job.

Franklin Leonard: Maybe you wouldn’t. But the number of people who think it’s appropriate to behave badly consistently shocks me. Professionals don’t behave that way.

Any individual project is just one project. Careers are long. What we’re looking for is people who want to build a career within the ecosystem — not people who say, I have to protect this one scene, this one line, and I’m willing to torch every bridge around me for it.

We’re looking for adults.

Can you write well? Is the experience of working with you pleasant enough that I’d want to do it again? Do those two things and you’ve got a real shot.

Ryan Coogler is my favourite example. I’ve known Ryan since Fruitvale Station, and everything you see of him in public is exactly who he is. Not only is he prodigiously talented, he’s a good guy. Everyone I know who’s worked with him would put themselves through hell to do it again.

What are the red flags?

David Boxerbaum: For me it’s unique voices — people with stories to tell who are passionate about their art. That’s what drives me as an agent. And that sounds easy, but finding those writers is not easy.

The red flags are a lot of what Franklin said. Unprofessionalism around buyers is a big one. And someone who hasn’t done their homework.

This is your career. This is what you’ve chosen to spend your time on. So do the homework. Read as much as you can. Keep writing. Own your craft.

A red flag is someone handing you a script and saying: here you go, I’m done, let’s go sell it.

I’ve been doing this a long time — I mean that in the best way, the grey hair gives it away — and I’m still honing my craft every day. I’m still learning. If this is the path you’ve chosen, are you still working at it?

Does it matter how much you’ve written?

Adam Kolbrenner: If you’re not a generative writer — someone constantly having ideas and writing them — it’s close to a non-starter.

You meet a writer and they say, I have this script. Great, what else? Well, I have this script. When did you write it? Four years ago, and I’ve been improving it since.

That’s a non-starter.

You want somebody who says: I’ve got this idea, and these three others, and I’m not sure which to do next — do you have thoughts?

Franklin Leonard: What you’re describing is the difference between doing this as a hobby and doing it as a professional. Hobbyists write one script, rewrite it for five years, and expect greatness. That doesn’t work.

What does work is: here’s a great script, well executed. Here’s what I’m doing next. Here’s what I’m doing after that. The constant flow of stories out of that artist’s brain — that’s what this is about.

It gives us the ability to talk to the industry about somebody new and say: there’s more where this came from. If you don’t have that, people don’t know how to communicate with you, and they move on to the next.

It’s cutthroat in that way. All you have to do is generate more ideas.

Why not put everything into one script?

Scott Glassgold: The journey from developing material, to getting representation, to going to market, to selling — it’s so long, with so many twists, that you can’t put all your eggs in one basket creatively.

A movie or an idea comes out just ahead of yours and cuts you off at the knees. That happens. It’s fine, if you have multiple irons in the fire. Or you sell something and can’t attach a director — but you’ve got something else coming.

You are a business. You are a store. You probably want to sell more than one product, and ideally more than one at a time. Putting all your eggs in one basket is bad business.

Fight for your material until you’re blue in the face. But don’t be precious about it. If one isn’t working out the way you thought, that’s okay. Go work on something else. Let it breathe. The market and the moment may come back around.

David Boxerbaum: And speaking for the three of us — we’re empathetic to the fact that generating ideas isn’t always easy. The journey of a storyteller is a rocky road. Sometimes you hit a wall and can’t figure out what to write next. That’s okay. Take a breath, sit with it, meditate on it. It will come.

But to their point — you’re the CEO of your company. We’re the COOs. We’re helping to run it. How do you want your company to run? What do you want it to put out? The product has to be continuously churned out for any of us to be successful.

Tell us about the short story market.

Scott Glassgold: David and I work together, so his success is my success. It’s all shared.

We’ve been in the short story space a few years now, and what drew me to it is that it’s incredibly empowering. We came up at a time when studios were hung up on IP — and sadly that IP is usually a shi*ty toy from the eighties they’ve already made five movies of.

What we try to do is create genuinely creator-driven IP. It becomes IP — usually a dirty word — when we run these ideas through multiple mediums, rather than letting a corporation do it.

The short story sits somewhere between a pitch and a spec. Far more tactile than a pitch, far more malleable than a spec.

We develop the idea, grow it into film and TV, and also do publishing deals. Setting something up in film and TV is a long journey with no guarantee at the end. But a book comes out in eighteen months.

Franklin Leonard: Technology is your friend. Adam, David and I sold a story that came out on Twitter for hundreds of thousands of dollars to Sony.

There’s a writer, Mark Schroeder, that David and I found on Reddit. His voice was extraordinary — he just wasn’t conceptually in the bullseye, and we helped him get there. When we met him he was living on his uncle’s couch on Canadian welfare.

We’ve sold two of his short stories. One for over a million dollars. One to Netflix with Blake Lively, one to Universal with Sydney Sweeney. His first book came out of a short story.

What does development actually require?

Kate Oh: It’s project-dependent. Some things take a few months, some take five years.

Before you go into development you need a singular vision — being very specific about the story you want to tell, whether through the pitch or the spec, so that once it’s set up everyone is on the same page.

Otherwise people start losing sight of what you’re working towards, you get conflicting notes, too many cooks, and you lose what made the project special.

Finding advocates is the most important thing. And beyond that, a relationship with your producer where you can be honest both ways — we’re your advocates, but we’re also talking to the studio and understanding what a buyer needs to green-light it. It’s finding the marriage where you keep the integrity of the project and still get to something everyone can be happy with.

Scott Glassgold: Honestly, a lot of it has to do with ego, and letting go of it. Be open to your collaborators. If you have a rep and you believe in them, listen.

It doesn’t mean they’re always right. It doesn’t mean you’re always right. But take the moment to put ego aside and listen to the note — because often the note is right even when the prescription is wrong.

Stress-test your material. The greatest filmmakers in the world do test screenings. They listen to their audience.

Sometimes you’ll get a bozo sending you the wrong way. Let’s be real — it isn’t all wonderful. But part of it is staying as objective as you can.

No matter how many Oscars are in the room, we’re all human. Nobody has the silver-bullet creative idea every time.

The Prisoners story.

Adam Kolbrenner: Prisoners started with a query letter — an actual hard-copy letter, stamp and everything — from a writer living in a leaking apartment in Brooklyn. I thought, that’s an interesting last name. Guzikowski.

I read his first script. It wasn’t great, honestly. But there was a voice.

It took us time to land on the concept of Prisoners, and that came to him maybe six months after our first conversation. From there we developed the screenplay together over nearly three years — phone, email, possibly fax. He was taking notes in the supply closet at his job. People would open the closet door and he’d hand them reams of paper.

We never actually met in person the whole time.

When it was finally done, every agent in town passed. It was a Monday, and I was about to call him and say we need to move on to the next script. And then Adam Levine — an agent at Endeavor I’d never met — called and said, I think I’ve read the best script I’ve ever read in my life.

I said, great. Which one?

He said, Prisoners.

I called Guzikowski and said: hey buddy, you’ve got an agent. Come out to LA. He showed up the next day.

I think we did somewhere between fifty-five and fifty-eight drafts over almost three years. And the movie that got shot is exactly the spec that appeared on the Black List — with a couple of exceptions Denis tried along the way, and one suggestion from Roger Deakins. When Roger Deakins suggests something, you do it.

He’s gone on to control his own destiny as a screenwriter and a television creator. He’s still with the same agent.

What’s the market looking for now?

Scott Glassgold: There’s a viable market. I genuinely believe that. But be honest with yourself — is it a commercial idea? Can it play?

Studios are making movies. Studios are making big commercial movies.

Kate Oh: And there are so many mediums to get yourself out there and build awareness. Position yourself before going to market, so when you get there you’re not going in flat-footed.

The market is constantly changing. But if you’re bringing something new and fresh and original, there’s an audience. I remain optimistic, even though every six months there’s another tectonic shift. If you’ve got your idea — commit to it.

Adam Kolbrenner: It is fundamentally easier today for a writer living anywhere in the world to be recognised for their body of work than it has ever been, and that’s a result of the work Franklin and his team have done.

People ask all the time: do agents, managers and producers actually look at the Black List site, at the Nicholl, at these competitions? The answer is one hundred per cent yes. Always. That’s our job. We are in the market for discovery. We can’t sit at our desks and expect a query letter to show up.

David Boxerbaum: But be careful about some of the other platforms out there. There are only a couple we trust, and that’s really the one. We’re sympathetic to the plight of a storyteller, and the last thing we want is for that to be taken advantage of by people who don’t have your best interests at heart.

Be curious about what you’re signing up for and where you’re putting your work.

Final advice.

David Boxerbaum: You’ve already done something. You’re making more effort than most — you came out to be around your people. That’s half the battle. The other half is sitting in front of a blank screen asking what you want to tell.

Adam Kolbrenner: Make friends with other writers. You don’t need to only make friends with Mike De Luca. Work with each other, give each other notes, make the material better.

And then: noisy, big ideas. That’s it. It’s hard to do, but that’s the key.

Kate Oh: Network laterally, not just vertically. The people I know today are the people I interned with or went to school with.

Someone on a panel over a decade ago told me: just don’t be a bummer. And I heard something this week — never work with people who don’t have a sense of humour.

Everybody says nobody wants to be stuck in development hell. But it can also be fun. I work with creatives who expand my mind in mind-blowing ways. Make sure you enjoy it, because most of us are making five dollars until we aren’t.

Franklin Leonard: Don’t be an as*hole.

And time is your equity. Where you choose to put your time is essential to whether you succeed.

Scott Glassgold: Which means listening to that quiet voice. Is my script ready? Is this the right idea for the market? Is this the right idea for me to execute? Only you know the answer, and you have to be crazy honest with yourself. If you’re not, somewhere down the line it becomes a pitfall you didn’t avoid.

Franklin Leonard: We only have so much time on this planet. Treat people well — assistants, interns, anybody below you in the chain, other writers.

There’s a thing that happens online where people make themselves feel better by trashing other people’s projects. Don’t be that person. People see it. It identifies you.

You will never see me punch down on a movie. And most especially — treat your audience well, and think seriously about what that means.

David Boxerbaum: Years ago I walked into a writers’ event and there was a saying on the wall. Just: great writers write.

That was it. Years later, here I am still using it.

Great writers write.

Stress-test your material. The greatest filmmakers in the world do test screenings. They listen to their audience.

Scott Glassgold speaking on stage at State of the Story, Los Angeles