WGSA partners with the Black List to increase opportunities for SA writers

The Writers Guild of South Africa has partnered with The Black List in a continuing effort to increase opportunities for South African writers to share their screenplays with established producers overseas.

Once an exclusive list circulated among Hollywood executives, The Black List has become a venerable resource for discovering unproduced scripts.

In 2005, film executive Franklin Leonard decidedhe was tired of seeing fantastic scripts lost in an insurmountable pile of unproduced screenplays.In an effort to acknowledge strong scripts yet to be made, he started The Black List , an annual, independent ranking of the best unproduced screenplays.

At the time, Leonard was working as a script scout at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company, Appian Way. He e-mailed about 75 of his industry peers, and asked that they share a list of their ten favourite screenplays that weren't confirmed to enter production.

The industry reaction to that first list was electric, and Leonard's annual Black List has since grown to include the collective top picks of hundreds offilm executives who contribute a list of up to ten favourite scripts that were either written - or somehow uniquely associated with - that year.

Black list screenplays that have since made it to the big screen include such acclaimed titles as Juno , Lars and the Real Girl , Little Miss Sunshine , Slumdog Millionaire , 500 Days of Summer , In Bruges , The Wrestler , The King's Speech , The Social Network , The Imitation Game and Whiplash .

In2011, Leonard and his team launched The Black List website(www.blcklst.com)which functions as a real time Black List and screenplay recommendation engine where producers can easily search and find top-rated scripts, thus creating a platform via which talented writers have a chance to share their screenplays with executives to whom they may not otherwise have access.

As quoted in a 2011 New York Times article on the website launch, Leonard explains that by putting The Black List online, we can lower the barriers to entry for talented people in a business where it can be tough to break in.

The frustration of such closed doors is extremely relevant for screenwriters in South Africa, who have limited means and opportunities to share their scripts with established film executives overseas.

In acknowledgment of this challenge, The Black List has been partnering with Writers' Guilds around the world in order to grant Guild members free hosting and discounted services on The Black List site.

It was for this reason that Kelsey Egan, a Western Cape council member of the WGSA, prioritized a meeting with Leonard when she was in Los Angeles last November for the American Film Market.

I've been very impressed by the resources and reach The Black List has providedto previously unestablished screenwriters. The Black List has become a household name in industry circles, and the WGSA wanted to make sure that South African writers could more affordibly take full advantageof the opportunities The Black List site affords, says Egan.

Leonard is equally enthusiastic about the partnership. Its a central tenet of the Black Lists worldview that great storytelling knows no national boundaries. Having spent the summer in South Africa back in 1999, I have long looked forward to the inevitable explosion of its extraordinary storytelling talent into the international filmmaking landscape. Im particularly excited about this newly launched partnership with the Writers' Guild of South Africa, he says.

Thanks to this partnership, as from 1st March 2015 paid-up full and candidate members of the WGSA with valid membership numbers will be able to list their scripts on The Black List database free of charge, and will receive a 20% discount on all Black List paid services, which includes script hosting and evaluations.

For more information or to join up as a member, please contact WGSA at admin@writersguildsa.org.

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