The 2009 Black List is out. Thanks Pia for the heads up and “Niles” for firing the first salvo on The Black List on the Discussion Board
For those of you who don’t know, The Black List is an annual list of Hollywood’s most liked unproduced screenplays. It started in 2004 when Franklin Leonard, a development executive for Appian Way, asked folks in the business to send in their list of top 10 unproduced screenplays. Those lists were complied into The Black List (which now as a site entirely devoted to The Black List).
Previous Black List scripts include “The Queen” , “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Juno”.
This year’s list is topped by THE MUPPET MAN by Christopher Weekes The life story and tragic early death of Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets.” and THE SOCIAL NETWORK by Aaron Sorkin The story of the founders of the social networking
Read, Elizabeth Currid’s excellent opinion piece, The Black List: what it can, and cannot, do for Hollywood filmmaking
It can’t be emphasized enough, however, that The Black List is a compilation of most liked, not best. This is clearly evident based on Mystery Man on Film’s August, 2009 review of one of The Black List scripts, Balls Out (in pdf format hosted by The Robotard 8000). The script was written by Tim Talbott and Malcolm Spellman under the psudonym The Robotard 8000. When insurance salesman Jim Simmers has a near death experience, he decides that nothing matters except getting a promotion, a new car, and the hot girl from work. Jim’s new attitude alienates his friends and co-workers, and he must figure out how to live his new life without losing his old one.
MMoF begins his review, “I found this script to be a vile, degenerate, 107-page piece of shit, about as witty as a maggot-infested corpse but only half as intelligent… Read the rest of the review, it only gets better. – Don
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Category: Movie Scripts, Unproduced scripts
5 Comments so far
1.
Stan
December 14th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
As I did last year, over the course of the next two weeks I’ll be providing detailed analyses of each of the top 10 scripts (including the two tying for #10) over on my blog, stanhasissues-dot-com. The coverage for “The Muppet Man” is up now.
2.
The Robotard 8000
December 15th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Thank you for slamming us and our screenplay with absolutely no objectivity, Don!
Please be sure to inform your readers how striking through a word on one’s cover page will assure that their script never gets read.
3.
SimplyScripts - Movie Scripts and Screenplays » SimplyScripts Radio
December 19th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
[...] The Black List and its inclusion of the script Balls Out by The Robotard 8000 [...]
4.
Donnie
January 22nd, 2010 at 2:22 am
The big joke is on everyone reviewing this script. The screenwriters who wrote this obviously knew what they were doing and purposely wrote it with multiple format errors and made it over the top to get attention.
They succeeded and it’s on the Black List.
Robotard 8000 = 1
Rest of the world = 0
5.
The Robotard 8000
February 8th, 2010 at 8:52 am
(sigh)
Do we really have to spell out the lesson in all this?
Seriously?