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How Franklin Leonard and The Black List Changed Hollywood : Planet Money In 2005, an anonymous list of the best unmade scripts in Hollywood shook up the movie biz. This episode: how a math-loving, movie nerd solved Hollywood's script problem. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

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Hollywood's Black List

Hollywood's Black List

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DANA POINT, CA - FEBRUARY 07, 2019: Founder, The Black List Franklin Leonard attends The 2019 MAKERS Conference. (Photo by Rachel Murray/Getty Images for MAKERS)
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Rachel Murray/Getty Images for MAKERS
DANA POINT, CA - FEBRUARY 07, 2019: Founder, The Black List Franklin Leonard attends The 2019 MAKERS Conference. (Photo by Rachel Murray/Getty Images for MAKERS)
Rachel Murray/Getty Images for MAKERS

In 2005, Franklin Leonard was a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company. A big part of his job was to find great scripts. The only thing — most of the 50,000-some scripts registered with the Writers Guild of America every year aren't that great. Franklin was drowning in bad scripts... so to help find the handful that will become the movies that change our lives, he needed a better way forward.

Today on the show — how a math-loving, movie nerd used a spreadsheet and an anonymous Hotmail address to solve one of Hollywood's most fundamental problems: picking winners from a sea of garbage. And, along the way, he may just have reinvented Hollywood's power structure.

Music: "Shark," "Take Charge" and "We Here."

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