Back in 2005, Franklin Leonard, who was then a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions, wanted a better way to find great screenplays. He went through his s and asked almost 100 anonymous Hollywood execs to send him the unproduced scripts they’d most enjoyed reading that year. Not the scripts they thought would make money. The scripts they loved.

In return, Franklin compiled a list of those screenplays and shared it with all of them. He called it Late Night. At the time of writing, Black List movies have won 53 Academy Awards from 262 nominations—including four of the last ten Best Picture Oscars (Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, Argo and Spotlight) and ten of the last 22 Best Screenplay Oscars—and grossed over $26 billion in box office worldwide.

Alongside the annual anonymous list, The Black List has also become an online community where screenwriters make their work available to readers, buyers and employers. The rewards of sharing include getting valuable , connecting with talent and management agencies, and selling or optioning screenplays. Leonard’s baby is now something of a mini cultural revolution, helping Hollywood address its inclusion issues at script level by surfacing original stories from a wider diversity of writers.

What film poster did you have on your wall at college?
Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat. The one that looked like it had been painted red with Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat walking through the village carrying a stuffed duck.

What’s the sexiest film you’ve ever seen?
In the Mood For Love.

What film do you have fond memories of watching with your parent/s?
Literally anything with Richard Pryor, with my father.

Guiltiest pleasure?
The Last Dragon.

Favorite holiday movie?
Elf.

What classic are you embarrassed to say you haven’t seen?
Some Like It Hot.

What’s a film that you had always loved and then watched again recently and went “ooh, problematic!”?
I don’t even know where to start.

Which movie scene makes you cry the hardest?
The moment of exultation after Fonny and Tish finally get their apartment in If Beale Street Could Talk. Gets me teary just writing this.

What filmmaker—living or not—do you most envy or ire?
Julie Dash. First African American woman to make a feature film to obtain a general theatrical release in the United States [Daughters of the Dust]. The fortitude, will and talent are all worthy of both iration and envy.

As the founder of The Black List, can we ask you to name five films that define the perfect screenplay?
This is a fundamentally impossible question for me to answer, but here are five screenplays that I seem to consistently reference of late: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Charlie Kaufman, with Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry).