This year’s Black List features Martin Shkreli, Kanye, Trump, and one very angry bear
The annual list of the year's most popular unproduced screenplays also goes heavy on hired killers and oddball biopics
Aux News Martin Shkreli
The Black List—the annual release of the most popular unmade screenplays floating around Hollywood in a given year—has always been an artistic oddity. By its very nature, the List is essentially a big collection of ideas that are considered cool but also unworkable, whether because they’re too expensive, too controversial, or are just the sort of thing that works better as a script than an actual film.
(Take it as read that many, but not all, of Black List scripts that do end up getting made rarely triumph in the cold cruel reality of the actual world.)
This year’s list, released earlier today, is no exception, with ideas that range from sounding genuinely interesting, to sounding like the sort of thing that would be floated as a joke on a modern version of 30 Rock. (For instance: Ballast, by Justin Piasecki, which depicts a naval engineering team that “find themselves trapped in a deadly game on a shipping vessel in the
middle of the Atlantic when they learn a series of car bombs are hidden amongst the thousands of vehicles on board.”)
This year’s crop goes heavy in two directions. First, there are horror movies set in weird locations, like Michael Shanks’ Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel (about a haunted motel); Grizz (Connor Barry) about a paramedic being stalked by a grizzly bear in the Pacific Northwest; and Ultra (Colin Bannon), about a marathon runner who finds themselves enrolled in a super-secret, super-deadly “ultra-marathon.”
The other angle is—and we’re trying to be at least moderately nice here—a whole bunch of proposed biopics of people who do not necessarily require biopics at this time. That ranges from the benign—Shania! by Jessica Walsh, or Tricia Lee’s Idol, focused on “The true story of American Idol viral sensation, William Hung”—to a whole host of more actively questionable subjects, including Martin Shkreli (The Villain, by Andrew Ferguson), Kanye West (The College Dropout, by Thomas Aguilar and Michael Ballin), and Donald Trump (Believe Me, by Hannah Mescon and Dreux Moreland, which bills itself as “an absurdist biopic”).
Oh, also: Assassins. (Assassins are always all over this thing.) Four different screenplays in the set are about being hunted by hired killers, whether that’s Lillian Yu’s Killer Instinct (Hollywood assistant jokes about killing his boss, then has to go on the run from said boss’ actual murderer), Colin Bannon’s The Devil Herself (high-powered assassin fights witches in the German mountains), David Coggeshall’s The Family Plan (former assassin has to take his family on the run when he gets outed), and our personal favorite, Ryan Hooper’s Four Assassins (And A Funeral), in which the adopted daughter of a master assassin finds herself targeted by her four assassin siblings for potential assassination.
Oh, there’s also a movie about Dennis Rodman hanging out in Las Vegas (Dennis Rodman’s 48 Hours In Vegas, by Jordan VanDina); we don’t know if anybody gets assassinated in that one.
56 Comments
Looking at US history, our assassins are never as cool as the ones in the movies.
The guy who tried to kill Nixon was comically inept. The guy who shot Reagan has a YouTube channel, and the guy who killed Garfield was foaming at the mouth insane. Yep I concur.
I heard something about Hinckley getting out, but not about his youtube channel.
By the way this is real. He makes original folk songs.
I think it’s only a folk song if it’s not original. Like Llewyn Davis said, it was never new and it never gets old.
Oh shit your completely right. Bonus points for referring to an underrated Coen Brothers film.
It sucks that his family’s wealth greased the wheels, but honestly I’m happy for Hinckley. He’s just a mentally ill guy who can hopefully keep himself and others safe by taking his meds.
Someone tried to kill Garfield? Was he from a zealously pro-Monday group?
John had enough…
*Jon
Jon
Someone tried to kill Garfield? Was he from a zealously pro-Monday group?‘twas a PETA-type group, but for lasagna
It was Odie, who got sick of getting kicked off the damn table.
Garfield was originally pro-Monday because he doesn’t have to work.https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/1979/05/28
The small but vocal Lasagna Lobby.
Nermal finally made it back from Abu Dhabi.
The guy who tried to assassinate Andrew Jackson got his gun fed to him by his target, and Teddy Roosevelt gave a goddamn speech after getting shot by his would-be assailant.
Hilarious! Someone should make a musical…
So it’s guys who shot presidents, but they’re black and they rap.
a whole host of more actively questionable subjectsPSA: “Actively” is not a word you tack onto adjectives to intensify their meaning. It has a specific meaning which many writers seem to just ignore, including this one.See also “blatantly”, “literally”.
…Lillian Yu’s Killer Instinct (Hollywood assistant jokes about killing his boss, then has to go on the run from said boss’ actual murderer)…Look, that sounds nothing like Killer Instinct but throw in at least one ULLLTTTRAAAAAAAA COOMMBBOOOOOOOO and I’m in.
This is probably how most video game movies begin production.
AKA How Hard Can John Wick Be?
only one way to find out!
Pretty much every thing I have ever seen made off the black list has fucking sucked the shit out of the asshole of a dog that has been dead at least two weeks, more like three?Good luck getting shit from this shit produced after The Beaver, it’s just another Hollywood trash chute
Ok. The Social Network, the Wrestler, Zombieland, Superbad, Recount, The Ides of March, Juno, The Wolf of Wall Street, Inglorious Bastards, Up In The Air, Easy A, The King’s Speech, Doubt, The Debt, In Bruges.
Yep. All trash.
Whiplash, Hell or High Water, Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea, Jackie, Looper, Margin Call, Booksmart, There Will Be Blood…
There were some pretty good sequels that came out of the black list too:
Die Hard 6: Die Hard in a Utility Closet, Friday the 13th Part XII: Jason Takes Reno, Three’s Company 2: The Legend of Furley’s Gold…
half of those I’ll re-watch in a heartbeat. the others, I did watch, but am fine with. In Bruges is that one film that I do tend to watch every five years. It holds up, and is wacky in a good way.
My screenplay, ‘Santa Claus in the Valley of the Unicorns: An Erotic Mystery’, got on the Black List.No, wait, I read the letter wrong. I’ve been blacklisted from Hollywood.
I love the twist of Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel being about a haunted Motel.
I hope to god that was a working title because Jesus that might be an all time worst film name.
It needs another three “hotels”, minimum!
Pump the brakes on all those sequels! Let’s see how the first four book.
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs
I get the feeling they were going for a “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”-type vibe, and missed.Why on earth they would be going for that type of vibe, I have no idea.
And its innkeeper, who came up with the title. It was only supposed to be one “Hotel”, but when you’re a jittery satyr hopped up on LSD life is hard enough!
Oh what does The Master approve of?
The Mads are riffing Manos tonight! https://www.themadsareback.com/tag/manos/
nice! thanks.
Some day I want to see an absurdist T* biopic. But it will not be directly about him but the various people he has ruined morally, politically, and/or financially throughout his life, and he will not be portrayed on screen or in voice over. And it will be years from now.
Can we mix and match some scripts? Four assassins who have to fight Trump, Kanye and Shkreli on a boat full of bombs and a bear?
I assume this takes place in the Sharknado/Lavalantula universe.
Twist: the Shkreli is haunted!
Haunting a DEVIL DOLL?!
An ugly stupid little wooden dummy; who will never have ham!
I absolutely need an “assassin fights witches in the German mountains movie.
It’s like you’re ordering from a Chinese menu: one from Column A, one from Column B…
Michael Shanks’ Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel (about a haunted motel)Not to be confused with Hotel (Hotel Hotel Hotel), about a motel haunted by echoes.
If you actually want to read the list, here, it’s not like the article could have linked to a version of it or anything:https://deadline.com/2021/12/the-black-list-2021-screenplays-list-scripts-1234890009/One odd feature of the list is that you’re left guessing which of them are supposed to be comedies.Also, I see a tenth version or so of Shop Around the Corner (You’ve Got Mail and friends) and I think two versions of All About Eve translated into Lifetime “The Perfect X” movies.
i dunno, i’d watch the car bomb one. but then, i’m a dirty plebe.
The Black List at this point is kind of a cottage industry and the quality has suffered. Some of the scripts are still really good, but a lot are scripts that are very inside baseball or high concept crap that other aspiring writers (a lot of the people scoring the scripts are unsuccessful writers) take to like cats to catnip.
“By its very nature, the List is essentially a big collection of ideas that are considered cool but also unworkable”Not really. In previous years, a huge percentage of the scripts on the list were actively in development and later came out as films.The list SHOULD have been for scripts that were too smart, too weird, too outside the mainstream, but nevertheless deserved attention. But, along the way, they completely lost the opint.
Take it from Byron Denniston, “nobody beats the Grizz!”.Edit: ha! Just read the image caption. Our references are out of control!
“sounding like the sort of thing that would be floated as a joke on a modern version of 30 Rock. (For instance: Ballast, by Justin Piasecki, which depicts a naval engineering team that “find themselves trapped in a deadly game on a shipping vessel in the middle of the Atlantic when they learn a series of car bombs are hidden amongst the thousands of vehicles on board.”)”
Wow, you’ve really NAILED the 30 Rock sense of humour.
I high-fived the bear and my arm flew off.