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Dee Rees, Brooklynn Prince, Howard Rodman and More Announce the 2017 Black List
If you don’t have access to all the work, and if you’re not plugged into the industry development community, the annual Black List — a “most-liked” list of unproduced screenplays floating around in Hollywood — is always a bit of head-scratcher list. Do the loglines — Daddio‘s “A passenger and her cab driver reminisce about their relationships on the way from the airport to her apartment in New York,” or The Mother‘s “A female assassin comes out of hiding to protect the pre-teen daughter she gave up years before” — herald exciting new voices or simply clever takes on durable concepts? Impossible to say without the PDFs on your hard drive. A read through all the loglines, however, does reveal trends when it comes to content. As Matthew Dessem breaks down over at Slate, there are several themes and subject matters that dominate the list. For one, Nazis — no less than nine scripts feature Nazi characters and subject matter. There are also lots of stories about true-life characters, including quite a few with protagonists or significant characters that will mostly be familiar to boomers and older (Walter Cronkite, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, John Hughes and the members of the Jane Collective). And, yes, female assassins. In addition to The Mother there are four more scripts featuring female contract killers.
You won’t learn a ton more about these scripts in the short video announcements posted on the Black List YouTube page, but they are all quite charming. I’ve posted three here: Dee Rees gives a simple shout-out to Daddio, Howard Rodman takes a car wash and talks up Kill Shelter, and Brooklynn Prince, above, intros George.
