Christmas come early! For screenwriters, anyway.

For those who are unfamiliar, The Black List is ”a compendium of the most-liked unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, as voted by a group of people that range from producer assistants to agency guys to development VPs.” Most of those unproduced scripts, the top ones anyway, usually lead to production deals. For example, The Beaver by Kyle Killen won top honors last year and is now being directed by Jodie Foster and starring Mel Gibson.

I’m including this because while people spend thousands of dollars on seminars or waste money on “How To” manuals, there is simply no alternative to reading an actual screenplay. Also, you can see just how many original  and awesome movies Hollywood doesn’t shelves, because they want to feed you more remakes. I’ve included only the top screenplays here, but you can check out the full list at the official site. Sadly, there’s no real genre stuff in the top ten.

NOTE: The Black List DOES NOT post the actual screenplays, but they’re not terribly hard to find. Script Shadow is a good place to start.

-Brian

1. The Muppet Man, by Christopher Weekes “The life and times of the late Jim Henson, the man behind Sesame Street and The Muppets.”

2. The Social Network, by Aaron Sorkin “Chronicles Mark Zuckerberg’s complicated journey towards creating Facebook. Sorkin depicts both the founder’s motivations for starting the largest social network in the world and the human casualties that came with his profound success.”

3. The Voices, by Michael R. Perry “Jerry, a schizophrenic worker at a bathtub factory, accidentally kills an attractive woman from accounting. While trying to cover his bloody tracks, Jerry starts taking advice from his talking (and foul-mouthed) cat and dog.”

4. Prisoners, by Aaron Guzikowski “When his young daughter and her best friend vanish on Thanksgiving Day, a Christian survivalist named Keller Dover takes matters into his own hands, imprisoning and torturing a suspect whom the police have set free. But does Dover have the wrong man? And if he does, who really has his little girl?”

5. Cedar Rapids, by Phil Johnston “Tim Lippy is a small-town insurance man who’s somehow made it to middle age without having quite done anything. Everything changes when he unexpectedly gets the chance to represent his company at the Cedar Rapids insurance convention, where comedy ensues, of course.”

6. Londongrad, by David Scarpa “An adaptation of Alan Cowell’s 2008 book The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder, chronicling the life and strange death of Alexander Litvinenko. Remember in 2006, when that ex-Soviet spy was allegedly poisoned with radioactive tea at a London sushi joint? That’s him.”

7. L.A.Rex, by Will Beall (based on his novel of the same name) “Rookie LAPD officer Ben Halloran gets partnered with scarred and tobacco-spitting Officer Marquez, and the unlikely team hit the streets of L.A. on the brink of a gang-rivalry explosion. Amid run-ins with the Mexican mafia, brutal gang murders, and corrupt cops, we soon find that Halloran may not be as squeaky clean as his brand new badge.”

8. Desperados, by Ellen Rapoport “Wesley Robbins, a 30-something single attorney with an unhealthy obsession with coupling up, thinks she’s found the perfect man. But when he doesn’t call for days after the first time they sleep together she freaks out and sends him a scathing email, only to learn he’s been laid up in a Mexican hospital with some broken bones. On a whim, she and her girlfriends travel down south to erase the email before she ruins what she believes could be her one true love.”

9. The Gunslinger, by John Hlavin “When a Texas Ranger is horrifically tortured and killed, his sharp-shooter older brother, Sam Lee Hensley, plots revenge against the mysterious, sadistic leader of a notorious drug cartel. Sam Lee’s quest for vengeance will cost him seven years in prison, his right hand and one eye. It will imperil his young nephew and wreak havoc on the lives of those who love him. And it will not bring him peace.”

10. (tie) By Way of Helena, by Matt Cook “Set in the south at the turn of the century, Texas Ranger David Kingston and his Mexican bride are sent down to the mysterious town of Helena to investigate the multiple Mexican bodies washing up in the river. What they discover is an idyllic-like town where everything is not as it seems.”

10. (tie) The Days Before, by Chad St. John “A man from the future keeps hopping one successive day into the past desperate to stop a vicious race of time-traveling aliens from wiping out humanity.”

Source: http://blcklst.com/tbl/list/