The Black List is ready to make a reservation.
The screenwriter-focused organization, which has been publishing its annual list of unproduced screenplays since 2008, and Autograph Collection hotels are forming a unique partnership that will kick off January 2017 at the Sundance Film Festival.
Hotel Park City, an Autograph property, will host a social space at the Utah-based festival with writer-focused programming.
“Sundance is arguably the reason why I wanted to work in this industry,” said Black List founder Franklin Leonard, who served on the jury for the 2016 iteration of the festival. “To be able to have a space at Sundance for writers — I am just incredibly excited.”
“We try to shine a light on independent, boutique hotels and I felt like, in that way, the values of the Black List were so in line with that of Autograph,” said Amanda Altree, senior director of brand marketing for Autograph. “It takes a wonderful script to be a wonderful movie and it’s the same thing with hotels — it takes a visionary to bring a hotel to life.”
This partnership is a part of Autograph’s larger Independent Film Initiative, which includes an Independent Film Channel that will be available to hotel guests, and will be curated by the indie distributor FilmBuff from its 1,500 titles.
Autograph says it will utilize its advantageously placed properties for more of the 2017 film festivals, including its Venice, Berlin and London locations. Leonard and Altree are currently in England at the BFI London Film Festival, working out the details of their Sundance kickoff.
Beyond Park City, the boutique hotel chain will sponsor the event series Black List Live! and Black List Table Reads, where Black List scripts are brought to life onstage by talent that has included John Cho, Jessica Alba and Don Cheadle. The Black List Screenwriter Lab — the weeklong intensive workshops — and the Black List Happy Hours will be hosted at the hotel’s properties.
“I think of growth in terms of our ability to be supportive of writers who are doing great work,” explained Leonard “With Autograph, we will be able to have a great global reach, across borders, finding stories wherever they exist.”
Helping with that global reach will be the hotel chain’s writer residency program — labeled Autograph Collection Hotel Residencies — that will allow five writers from the 2016 annual Black List the opportunity to research and write out of a hotel of their choosing over the course of 2017.
Of the program, Leonard said: “We will have the ability to offer writers to travel around the world to write their next, great scripts.”
