FRANKLIN LEONARD: I do love — well, look, the coincidence of the Black List having a lot of biopics and me loving biopics, that is just a coincidence. I should clarify. It's not like I'm like, "Oh, that biopic is dope. Let me put it on there." No, I do love biopics.

One of the things that I wanted to do when I came to Hollywood, the sort of fantasy dream, there was a triptych of biopics of the African diaspora that I wanted to do. I wanted to the Mandela biopic, the Marley biopic, and the Paul Robeson biopic. And they made a bunch of Mandela biopics in the wake of his untimely passing, but there still hasn't been a Robeson biopic and there still hasn't been a Marley biopic. Those are two stories that I'd love to see.

I'd also love to see Fannie Lou Hamer biopic. I don't think we've seen enough about the role of black women in the Civil Rights Movement, just as a matter of black women played a big role in the Civil Rights Movement, and we haven't seen that story told. And I think hers is particularly special.

I mean, I just want to see good stuff. That's the other thing. I could tell you the things that I want to see, and it's easy for me to come up with those biopic stories cause I feel like those are stories that I know, that I think would have a positive impact on the way people see the world, the way people see black people, whatever.

But for me, more than — I couldn't've told you that I wished that Barry Jenkins would make a movie about a young gay black man in Miami, crack-infested Miami in the '80s. Not — literally in a million years, if I had just made a list of ideas, that never would've come up. But that movie was brilliant.

So I think for me, it's less about, "These are the movies I want to see," and more about, "These are the points-of-view or people who I want to have the creative license to tell the stories that they want to tell." And so for me, I want to see more films from Muslim women who live in the Muslim world. I want to see more films from the LGBTQIA community. I want to see more films from the Latino immigrant community. I want to see more films from the refugee community. I want to see more films from poor white rural communities.

The End of Gatekeepers

It is easy to see the downsides of the destruction of gatekeepers; in 2016, before the election, I explained how the collapse of media gatekeepers meant the collapse of political gatekeepers. From The Voters Decide:

There is no one dominant force when it comes to the dispersal of political information, and that includes the parties described in the previous section. Remember, in a Facebook world, information suppliers are modularized and commoditized as most people get their news from their feed. This has two implications:

All news sources are competing on an equal footing; those controlled or bought by a party are not inherently privileged

The likelihood any particular message will “break out” is based not on who is propagating said message but on how many users are receptive to hearing it. The power has shifted from the supply side to the demand side

This is a big problem for the parties as described in The Party Decides. Remember, in Noel and company’s description party actors care more about their policy preferences than they do voter preferences, but in an aggregated world it is voters aka users who decide which issues get traction and which don’t. And, by extension, the most successful politicians in an aggregated world are not those who serve the party but rather those who tell voters what they most want to hear.

I can imagine there are many that long for the days when the media — and by extension the parties — could effectively determine presidential nominees. The Weinstein case, though, is a reminder of just how rotten gatekeepers can be. Their very structure is ripe for abuse by those in power, and suppression of those wishing to break through; consumers, meanwhile, are taken for granted.

For my part, I’m thankful such structures are increasingly untenable: perhaps the New York Times didn’t spike that 2004 story because of pressure from Weinstein, but there’s no doubt that for decades “All the News That’s Fit to Print” was shamefully deficient in reporting about news and groups that weren’t on the radar of New York newspaper editors. And, selfishly, I wouldn’t have the career I do without the absence of gatekeepers: anyone can set up a website and send an email and instantly compete with the New York Times and everyone else for attention and subscription dollars.

Most importantly, though, the end of gatekeepers is inevitable: the Internet provides abundance, not scarcity, and power flows from discovery, not distribution.

Very Interesting!! https:// stratechery.com/2017/goodbye-gatekeepers/