Franklin Leonard speaks at the fourth Chinese Movie Scriptwriters' Seminar in Beijing. [Photo provided to China Daily]

After a long-haul flight from New York, Franklin Leonard looked a bit tired. But his speech recalling the dramatic birth of The Black List, an influential survey about Hollywood's most popular but unproduced screenplays, quickly captured the attention of the Chinese audience.

As the founder of the list, Leonard was attending the fourth Chinese Movie Scriptwriters' Seminar, which was organized by Bianjubang, an online platform for scriptwriters, to discuss the key to distinguishing good stories on April 19.

The title of Leonard's speech was Without a Writer, There is Nothing.

But the Hollywood film executive's rapid rise to fame is an interesting story that could just as well be titled Without an Email, There is Nothing.

Growing up in Georgia in the southeastern United States and graduating from Harvard University, Leonard began his career as a celebrity agent's assistant in 2004. A year later, the then 27-year-old became a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company, Appian Way Productions.

A big part of his daily job was to read scores of novels, articles and scripts, which proved to be a time-consuming way of trying to identify works with real potential. Besides the usual working week, Leonard recalls having to take another 20 scripts home with him to read on weekends.

During one late night in 2005, the exhausted young man suddenly had an idea in the company's office, high above Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. He sent emails to nearly 100 film industry development executives, asking them to anonymously list their favorite yet-to-be produced screenplays of the year.

"Initially, it (the anonymous survey) was very selfish. I just wanted to make my job easier… There is a long history in Hollywood that people share information in order to do their jobs better, but email was comparatively new in 2005," says Leonardo during an interview with China Daily after the event.

Unexpectedly, he received a response to most of the emails, which he then made into a list, and then, again anonymously, shared with the people in the survey. A week later, he found the list was forwarded back to him dozens of times. And six months later, he received a call from an agent who tried to sell him a script by confiding in him a "personal secret".

"Listen, don't tell anyone I told you this, but I have it on very good authority that this script will be number one on next year's Black List," says the agent.

Leonard was dumbfounded. Before that, he had no plans to make another list.