Earlier this year, The Bay List held a Bay Area Screenwriters Salon at Mama Dog Studios in Oakland. Its purpose was to build a sense of community and encourage participation. By April 8, over a thousand hopefuls had submitted their work. The pool has now been whittled down to 30, with the final 10 to be announced in September. Rafael Casal—best known for his work on Blindspotting with Daveed Diggs—and his cohorts on the project will then announce the final list of screenplays that, ideally, will move into pre-production.
Casal formed The Bay List with Franklin Leonard, the founder of The Black List, which heralds the best unproduced screenplays making the rounds in Hollywood. The Black List also connects writers with established professionals in the film and television industries. Casal, who grew up in Berkeley and Oakland, wanted to start a similar list in the Bay Area.
Before Casal made some opening remarks at the screenwriting salon, he and I talked in a Mama Dog conference room. I asked him why he wanted to start The Bay List. “There’s a point where you get to in the filmmaking process where you have no tools to ask what’s next or what to do next,” he said. “I think what myself and the other partners involved in this are trying to do is to share some information and demystify what the folks who have gone out and paved their own way have learned.
“When I go to these events, I see myself over and over again trying to figure out how to make an idea work, how to get to the next level and how grateful I would have been if somebody had made it a little easier,” he added.
Many Bay Area filmmakers who’ve made it to the next level are participating in The Bay List. Boots Riley, Joe Talbot, W. Kamau Bell, Benjamin and Peter Bratt, and Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden are a few of the partners who are reading scripts and, if the stars line up for the right project, will take a hand in the development phase.
Right before the release of their movie Freaky Tales, which was filmed in Berkeley and Oakland, Fleck and Boden told me in an interview that Casal had reached out to them. “We didn’t know Rafael, but he reached out on Instagram and we were fans,” Fleck said. “As someone who grew up there, I would love to see more Bay Area stories told on screen. We wanted to be supportive of that.”
The Bay List has been a work-in-progress since 2023. Leonard had been working on a similar project in his native Georgia when Casal reached out to him. The Georgia List launch left a regionally specific model in place for the rest of the country. “We got on the horn that December [2023] and then we worked until October to lock in all the partners,” Casal said.
Submitting a screenplay for the inaugural Bay List required a few fairly broad stipulations for a writer, including: being born in the Bay Area, growing up here, living here full or part-time, or having lived in the Bay Area “for a significant period of time.”
Casal recalled that while touring the country as a musician and performer in his late teens, he ran into people from the Bay Area all over the world. “There’s a common denominator, a political allegiance, obviously. There’s an understanding of the cultural experience of growing up in the Bay, especially if you’re working class and went to public schools. So I just feel a deep kinship with people here,” he said.
In terms of cinematic storytelling and representation, Casal feels the Bay Area is an underdog in comparison with cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami. “All these cities have this very national and international identity,” he said. “I want to show what this place is like for me. First, it was in poetry. Then, music. Now it’s in film and television is how it’s evolved for me.”
Casal lives in Los Angeles, but he often runs into people who have ties to his hometown. “Somebody will come up to me and say, ‘You don’t know me, but my best friend’s cousin was in your writing workshop four years ago.’ There’s this interconnectedness that I can’t let go of and a sense of responsibility there.”
The final 10 Bay List writers will be notified in September. thebaylist.org
IG: @thebaylist
[Editor’s note: this story’s opening paragraph has been updated per The Bay List on 8/19.]
