Rafael Casal's inaugural Bay List summit put eleven local filmmakers on a chartered bus through Pixar in Emeryville and Lucasfilm, Dolby and SAG in San Francisco — a two-day crash course built to keep Bay Area storytelling from decamping to Los Angeles.

The itinerary reads like a map of everything the Bay Area built and then watched drift south: Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, then Lucasfilm, the Dolby labs and the local Screen Actors Guild field office over on the San Francisco side. Earlier this month a chartered bus carried eleven local filmmakers between those corners over two days, stopping at each to hear working veterans talk through budgets, scripts, casting and postproduction — the practical machinery most of them had never had walked through before. The account comes from the San Francisco Chronicle, as relayed by the neighborhood news site Hoodline.

The event was the inaugural run of Bay List, a project the Berkeley-raised actor and filmmaker Rafael Casal conceived and, this month, personally shepherded from stop to stop. Casal told the Chronicle he spent about two years organizing it and does not know when — or whether — a second one will follow.

The whole premise is about place. Casal built Bay List with Franklin Leonard, who founded the Hollywood screenwriting index The Black List, borrowing the template from a regional edition Leonard had already run in his native Georgia, the East Bay Express reported (external source, opens in a new tab) in a profile last summer. Casal grew up in Berkeley and Oakland and now lives in Los Angeles — the exact migration the summit is trying to slow. "I want to show what this place is like for me," he told the paper. "First, it was in poetry. Then, music. Now it's in film and television."

The pipeline that fed this month's bus tour started as paperwork. Bay List opened on the Black List's site in October 2024 and pulled in more than 1,000 feature and pilot submissions from writers with Bay Area ties inside of six months, Deadline reported (external source, opens in a new tab) when the finalists were named in October 2025. Dolby covered evaluation fees for the first 150 eligible entries. The field narrowed at in-person salons — one at Mama Dog Studios in Oakland, another at Ciel Creative Space — each drawing more than 200 people, before ten projects from eleven filmmakers were chosen alongside a bench of collaborators that included Daveed Diggs, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, Boots Riley's Cinemama, W. Kamau Bell's Who Knows Best Productions, Tom Hanks' Playtone and Stephen Curry's Unanimous Media.

The chosen work stays close to the ground it came from. Reinhard Cate's script "Terp" is a thriller set across an interview table, where a federal asylum officer starts to doubt the account of the former Afghan interpreter seated in front of him; Cate told the Chronicle the summit pushed him toward films that could actually get made and land in the Bay. Kausar Mohammed, raised in San Jose, wrote the series project "Exorsisters," a story of sisters saddled with an inherited and unwanted family duty — casting out demons for their community — and hopes to shoot it in the South Bay. "The Ghost Wedding," from Sining Xiang and Patrick Boyd, unfolds in 1980s San Francisco, per Deadline's project list.

What someone walking past Emeryville's studio blocks tomorrow would not notice is that the bus already came and went. The summit was invitation-only, done in two days, with no public date and nothing yet on the calendar to repeat it. What it leaves behind is the question the route itself keeps asking: whether the corners that made Pixar and Lucasfilm can hold the next set of names, or whether those names end up on a callsheet shot somewhere else.