As Hollywood agencies and production companies increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to evaluate screenplays, a group of writers and creatives have come together to design a so-called barrier against the incursion.
Shane Black (“Iron Man 3”), Jim Herzfeld (“Meet the Parents”) and Akela Cooper (“M3GAN”) are among two dozen industryites who collaborated on the development of a new tech platform, dubbed the Gauntlet, in an effort to keep humans assessing screenplays at the gate-keeper stage rather than AI.
ScriptHop, a Hollywood tech company founded by former UTA story department head Scott Foster and tech entrepreneur Brian Austin, is launching the Gauntlet Tuesday with 30 freelance script analysts from such high-profile companies as HBO and Lucasfilm, becoming the largest organized group of professional readers in the industry.
ScriptHop advisory board member and screenwriter Herzfeld came up with the idea that sees screenwriters pay a $380 fee to run their script through a “gauntlet” of professional story analysts. Each script starts with at least seven readers to ensure that its journey doesn’t end because of one person’s opinion or taste. Scripts doing well ascend to the next level and garner more readers. David Hayter (“X-Men”), Dana Stevens (“The Woman King”) and Jim Uhls (“Fight Club”) were among the writers who helped design the platform that gives screenwriters direct access to Hollywood decision-makers to vet and potentially shop their screenplays.
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The Gauntlet readers simultaneously work for well-known agencies, studios and production companies while freelancing for ScriptHop. The system organizes and tasks these individuals to read some or all of a script, depending on what level the script has reached inside the Gauntlet.
One common complaint from screenwriters is that their work is at the mercy of siloed decision-making, and a promising career can be derailed by one review — often from an intern, unqualified reader and increasingly an algorithm. By contrast, the Gauntlet ensures that each project receives a consensus of professional opinion comprised entirely of humans.
“AI is coming in to do a writer’s job, and all these story departments are diminishing in the industry,” Austin tells Variety. “We want some human expertise here picking projects versus a machine making the assessment that honestly is just probably pulling in certain box-office numbers and finding certain tags and keywords that are similar to something that performed. This provides a barrier to that trend.”
Scripts that make it through all three levels qualify for a certification that includes signed endorsements by the analysts who choose to champion the script. Austin says transparency is key. Writers who submit their scripts with the Gauntlet know who the pool of readers are, which is why the names, photos and biographies of everyone involved in assessing a given script can be found on the website.
Additionally, scripts that perform well in the Gauntlet will be searchable by a database offered to agencies, studios and production companies and promoted via a subscription service called “The Gauntlet Weekend Read.”
“The Gauntlet counters a troubling emergence of AI’s incursion into script reading,” says Herzfeld. “It aims to keep people and humanity in the mix by enlisting highly experienced teams of film industry readers to separate the wheat from the chaff. It then provides the best screenplays a legitimate and viable path to a greenlight.”
