Hollywood Script Reader

Except I cribbed it directly from SPEED-THE-PLOW

I'm not sure when we decided it was okay to say "ex cetera" but as an unofficial officer of the Grammar Police I would like to make a citizen's arrest

Can’t handle the rollercoaster of the stock market’s ups and downs? Invest in independent film! Your whole investment vanishes immediately, then 3-5 years later, when you’ve given up entirely, a small percentage of it comes back (hopefully) AND you’ve helped put a movie out in the world (hopefully).

Asked ChatGPT to write me a screenplay in the style of David Mamet and this is what it came back with: "You fool — your fucken’ sissy film — you squat to pee. You old woman . . .all of my life I’ve been eating your shit and taking your leavings. Fuck you." It has an agent now

Clearly we're moving in the wrong direction but it's sad that other countries – Canada, UK, Australia, etc. – actually support their film industry and the U.S. does not

So many people I know still aren't working. There used to be good middle class jobs in the industry – and those jobs helped drive the economy from restaurants to retail. It’s like this city is being hollowed out from the inside

Someone has to explain to me why L.A. can’t offer the same tax incentives as Atlanta and New Orleans – and I hear some of those productions are moving to Bulgaria and elsewhere. Local shoots are at an all-time low barring COVID and the strikes...

If AI is trained on things that have already been written, does that mean the best it can do is write something average or mediocre? Is it capable of writing anything novel or original even if you tell it to “write something novel or original”?

The problem with Netflix is that they cancel shows without giving them time to catch on. A lot of people only started watching SEVERANCE S1 after S2 came out because of all the buzz and positive word of mouth. If Netflix had this show not sure if they would have renewed it

Apple Is Losing Over $1 Billion per Year on Streaming Service, Has 45 Million Apple TV+ Subscribers (Report) Apple TV+ is reportedly losing more than $1 billion per year as the company is spending $4.5 billion on content annually.

Last night during the SEVERANCE finale I was wondering to myself: how is Apple making money on all these high-production value shows without commercials and a lower subscription cost than all the other streaming platforms?Answer: they aren't

But we’re gonna get a Season 3, right? #severance

That's because it's not trying to communicate anything to you. It's just using predictive text – albeit at a very high level – to identify the next most likely word in a pattern or sequence

I think you can use AI as a sort of automated writing partner to bounce ideas off of or get a fresh perspective as long as long as you're the one doing the actual work

It's its own skill to turn off that part of your brain and plow straight ahead without the inner critic telling you you're doing it wrong

Say what?! Next thing you'll tell me is that we're all supposed to pronounce my favorite cocktail MOW-hi-TOE

Who’s willing to admit they like watching movies at home more than going to the theater? I’m not talking about costs or the hassle of leaving the house. As a film snob I know you’re not supposed to say that, but I must confess something shameful to you right now: I watched the first Dune on an iPad

Pointless too. If you think an AI can write better than you can, maybe find another hobby – one that you actually enjoy doing

Some of the coverage sites might be using AI but if that's the case, what are you really getting for your money? Seems like just another grift

I will say that jump scares are even more lame on the page than the screen. The big font thing is not cutting it

Is an AI more likely to give good coverage to a script written by a fellow AI or a human? What do you think?

I’m pretty good at sniffing out when something is written by an AI. The writing is dry or dull. It lacks soul. There’s no "there" there. These scripts will probably never get to me. Or at least I hope not. But that raises another rather troubling question:

Here’s another problem. People are already using AI to write their scripts as well. Maybe not the pros, but amateurs and hopefuls for sure. Which only makes the pool of scripts bigger than it already is and makes it harder for writers to cut through the noise.

So what can we do about it? Unions like the WGA have already tried to litigate this in their last contract and will continue to do so. But my feeling is that if people wanna use it, they will and there’s no good way of stopping them. Once the cat’s out of the bag and all that.

Writers will start trying to game the system, not by writing the best scripts they can but trying to optimize for the AI, which will have worse outcomes for everyone, including the audience, most of whom don’t care how the sausage is made to begin with.

It would be very easy, for instance, to upload the Blake Snyder beat sheet and go by how closely it fits that model. Regardless of how you personally feel about Save the Cat I think we can all agree that would be very, very bad.

Maybe there’s a way to simulate that kind of emotion, but it seems a long way off. So without that an LLM like ChatGPT will have to look at other metrics – like story structure for instance.

One advantage I have as a human being is that I’m reading scripts by humans, for humans. I’m a pretty good judge of what will make people laugh or cry, what will scare them and keep them on the edge of their seats. Because I have those feelings too.

There will be some pushback from the execs, agents, and managers and who knows if they’ll win that fight. Here’s why this matters to you, dear screenwriter. You do NOT want an AI reading your script.

Of course it’s getting better but I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point where we can trust it 100%. In any case, the bean counters are going to try to get rid of us at some point because that’s what they do.

It can “read” a script and spit out a summary a lot faster than I can. It’s still not very accurate. Gets some of the plot points wrong or hallucinates scenes that didn’t happen.