Quilty, which makes a tool that uses AI to evaluate and score a screenplay to help determine its producibility, has landed its first partnership with a production company.
The company, launched in February by founders film producer Daniel Wood and lawyer-turned-producer Simon Horsman, has struck a multiyear “preferred-look” deal with Giovanni Entertainment, the production company behind the Maika Monroe-led “Vegas: A Love Story” and the Emilie Hirsch-led “In Tandem.” The deal will give Giovanni preferred access to five of the top screenplays on Quilty’s “Discovery Leaderboard,” a merit-based ranking users opt into with scripts that have earned high “Quilty Scores.” There are currently about a dozen scripts on the leaderboard, Wood said.
Those scores, out of 100, are the proprietary product of 12 different AI models analyzing a script on factors including story craft, market viability, culture and resonance and feasibility to help studios decide whether to greenlight a project. The average Quilty Score across genres is 62.4, with the majority of the platform’s paid-tier scripts ranking at the “development” level.
“This is truly democratization at work,” Horsman told Variety in a recent interview. “We’ve always said, maybe our first adopters are the people that don’t have all the relationships in the industry, they don’t know an agent, they don’t know a manager, they don’t even know how to call UTA and speak to a [literary] agent, but yet, here, a platform for limited costs, you can come in and be part of a system that you know will elevate or will surface your material.”
Quilty has not spoken to other companies yet about similar deals, Horsman added, as they want to use the Giovanni deal as a test run.
“We wanted to get the program up and running, frankly, to give Giovanni Entertainment a chance to see it working,” he said. “Once we start developing the network, what we want to do is try and bring people together to get stuff made… We want to build that community.”
Giovanni does “use the tool internally as well, from the submissions that they get from other people and the projects they’re working on,” Wood added.
“At Giovanni Entertainment, we’re building a slate grounded in strong storytelling and smart commercial instincts,” Giovanni James Guidotti, CEO of Giovanni Entertainment, said in a statement. “Quilty gives us a powerful lens to identify exceptional material early—before the rest of the market catches on. This partnership lets us move faster and with greater confidence on the projects that deserve to get made. We love the way Quilty is democratizing the business.”
Horsman has touted Quilty as a “360-degree platform” aimed at lowering the barrier of entry to the industry for aspiring screenwriters. Writers can pay $49.99 for an in-depth, AI-powered evaluation of their script.
The platform ran into some hiccups when TheWrap ran produced scripts for films such as “Christy,” “Barbie” and “Sinners,” leading to “Quilty Scores” varying wildly from their actual success. (“Christy,” a financial flop, earned the highest score, while the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Sinners” was derided as a “Tarantino wannabe.”) Wood told Variety the platform was not initially prepared to handle films already produced, though he said the company has since worked to improve the platform to rectify such disparities.
Quilty currently has more than 1,500 registered users and has seen more than 2,700 scripts uploaded to the platform, according to the company. Horsman and Wood’s relationship began after they sold price-comparison website PriceGrabber, which Wood co-founded and where Horsman served as general counsel, for $485 million to Experian in 2005. Horsman and Wood transitioned into entertainment as producers. Horsman went on to win an Emmy, a Tony and two Olivier Awards while raising over $350 million in entertainment financing, with credits include “Rob Peace,” “Magazine Dreams” and “Juliet, Naked.”
Pictured above: Quilty founders Simon Horsman (left) and Daniel Wood
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