Quilty, which develops tools that use AI to evaluate and score screenplays to determine their producibility, has entered into its first partnership with a production company.
The company, founded in February by founding film producer Daniel Wood and lawyer-turned-producer Simon Horseman, has signed a multi-year “Preferred Look” deal with Giovanni Entertainment, the production company behind “Vegas: A Love Story” starring Maika Monroe and “In Tandem” starring Emily Hirsch. The deal gives Giovanni priority access to the top five scripts on Quilty’s “Discovery Leaderboard,” a merit-based ranking where users opt in to scripts with high “Quilty scores.” There are currently about a dozen scripts on the leaderboard, Wood said.
These scores are out of 100 and are the unique product of 12 different AI models that analyze scripts for factors such as story craft, market viability, cultural resonance, and feasibility, helping 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 ranked at the “Development” level.
“This is really democratizing,” Horsman told Variety in a recent interview. “We’ve always said, our first hires are probably people who don’t have all the relationships in the industry, don’t know agents, don’t know managers, don’t even know how to call UTA and talk to a (literary) agent. But here, on a platform with limited cost, you can come in and be part of a system that we know will elevate your material or bring it to the surface.”
Horsman added that Quilty has not yet discussed similar deals with other companies because it wants to use the deal with Giovanni as a pilot.
“Frankly, we wanted to get the program up and running and give Giovanni Entertainment a chance to see it work,” he said. “Once we start developing the network, what we want to do is bring people together and have them build something…We want to build that community.”
Giovanni “also uses this tool internally, whether it’s suggestions we receive from others or projects we’re working on,” Wood added.
“At Giovanni Entertainment, we are building a foundation on 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 great materials early, before other markets catch on. This partnership allows us to move forward with production-worthy projects faster and with more confidence. We love the way Quilty is democratizing business.”
Horsman touted Quilty as a “360-degree platform” aimed at lowering the barrier to entry into the industry for aspiring screenwriters. Writers can pay $49.99 to receive a detailed AI-powered evaluation of their scripts.
When TheWrap produced scripts for films like “Christie,” “Barbie” and “The Sinners,” the platform ran into some problems that led to “Kilty Score” being far different from its actual success. (The box office flop “Christie” received the top score, but the script for the Oscar-winning “Sinners” was derided as a “Tarantino wannabe.”) Wood told Variety that the platform was initially not prepared to handle already-produced films, but the company has since worked to improve the platform to correct such disparities.
According to the company, Quilty currently has over 1,500 registered users and has seen over 2,700 scripts uploaded to the platform. Horseman and Wood’s relationship began after Wood sold price-comparison site Price Grabber, which Wood co-founded and Horsman served as general counsel, to Experian in 2005 for $485 million. Horseman and Wood moved into the entertainment industry as producers. Horseman won an Emmy, a Tony and two Olivier Awards while amassing more than $350 million in entertainment funding with credits including “Rob Peace,” “Magazine Dreams” and “Juliet, Naked.”
Pictured above: Quilty founders Simon Horsman (left) and Daniel Wood.
