In the fast-paced world of Hollywood, thousands of scripts from aspiring and established screenwriters vie for attention each year. Development departments are tasked with considering, recommending or passing on scripts—however, the vast majority of them are overlooked, with many not even receiving a first pass due to the sheer volume of submissions. One screenwriter is leveraging artificial intelligence to revolutionize how scripts are read and evaluated, potentially leveling the playing field for aspiring writers and creating new opportunities for studios.
Ben Christopher, a screenwriter who has penned a number of award-winning action scripts, founded Speed Read AI with a bold vision: to create an AI system capable of understanding the full depth and breadth of a screenplay.
The startup reflects his journey from screenwriter to developer, which was born out of necessity as he honed his coding skills while trying to break into Hollywood.
At the dawn of AI, Christopher’s unique combination of deep industry knowledge and surprising technical abilities led him to a question.
“Over 95% of scripts in Hollywood never make it to a development executive’s desk because the volume is just too high to wade through. I wanted to increase opportunities for screenwriters and studios by making an AI that really understands full screenplays and books. It needed to understand the plot, the structure, the character, themes, the pacing, as well as a human reader could,” Christopher recalls.
At the heart of Speed Read AI’s innovation is a sophisticated AI system designed to revolutionize script coverage—a crucial process in Hollywood where detailed summaries of screenplays are created to aid in decision-making, development, casting and more. The product has now expanded to offer a workspace to manage screenplays, books and other types of manuscripts.
Christopher envisioned something far beyond the scope of current AI tools, most of which can only perform static summarization. He wanted to create AI that could fully grasp the nuances of stories, then dynamically respond to specific queries. “With the newest version we’re working on, you can ask it questions about any script it’s ever read, and it can tell you, ‘This is kind of like that sequence from a script you uploaded a month ago, but with a stronger female lead,’” Christopher notes. 
It can also offer insights beyond the artistic scope, for example: target budget or locations for filming. This advanced tool is poised to significantly streamline the script evaluation process, potentially transforming how Hollywood discovers and develops new content using trustworthy AI.
Speed Read AI’s motivations extend beyond its very real urges to craft tools in its image. The company believes it can make the entertainment industry fairer. As Christopher explains, “If you can build a fair and unbiased machine, an open-minded machine, it’s going to give every script a fair shot. I think there are a lot of opportunities for material that would have fallen through the cracks to now have a chance to shine.”
In the development process, the team yearned for more control, more freedom to innovate up and down the stack, tweaking any knobs available. That’s when Dell and NVIDIA technologies entered the picture, marking a pivotal shift in Speed Read AI’s journey.
As Christopher explains, “With Dell’s Precision 5860 Tower workstations powered by two NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs, we now have tools that allow us to experiment freely, to try and retry ideas, and to build things up in a way that wasn’t possible before.”
The newfound freedom led to rapid advancements. “One of the features that I’m working on right now is the ability for it to write better loglines—the one—sentence description of a screenplay. You think that’s easy, but it’s not.”
The transition from calling an API to getting hands-on with models can be daunting, but for Speed Read AI, it was a game-changer. Now it’s exploring ideas that once seemed like science fiction and some that still do. “AI is going to change the entertainment industry, 100%,” Christopher says. “We’re building things right now that people are still just dreaming about.”
The results speak for themselves. Users of Speed Read AI’s technology report significant time savings and increased efficiency. Aaron Bilgrad, Christopher’s gregarious head of Business Development, shares feedback from a customer: “What used to take us eight hours of work can now be done in about five minutes.” This positive feedback fuels the team’s drive to keep pushing boundaries. “The people we’re working with in the studios, production companies, literary managers, agencies—they’re all blown away by how much better this product is making their lives. It’s saving them so much time. It doesn’t replace creativity, it just expedites it.”
For AI developers using API services watching this unfold, the message is clear: the future of AI isn’t just about convenience and efficiency. It’s about creativity. It’s about building upon open-source technology to enable things like telling better stories, uncovering hidden talents, and helping make industries fairer. With AI-powered tools at your desk, new breakthroughs are brought within reach. And with the right collaborators, the impossible becomes probable.
Learn more about Speed Read AI and learn how Dell’s AI-ready workstations can accelerate your AI adoption.
