Inside The Gauntlet: What Really Happened When I Entered the $380 “Non-Competition”

The Guantlet (Yes, It's the One With Shane Black)

Why? Honestly, the names on the header. Don Bohlinger. Jim Herzfeld, Shane Black. Seriously, The Nice Guys is a top ten movie for the 21st century. People whose work as screenwriters, and whose commitment to the community of writers, I took seriously. This is an industry where endorsements matter. For The Gauntlet, people whom I respected were endorsing the platform. I was curious about what system they had built and how it might be useful to the filmmaking community at large.

Also, let’s be honest, if it were terrible, I could still get an article out of it. If you haven’t read it, I entered a $300 contest a long, long time ago with Thunder Studios that turned into a total trainwreck, and that article did okay. So, I’ve done this before, and anything for content, baby.

The first thing to really understand about The Gauntlet is that it is very, very much not a contest. There are no “winners.” It’s not run on an annual cycle where, on the same day once a year, they are going to announce their picks that are never heard from again.

A Better Way to Develop

It’s hard to find the precise term for what it is, but I think of it right now as a development funnel. An open platform for submitting work where you get actionable feedback on preparing it for industry submission.

The process is scaffolded: you send in your script, and the first 20 pages are read by several experienced readers. Currently, for Round 1, it’s seven readers. If that is rejected, you can revise and submit based on their feedback.

Once you make it through that step, you go to Round 2, where the full project is read by five more readers who are different from the original batch of seven. If they give you the go-ahead, you get sent on to the Final Round, where five more read the script. At this point, you've gotten feedback from 17 readers.

Late Breaking Inciting Incidents

That experience was frankly pretty impressive. The script I submitted was one I workshopped in a writers group for more than a year. Jason had read it and said, “This seems ready to go.” I had gotten it to a place where I was very comfortable sharing it publicly.

And yet it got rejected round one, because the inciting incident was too late. I knew it was late, but I had convinced myself that it worked, I had a solid subplot and momentum, and it would play. The inciting incident of The Apartment is on page 27, after all. I teach a class in narrative structure! This was fine, I thought.

But I was rejected round one since we didn’t kick off the story in their page count; they only read the first 20 pages. And you know what? They are right. I was a script reader way back in the year 2001 for Creative Artists and Appian Way, and I would’ve flagged this script for a late inciting incident. Jason and my writers group were too nice to really hold me to it, and I had convinced myself it was okay, but seven readers gave feedback on the opening 20, and while they all clearly “got” the script, it was universal: the inciting incident is happening too late. “Move it up,” they all said, if you want this script to function within the system of getting read in Hollywood.

Not Everyone Will Agree

Which I did, and then I went from there to Round 2 and on to Round 3, and I have to say, I had a truly fascinating experience the entire time. At the end of The Gauntlet, you get a copy of your script with the readers' notes included. Sometimes it was just emojis, a smiley for a funny line, a question mark for a lack of clarity.

That alone was worth the price of entry. I always say you don’t know your move until you’ve watched it with a crowded theater audience and you feel the energy, feel the laughs, look around, and clock the posture. This was like that, but for a script. The readers don’t see each other's notes and emojis, but when a laugh line lands and you look up to see 15 notes all with a laughing face, it feels like “yep, that worked.”

The whole process was a great reminder that there is no work of art that has unanimous agreement in an audience. Getting notes from 17 people really helped the outliers stand out. There was a reader, whose name I will never know, who had a real handle on the characters and amazing notes, but also thought it should be non-linear.

We’ve all dealt with that producer or client who has a very big idea for your project, and we learn to ignore it. But it’s way easier to ignore it when 16 of your readers appreciate your structure and the tension you’ve built, and just one reader is saying, “make it non-linear.” Some people just have different opinions. But if I had submitted to an agency, I might’ve gotten that reader as the only human reading my script. It was amazing getting the notes from so many people.

Getting the Scripts Out There

The notes were overall exceptional. Moments I hadn’t taken as far as I could’ve. Moments to clarify. Moments to compress. A great idea on how to take the “all is lost” moment just a little bit further to really make the climax land. They were clearly written by experienced people with a real dedication to story. My project, which I had workshopped for a year with a writers group with working filmmakers and repped writers in it, is another generation better after going through The Gauntlet.

After the Final Round, if you get enough support, your script is sent around to all the readers for endorsements. If you get enough of those, you become a script they call “Gauntlet Endorsed” and promote to the industry. And they take that promotion seriously. They had a massive party in the house Shane Black famously wrote into existence with his screenplays. I bought a T-shirt canon for it (so technically I’m in for about $800 right now). They are sending the scripts around. One of the founders ran literary at a major agency for a long time and knows how the world works and is doing the legwork to get the first batch of scripts out there.

They are doing that with an endorsements page that is available to the industry, or that you can share with your contacts. This is a website link, but it’s not just your script; it includes specific positive endorsements from experienced people about your project. Because endorsements are the engine Hollywood runs on, I took a run at the Gauntlet because of the endorsements it had. Now, hopefully, agents, managers, producers, and executives will take a chance on reading your script (or getting their assistant to read it) on those same endorsements. So, you can see what that looks like, here is mine (with my script removed).

The Future

What’s the future for them from here? I don’t have any inside knowledge, but considering the value for money, right now feels a bit like when Uber was really cheap and you knew it wasn’t going to last. For what they offer (17 experienced screenwriters with real credits gave the script deep reads!), $380 is a steal. There is one world where they raise their price, and I don’t know enough about marketing to know how that would do, but honestly, even if they did, I think it’s a strong value for money.

From there, I don’t know, I suppose there is another world where they take a percentage ownership of a project they develop. Or perhaps they become an outsourced development agency. Studios are slimming down and outsourcing all sorts of things. I could imagine ScriptHop contracting with a studio or streamer to develop material for them.

There might also be another world where the tools become the product. I’ve been in a writers group for years and am a big believer in them; I could imagine a world where my writers group pays to subscribe to the collaborative feedback tool. When Frame.io first launched, it was hard to imagine how big that market was, but it was huge, and the company eventually sold for more than a billion. The toolset they’ve launched is legitimately something useful, and it might be very useful at the television writing level or the education level. I could see a partnership with something like Scriptation paying off well.

Conclusion

Their first batch of scripts is hitting Hollywood right now, so time will tell how those scripts will do. Will the writers get repped? Will movies get made? Who knows. My script is in the first batch, so maybe I’ll get another article out of writing up how it goes in a year. As of right now, I’m cautiously optimistic. If nothing else, I had a fantastic creative experience taking a project I was already very excited about and bringing it to a whole new level.

If you are considering submitting yourself, I think that for a Hollywood-ready script that you have already put a lot of work into, this could be a fantastic next step. Just make sure you’ve got an inciting incident in those first 20 pages.

I have an interview coming up with the founders of The Gauntlet. Be on the lookout for that soon.