But then I got an email from a guy over the weekend who told me that many agencies and management companies, along with producers, are using Claude AI to do coverage, and not Gemini, because they feel it’s superior. <\/p>\n
After emailing back and forth with the guy and some friends, I’m not convinced that they’re “all” doing it. <\/p>\n
I figured we should use it to test the same script I did previously to see what we can get. <\/p>\n
Let’s dive in. <\/p>\n
Claude Screenplay Coverage<\/p>\n
I spent all Sunday trying to learn about Claude and how people use it to cowork. It was a bit of a learning process that had a ton of trial and error. <\/p>\n
I am still not used to talking to machines, and I’m not sure they like me either. <\/p>\n
After looking all over for people using AI coverage from Claude, I decided to just go to the source and ask Claude itself to build me a prompt that a writer could use for professional screenplay coverage. <\/p>\n
This is what it came up with and what we’ll be testing. <\/p>\n
The Coverage Prompt: “Please write professional screenplay coverage for the script I’m sharing. Format it with the following sections: With any kind of AI, you have to kind of treat it like you’re wishing on a genie, and you have to fill in the holes so it does not hallucinate a request. <\/p>\n You always want to specify the reader’s perspective. Adding something like “read this as if you’re covering it for a mid-budget indie drama slate” or “for a streaming platform focused on genre content” will calibrate the commercial lens for the AI.<\/p>\n Ask for a recommendation vs. a pass justification. <\/p>\n Claude sometimes hedges. Adding “justify your overall grade with at least two specific reasons” keeps it accountable.<\/p>\n If you want harsher notes, add “Don’t soften the criticism.” If you want it more like a supportive script consultant than a cold reader, say so.<\/p>\n Again, I think this is what makes this a bad format to use, since just a few changes in words could drastically affect how this AI reads and rates your script. <\/p>\n The key difference between generic feedback and real coverage is in the final ‘Recommendation’ section, where Claude needs help to commit to a clear point of view in order to make a real call. <\/p>\n Claude Screenplay Coverage Example\u00a0<\/p>\n Okay, as we did on the other test, we ran my script, The Cure For Male Loneliness, through the Claude AI. <\/p>\n I will say, it took around four minutes to get this coverage generated, which is fast, but not immediate like we’ve seen other AI programs do. Also, I did all this with free Claude; I didn’t pay to upgrade. <\/p>\n Below is the unedited coverage. <\/p>\n ‘The Cure for Male Loneliness’ Coverage <\/p>\n Title: The Cure for Male Loneliness<\/p>\n Author: Jason Hellerman<\/p>\n Genre: Crime Thriller \/ Character Drama<\/p>\n Pages:104<\/p>\n Setting: Small Pennsylvania town; storage lockers, woods, a local bar, FBI offices<\/p>\n Period: Contemporary<\/p>\n LOGLINE<\/p>\n When a Purple Heart Marine vet\u2019s plan to assassinate the tech billionaire whose faulty body armor got his entire unit killed in Fallujah draws the attention of the FBI, the undercover agent assigned to radicalize him into committing a bigger crime finds himself unable to betray the first real friendship\u2014and the first reason to live\u2014he\u2019s had in years.<\/p>\n SYNOPSIS<\/p>\n JOE MALONE (40s), a Purple Heart Marine vet carrying the full weight of a war the country has already forgotten, is caring for his cancer-stricken mother CATHY while working construction in a small Pennsylvania town being consumed by tech billionaire ETHAN AVEDON\u2014whose company manufactured the faulty body armor that killed Joe\u2019s entire unit in Fallujah. Joe\u2019s grief has calcified into a plan: acquire a rifle, train to shoot, and be ready when Avedon arrives to dedicate the new hospital bearing his name. Enrolled in an \u201cAlpha Male Excursion Weekend,\u201d Joe meets BRETT JONES (50s)\u2014a gruff, lonely widower whose skill in the woods matches his own and whose disarming \u201cwould you rather\u201d parlor games peel back Joe\u2019s reserve layer by layer. Brett is, of course, an FBI agent running a radicalization sting. His surveillance team\u2014rising agent TROY, politically hungry MACK, and bureaucratic supervisor GARRETT\u2014watches from a distance as Brett makes rapid progress: sniper training commences, photos of Avedon paper the storage locker walls, and the case appears to be building toward a clean arrest.<\/p>\n But Brett\u2019s professional distance collapses under the weight of what he discovers. A Reddit article surfaces documented evidence that Avedon\u2019s company sold defective body armor and buried the subsequent cover-up\u2014Joe\u2019s grievance is not a radicalized delusion but the legitimate wound of a man the system betrayed and then discarded. Meanwhile, Joe is quietly pulling back from the edge on his own: he falls for LIV (40s), the warm and perceptive bar owner whose trauma support group becomes his first real community since the war; he finds a second family in his construction crew; he frames his Avedon obsession to Liv as something he might simply hand to Terri Gross at NPR. Then Avedon\u2019s encroachments deliver a fresh and devastating provocation\u2014the new Avedon Health Care Center is revealed as concierge-only medicine, displacing Cathy\u2019s oncologist and ending any realistic hope of treatment. Joe\u2019s resolve re-ignites. Brett, ordered by Garrett to push Joe toward building a bomb (the headline arrest Garrett\u2019s career requires), tries to stand down and is threatened with termination. A farcical staged police encounter using Garrett as an unwilling decoy backfires when Joe, rattled and desperate, agrees to build the bomb after losing his rifle. A letter Joe mails to NPR reads in the FBI conference room like a manifesto.<\/p>\n With a largely inert bomb loaded in a van and Avedon\u2019s speech a day away, Brett delivers the vehicle to Joe\u2019s house. What follows is one of the most quietly devastating sequences in recent spec memory: a final evening with Cathy, Liv, and Danny in which Brett arrives with a six-pack and a pizza guy who is secretly an agent, and in which Cathy\u2014frail, funny, and fully clear-eyed\u2014takes Brett\u2019s hand in the small hours and extracts a promise that Joe will be okay. Brett gives his word. When the FBI converges at dawn, Brett draws his own gun and tries to arrest Joe himself, determined to control a process he no longer trusts Garrett to conduct humanely. The arrest disintegrates: Garrett shoots Joe in the shoulder; Liv hurls a lamp and sends Garrett\u2019s gun skidding; Joe escapes in the van with Cathy\u2019s body. At the hospital dedication, the bullet-riddled van rolls to a halt beside Avedon\u2019s helicopter. Joe emerges carrying his mother. He does not flip the switch. It is Garrett\u2014slinking to the van to manufacture the evidence he needs\u2014who flips it himself. The diesel-soaked device ignites, killing Garrett and sending a fireball into Avedon\u2019s helicopter. The FBI case is legally compromised. An epilogue finds Joe out on an ankle monitor, tending bar, when Brett walks in\u2014fired, unburdened, carrying a cardboard box of desk items. They find their way back to each other the only way they know how: a beer, a handshake, and a fresh start.<\/p>\n COMMENTS<\/p>\n Premise & Concept<\/p>\n This is one of the more original premises to cross the desk in a long while, and it\u2019s worth saying that plainly up front. Positioning a radicalization sting at the center of a film about male loneliness is a genuinely inventive move\u2014an FBI honeytrap that succeeds not because it manufactures a grievance but because it manufactures a friendship is more morally disturbing, and more cinematically alive, than any number of bomb-in-a-van procedurals. The \u201cAlpha Male Excursion Weekend\u201d framing gives the film a wry satirical entry point before deepening into something far more intimate, and the thematic architecture is uncommonly well-considered: both Joe and Brett are isolated, both are grieving, and the film\u2019s central argument\u2014that connection is simultaneously the cure for radicalization and the mechanism of its exploitation\u2014gives it moral texture that most crime thrillers don\u2019t even attempt. The title does what great titles do: it works on multiple levels, promises something specific, and earns its irony by the final frame.<\/p>\n The one area worth sharpening in the next draft is the third act\u2019s moral architecture. The film spends 100 pages constructing a question: can Joe choose connection over revenge?\u2014and the current resolution (Garrett accidentally detonates the bomb, Avedon dies collaterally) is clever but lets the story off the hook at the precise moment it needs to make its most definitive statement. This is a fixable structural problem, not a conceptual one. The premise is exceptional; the third act just needs to rise to it.<\/p>\n Structure<\/p>\n The first act is a pleasure to read. The Alpha Male Weekend, the FBI surveillance setup, Joe and Cathy\u2019s household, and the early Joe-Brett dynamic are established with real economy and wit\u2014five or six things happening simultaneously without any of them feeling rushed. The hook is airtight: a man with a plan, an agent with an assignment, and a friendship neither of them expected. It\u2019s the kind of opening that makes you clear your afternoon.<\/p>\n Act Two sustains momentum better than most scripts of this type, largely because the Joe-Brett scenes are doing two jobs at once\u2014advancing a plot and deepening a relationship\u2014and the Cathy material provides genuine emotional stakes that keep every scene from feeling like chess-piece movement. The main structural note for revision is that the push-pull rhythm\u2014Joe considering walking away, then being re-provoked by another Avedon outrage\u2014repeats itself one too many times before the third act arrives. Trimming one cycle of that loop and pushing some of that real estate toward Brett\u2019s crisis of conscience (currently rendered in private elegy rather than dramatized confrontation) would tighten the engine considerably without losing anything essential.<\/p>\n Act Three delivers the goods where it counts. The final evening at Joe\u2019s house\u2014Brett wired for sound, Cathy extracting her promise, the pizza-delivery agent in the doorway\u2014is the sequence that will get this film made, and the arrest sequence is staged with genuine kinetic force. The climax\u2019s reliance on Garrett\u2019s accidental detonation is the script\u2019s one significant structural concession, and addressing it\u2014finding a way to give Joe a genuine, costly choice before the chaos takes over\u2014is the single most valuable revision available. The epilogue lands exactly right.<\/p>\n Character<\/p>\n Joe Malone is a genuinely original screen protagonist<\/a>, and the industry should be paying attention. He\u2019s not a radicalized villain and not a grieving saint but something more difficult and more honest: a man whose anger is completely justified and completely dangerous at the same time, who is capable of extraordinary tenderness with Cathy and extraordinary precision with a rifle, and who is entirely uninterested in pretending those two things don\u2019t coexist inside him. His arc from solitary obsession toward the possibility of connection as a reason to live is clearly drawn, sympathetically rendered, and\u2014crucially\u2014never once feels like a Hollywood softening. He\u2019s a real lead.<\/p>\n Brett Jones may actually be the more interesting character on the page, and that\u2019s a high bar to clear. He holds the film\u2019s central moral contradiction\u2014engineering a man\u2019s radicalization while genuinely caring about him\u2014and the script handles his collapse with real intelligence. The late confession about his wife (dead a year, discovered alone on their mattress, Joe going straight back to work) is the best single scene in the script, identifying what Brett has actually been chasing in this friendship: not a closed case but absolution, and maybe a life worth living after thirty years in rooms like this. Giving that scene\u2019s emotional logic an earlier foothold in Act Two would pay significant structural dividends.<\/p>\n Cathy is luminous\u2014funny, fierce, clear-eyed about her dying, and constructed with a precision that makes every scene she\u2019s in feel essential rather than decorative. Her final hallway moment earns every tear it gets. Liv is smart and warm and deserves a bit more of her own interiority; in a film this explicitly about loneliness, her own loneliness could do more work. Garrett functions effectively as the institutional corruption that mirrors Joe\u2019s institutional betrayal\u2014giving him even one scene of comprehensible human logic beneath the careerism would make his ultimate fate land with the systemic weight the film is reaching for, rather than reading as simple villain payoff.<\/p>\n Dialogue<\/p>\n Flat out: this is some of the best dialogue in any spec this year. The \u201cwould you rather\u201d device is a small stroke of genius\u2014it\u2019s simultaneously Brett\u2019s intelligence-gathering tool, Joe\u2019s mechanism of trust, and the film\u2019s thematic shorthand, and it earns its callback in the final scene so completely that the epilogue lands as a full emotional resolution rather than a tag. Cathy\u2019s voice<\/a> throughout is perfectly calibrated\u2014funny without being a performance, dignified in decline, never asking for more sympathy than she allows herself. The pizza scene near the end, in which Brett arrives wired for sound to give a dying woman her goodbye while trading jokes about sticky versus itchy, is writing that stops a room.<\/p>\n The one place to sharpen: the FBI conference room scenes rely a bit too heavily on Garrett delivering villainous exposition, and Liv occasionally gets tasked with speaking the film\u2019s thematic content directly (\u201clove isn\u2019t meant to fix broken people\u201d) rather than embodying it through behavior. These are minor notes in a script where the dialogue is otherwise doing everything right.<\/p>\n Theme<\/p>\n The film knows exactly what it\u2019s about, which is rarer than it sounds. The title\u2019s irony\u2014that the FBI\u2019s radicalization sting works not by amplifying Joe\u2019s ideology but by providing the friendship he needed, deployed against him rather than for him\u2014is a pointed and genuinely disturbing observation about how institutions exploit the human need for connection. The reciprocal dynamic between Joe and Brett\u2014each the cure for the other\u2019s loneliness, neither able to be honest about it until it\u2019s nearly too late\u2014is the film\u2019s best idea and the one it should trust most. Everything else\u2014the critique of tech-bro philanthropy, the veterans\u2019 betrayal narrative, the healthcare system as a class weapon\u2014is richly layered context that gives the central relationship its stakes without overwhelming it.<\/p>\n The thematic ambition is fully matched by the execution in the first two acts. The third act asks the film to complete its argument\u2014to show, not just imply, that connection was sufficient to pull Joe back from the edge\u2014and that\u2019s where a targeted revision would transform a very good film into a great one. The materials are all here.<\/p>\n Commercial Viability<\/p>\n This is a film that gets made. The comparison titles write themselves\u2014Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Wind River, A Most Violent Year\u2014American crime dramas with moral ambiguity at the center, strong male friendship as the emotional engine, and the kind of endings that generate awards-season conversation precisely because they don\u2019t resolve cleanly. Joe and Brett are exactly the kind of dual-lead setup that attracts serious actors: two men of a certain age, each carrying the weight of a life that didn\u2019t go the way it was supposed to, finding something unexpected in each other. That\u2019s a pitch that gets returned.<\/p>\n The veterans\u2019 grievance \/ FBI entrapment angle is both timely and differentiated\u2014there\u2019s nothing quite like this in the current marketplace, and the Pennsylvania working-class setting gives the film a visual specificity that distinguishes it from generic prestige-crime territory. At 104 pages, it\u2019s proportioned for a theatrical feature. The main packaging consideration is ensuring the third-act resolution is tight enough that buyers aren\u2019t left with unanswered questions about the moral conclusion\u2014but that\u2019s a development conversation, not a reason to pass. The bones here are exceptional, and with the right revision push, this is a film that earns a wide audience.<\/p>\n GRADES<\/p>\n ELEMENT<\/p>\n GRADE<\/p>\n Concept<\/p>\n Excellent<\/p>\n Story<\/p>\n Good<\/p>\n Structure<\/p>\n Good<\/p>\n Characterization<\/p>\n Good<\/p>\n Dialogue<\/p>\n Excellent<\/p>\n Format<\/p>\n Excellent<\/p>\n OVERALL GRADE<\/p>\n CONSIDER<\/p>\n RECOMMENDATION<\/p>\n Read this script. Pass it up the chain. The Cure for Male Loneliness is the kind of spec that reminds you why you got into this business\u2014it has a premise that feels both utterly of-the-moment and enduringly human, two lead characters with the depth and specificity to attract serious talent, and dialogue so alive on the page it practically reads itself. Joe Malone is a genuine original: a man whose rage is completely justified and completely dangerous, whose capacity for tenderness is exactly equal to his capacity for violence, and who the script never once condescends to or softens for easy sympathy. Brett Jones is the rare antagonist-turned-friend who earns his redemption not through plot mechanics but through the slow accumulation of genuine feeling. Cathy\u2019s death is one of the most honestly written scenes of its kind in recent spec memory. The pizza sequence\u2014Brett arriving wired for sound to give a dying woman her goodbye\u2014will be talked about.<\/p>\n The single revision note worth flagging is structural: the third act needs a moment where Joe makes a genuine, dramatized choice between the revenge he\u2019s been planning and the life he\u2019s been building, rather than having that choice resolved by Garrett\u2019s accidental detonation. It\u2019s a meaningful note, but it\u2019s also a contained one\u2014the setup is all there, the emotional logic is in place, and a writer with this much command of character and dialogue will solve it in a pass. Everything else\u2014the tone, the craft, the moral seriousness\u2014is already at the level this story deserves. This is a film that gets made, and whoever makes it will have something worth talking about for a long time.<\/p>\n Is this Professional Coverage?\u00a0<\/p>\n This is not professional coverage because it was not done by a film and TV professional; it was done by a computer that is, like, guesstimating if a script is good or not. <\/p>\n As I said, small changes in the world may yield different results. I had Claude perform coverage without a prompt, and it produced such a rave that I felt uncomfortable even publishing it. <\/p>\n Even this one is nice, and I think it has interesting notes, but I can’t have a conversation with it to talk about why I made a choice in the story. <\/p>\n Or even what I think the theme is — now with most paid coverage services<\/a>, you can’t do that, but with a development executive, you can, and you can even agree on changes or different scenes. <\/p>\n For this script, I actually had to go back and design a prompt that I feel like did weigh things differently with Claude, because just asking it to read and cover a script gave some flowery responses. <\/p>\n
Title \/ Author \/ Genre \/ Pages \/ Setting \/ Period Logline<\/a> (one sentence) Synopsis (2\u20133 paragraphs, present tense, covering the full arc) Comments \u2014 evaluate the following in prose: premise & concept, structure, character, dialogue, theme, and commercial viability Grades \u2014 rate each element (Excellent \/ Good \/ Fair \/ Poor): Concept, Story, Structure, Characterization, Dialogue, Format Overall Grade: Consider \/ Consider with Revisions \/ Pass Recommendation: A brief paragraph summarizing the key strengths and the single most important thing to fix Be honest and specific. Write as a working story analyst at a production company, not as a cheerleader. Flag real problems clearly.”
Here Are a Few Tips to Get Better Results<\/p>\n