{"id":595800,"date":"2026-09-10T06:58:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T06:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/595800\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T06:58:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T06:58:10","slug":"stephen-colberts-next-act-screenwriting-software-mogul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/595800\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Colbert\u2019s Next Act: Screenwriting Software Mogul?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMoments after Stephen Colbert<\/a> signs on to the Zoom interview, appearing to settle into a chair, he falls off it. The arc of the descent is so perfect, his reappearance so unruffled, that at first the plunge appears to be a Buster Keaton-esque pratfall. But it soon becomes clear that Colbert\u2019s tumble was not planned, and in fact was the result of him being in a relatively unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar chairs without backs, in Wellington, New Zealand, home of The Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson\u2019s entertainment empire.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the former Late Show host isn\u2019t here to talk about his gig co-writing The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, which is the reason he is spending time across the Pacific. He\u2019s here to discuss his other big project post-Late Show: growing his scriptwriting software company, Scripto. (On whose platform the aforementioned script is being penned.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe company, born out of Colbert\u2019s frustration with the computerized writing system on The Colbert Report more than a decade ago, followed the entertainer to The Late Show in 2015 and quietly spread to other variety shows over the years: The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, The Opposition With Jordan Klepper.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, with his 10-year stint on The Late Show behind him, Colbert is ready to grow the company he co-founded with his Colbert Report colleague Rob Dubbin further. To do so, he has some new backing: $5 million in seed funding, in a round led by Todd Stiefel, from both Colbert and his wife, Evelyn McGee Colbert, J.J. Abrams and Mark Cuban. With it, he wants to bring the cloud-based software \u2014 which allows teams to collaborate in real time on a script \u2014 to more of Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI saw what it did for my company and I want everyone to do it,\u201d says Colbert. \u201cIt drives me crazy when I go into somebody else\u2019s production and then I\u2019m back to PDFs being distributed and printed out on set. I\u2019m like, \u2018What is this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of which ushers in a new era for Colbert. Fake TV news reporter? Check. Late night host? Been there, done that. Screenwriter? Currently happening. Now, he\u2019s putting software mogul on for size. Or, as he says in a statement to THR, \u201cWhile I enjoyed being a late-night host, I\u2019m excited to move on to my dream job: Tech Oligarch!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike his Silicon Valley counterparts, he\u2019s not talking about changing the world, just the software that Hollywood writers work on. As it currently stands, Scripto\u2019s big idea is to allow multiple people to work on a script at the same time, with professional formats and trappings that differentiate the software from Google Docs. Scripto auto-saves all versions of a script, can search across an entire script library and connects with an array of tools typically used by productions like WritersRoom Pro, Scriptflow, Filmustage and Reve. It\u2019s free for personal use and starts charging only once teams use the tool for collaboration.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAn image of Scripto Screenplay Pro\u2019s interface when writing a script.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Scripto<\/p>\n

\n\tThe company arose out of an incident with an $800 goat. In late 2010, the program that made Colbert a household name \u2014 Comedy Central\u2019s news satire program The Colbert Report \u2014 was using the Electronic News Production System (ENPS) from The Associated Press to write its scripts. The tech wasn\u2019t a good fit: The program at that time didn\u2019t allow for collaboration, didn\u2019t let comedy writers and producers input long descriptions of elements that might accompany the writing, and crashed often.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt one point, the show\u2019s writers penned a bit that included a goat, but in rewrites the animal was taken out. Unfortunately, nobody saved those rewrites in the system and the goat showed up on set, costing the production around $800. That\u2019s what \u201creally broke us,\u201d Colbert says.<\/p>\n

\n\tColbert Report writer Rob Dubbin, who was also a coder, offered to get a group together to create a bespoke production software for the show, and a very fed-up Colbert agreed to bankroll it. Three years in, Scripto was in beta-test mode and it became clear that The Colbert Report had finally found a platform that suited their needs. Word soon caught on. \u201cA few years later, The Daily Show said, \u2018Hey, how are you producing so fast?\u2019 And we said, \u2018Well, we\u2019ve got this new thing,\u2019\u201d recalls Colbert. \u201cThey said, \u2018Can we use it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOver the years, the software modernized. On The Late Show, Scripto was rebuilt to handle the needs of a much larger show that might have 200 people interacting with it at the same time. The product, once operating out of a pair of server racks, became cloud-based not long after. In 2023 during the writers strike, Colbert says he considered selling the software, but decided to grow it instead. He hired Josh Kline, the former chief strategy officer for Final Draft, as CEO.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAn image of Scripto\u2019s dashboard.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Scripto<\/p>\n

\n\tSo far, the team has diversified its user base from late night staples (currently, Saturday Night Live in the U.S. and the U.K. are using it in addition to Last Week Tonight and The Daily Show) to awards shows (the Primetime Emmys, the WGA Awards, the Clios), streaming shows (Bleacher Report) and video games (several AAA titles are using it). In August, Scripto unveiled Screenplay Pro, a set of features tailored to narrative television and feature film (like color-coded revision sets and page locking) and one sitcom has already begun using it.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Scripto enters its growth era, its team has been deploying the software\u2019s famous users to hype it up. \u201cWhile I strongly advise against trusting any tech company, Scripto has been the backbone of Last Week Tonight\u2019s writing and production process since our inception,\u201d John Oliver said in a statement to THR. Added Jon Stewart, \u201cI have now used Scripto across multiple projects and you can quote me on this: It\u2019s the reason I came back to The Daily Show. Election year, schmelection year, I just wanted to be back in that sweet script-writing interface.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile he\u2019s been trying the entrepreneur label on for size, Colbert says he\u2019s received some offers for other gigs that he\u2019s entertained, though he\u2019s mum about what they might be. \u201cThere\u2019s some fun stuff to think about. I\u2019m in no hurry,\u201d he says. The thing he misses the most from late night television, he adds, is the people he worked with. \u201cTo be in the room full of laughter is an irreplaceable feeling. So I\u2019d like to get back to that. I just don\u2019t know what that\u2019s going to be yet based upon the various things that I\u2019ve talked to people about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor now, he\u2019s content with being laser-focused on bringing Scripto to the masses. Says Colbert, \u201cBack on The Colbert Report days, Rob Dubbin and I had a little dream of trying to make our job easier, and I hope other people have the same benefit. I hope their days get easier the way our days got easier.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Moments after Stephen Colbert signs on to the Zoom interview, appearing to settle into a chair, he falls…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,5459,437],"class_list":["post-595800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-stephen-colbert","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}