The Phrase Changing Hollywood Overnight
This is part one of my two-part series this week for paid subscribers on OpenAI’s new tools and what they mean for Hollywood. Today: how ChatGPT-5 instantly changed writers rooms. Later this week, the Sora 2 panic.
When OpenAI unveiled GPT-5 on Aug. 7, CEO Sam Altman opened with a flourish worthy of a Casablanca finale: “our smartest, fastest, most useful model yet.” The implication was clear — management consultants, lawyers and other white-collar professionals were about to get supercharged.
What I didn’t expect was who grabbed it first. Within hours, Hollywood writers, showrunners and producers were quietly running scripts, coverage, even pitch decks through the new model — testing what it could do before their bosses did.
Beneath the showmanship was something real. GPT-5 isn’t just a bigger brain; it’s a directorial system — a single AI mind composed of specialized sub-models, with a “router” that decides which sub-model takes on the assignment. It behaves less like a chatbot and more like a studio of specialists behind one front door.
That design is a genuine departure from GPT-4, which forced users to choose between different variants or carefully engineered prompts. Despite bumps in the launch, Hollywood, already trembling with fear, noticed — GPT-5 performs better?
And then something strange happened: Hollywood didn’t roll its eyes. It logged in.
Within days, “GPT-5 pass” became a new phrase of the week — shorthand for nearly every script, pitch or coverage doc being run through the machine. Showrunners swapped router demos like new Final Draft plug-ins. Assistants realized their notes were being outpaced by a system that could remember every line of a season’s worth of scripts. And for the first time since the strikes, the fear wasn’t abstract — it was happening right now, inside the rooms where stories are made. And from the people who vowed to never use AI.
Here’s what I’ll tell paid subscribers:
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Why the WGA’s “AI protections” from the 2023 strike are already outflanked — and what the guild can’t actually stop this time
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How the “GPT-5 pass” is transforming writers rooms as showrunners use the model to rewrite faster, cheaper and in secret
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The quiet gold rush in studio marketing and post teams, where GPT-5 can cut 20 trailers before lunch and nobody’s sure whose job that is anymore
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GPT5’s memory superpower as it can now ingest pilot, a bible, drafts and coverage notes for a mulyi-season continuity check in minutes
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Inside the studios drawing up color-coded AI risk charts — the green-light zones, the red lines and who’s already crossing them
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The unexpected winners (and losers) of the GPT-5 era — from assistants and coverage readers to legal departments trying to hold the line
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What OpenAI’s commitment to open and public iterations of the tech means for future versions and how they’ll impact Hollywood workflow
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And the uncomfortable question hanging over every creative contract now: Who owns the work when the machine remembers every draft you ever fed it?
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