Stephen Colbert Valerie Terranova/Getty Images Moments after Stephen Colbert signs onto the Zoom interview, appearing to settle into a chair, he falls off of 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’s 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’s entertainment empire.
But the former Late Show host isn’t here to talk about his gig co-writing The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, which is the reason why he is spending time across the Pacific. He’s 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.)
The company, born out of Colbert’s 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.
Now, 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 Steifel, from both Colbert and his wife Evelyn McGee Colbert, J.J. Abrams and Marc Cuban. With it, he wants to bring the cloud-based software — which allows teams to collaborate in real time on a script — to more of Hollywood.
“I saw what it did for my company and I want everyone to do it,” says Colbert. “It drives me crazy when I go into somebody else’s production and then I’m back to PDFs being distributed and printed out on set. I’m like, ‘What is this?’”
All 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’s putting software mogul on for size. Or, as he says in a statement to THR, “While I enjoyed being a late-night host, I’m excited to move on to my dream job: Tech Oligarch!”
Unlike his Silicon Valley counterparts, he’s not talking about changing the world, just the software that Hollywood writers work on. As it currently stands, Scripto’s 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 autosaves all version 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, among others. It’s free for personal use and starts charging only once teams use the tool for collaboration.
An image of Scripto Screenplay Pro’s interface when writing a script. Courtesy of Scripto The company arose out of an incident with an $800 goat. In late 2010, the program that made Colbert a household name — Comedy Central’s news satire program The Colbert Report — was using the Electronic News Production System (ENPS) from the Associated Press to write their scripts. The tech wasn’t a good fit: The program at that time didn’t allow for collaboration, didn’t let comedy writers and producers input long descriptions of elements that might accompany the writing and crashed often.
At one point, the show’s 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’s what “really broke us,” Colbert says.
Colbert 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. “A few years later, The Daily Show said, ‘Hey, how are you producing so fast?’ And we said, ‘Well, we’ve got this new thing,’” recalls Colbert. “They said, ‘Can we use it?’”
Over 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.
An image of Scripto’s dashboard Courtesy of Scripto So 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.
As Scripto enters its growth era, its team has been deploying the software’s famous users to hype it up. “While I strongly advise against trusting any tech company, Scripto has been the backbone of Last Week Tonight’s writing and production process since our inception,” John Oliver said in a statement to THR. Added Jon Stewart, “I have now used Scripto across multiple projects and you can quote me on this: It’s 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.”
While he’s been trying the entrepreneur label on for size, Colbert says he’s received some offers for other gigs that he’s entertained, though he’s mum about what they might be. “There’s some fun stuff to think about. I’m in no hurry,” he says. The thing he misses the most from late-night television, he adds, are the people he worked with. “To be in the room full of laughter is an irreplaceable feeling. So I’d like to get back to that. I just don’t know what that’s going to be yet based upon the various things that I’ve talked to people about.”
For now, he’s content with being laser-focused on bringing Scripto to the masses. Says Colbert, “Back 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.”
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