Complaint Review: Screenplay Readers

Great coverage service if you like a low price, super fast turnaround time, and an uncaring customer service. It’s great to know that a business puts its employees way above its customers. Unfortunately, I’m not an employee. So if I get screwed, I don’t have their back or ear. And that was my experience with Screenplay Readers.

It started nicely, with a rather sunny day a few weeks ago, a great price, a 24-hour turnaround time, as promised. I read the coverage, got a Pass, and the sun kept shining outside and inside. But as I was reading the comments, there were a few things that were suspicious and led me to believe that the reader skipped vital parts of the script, and therefore assumed the script didn’t contain certain information, which resulted in very inaccurate logline, synopsis, comments, and grades.

This was not my first, or my thirtieth, coverage. And I know when the reader skims. In fact, I can point to the exact parts the reader did or didn’t read. I contacted Screenplay Readers’ customer service and politely explained my problem. They got back to me a few hours later, saying they went over the coverage and there was nothing wrong with it; saying I may contact them again if I have more questions.

Okay, so obviously I wasn’t specific enough, and obviously they want me to contact them again if I have more questions. So I did. This time, to support my argument, I provided specific references and quotes from the coverage and from the script, in hopes of settling this once and for all, somehow.

But they never got back to me. Maybe because my points were valid. Don’t know. What I do know is, Screenplay Readers give their paid readers a “get out of jail free card.”

All I wanted was to get to the bottom of this, whether I’m wrong or they are. But they obviously don’t care about their customers. They will reply if don’t have a valid case, yes. But not if their employees actually made an accidentally-on-purpose mistake while also blaming the writer.

I read their terms of service and followed, I was polite, I provided references… And yet, they did not want anything to do with me anymore. They didn’t care enough to find out the truth. They already had my money.

Every coverage service has lousy readers, yes. But I expected the customer service to, you know, service me. The customer. Especially when one of their employees was paid to do such a lousy job. Instead, they chased me away. They took my money and vanished. Wouldn't offer a new review to replace the faulty one, wouldn't offer a refund, a discount, nothing. I got stuck with a useless coverage. And less money.