How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice | The New Yorker
A Profile of Scott Frank, who has written and rewritten screenplays for films and TV shows including “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Night at the Museum,” “The Ring,” “Out of Sight,” and a number of X-Men movies. Patrick Radden Keefe reports.
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Screenwriting - Scott Frank
- Scott Frank is one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful screenwriters.
- He has devoted entire months just to cracking an opening scene.
- He also excels at endings.
- In the mid-nineties, he was adapting “Out of Sight,” a novel by Elmore Leonard.
- Frank has written no fiction, and finds it easier to write fiction than playwriting.
- The tools of the novelist are mostly off-limits: no extensive character description, no extensive description of the world around the character, and no extensive detail about the characters.
- The best screenplays are “more of an exact science of science,’’ Frank says.
- “ Scripts “are “just as hard to write as the good ones are, he says, so the screen time for each scene needs to be about a minute of screen time, so that each scene can be abbreviated to a haiku.’ “ Screenplays ‘are this unique, weird thing, Frank says—more disciplined and disciplined with a playwriting, playwriting with ahaiku’
Scott Frank - The Best Screenwriter in Hollywood
- Scott Frank is one of only a handful of American screenwriters who have managed to write good films and enjoy consistent success for four decades.
- His first movie, a cop-goes-undercover-in-high-school stinker called “Plain Clothes,” came out in 1988, and he has since had fifteen films released, across disparate genres.
- He has also enjoyed a quiet, and extremely lucrative, sideline as perhaps the most in-demand script doctor in Hollywood.
- For such assignments, which are generally uncredited, he commands a fee that he acknowledges is “insane”: three hundred thousand dollars a week.
- The writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson told me that Frank’s work reminds him of Hollywood”s golden age.
- “He understood classic structure in a way most people can’t ever grasp, so they end up having to be ‘inventive’”
Scott Frank: A Ventriloquist
- Scott Frank can inhabit movie characters so completely that he can compose fluid dialogue in their precise manner of speaking.
- Steven Soderbergh, who directed “Out of Sight” and is a close friend, described Frank to me as “a ventriloquist” Frank’s ability to offer solutions within an existing stylistic idiom makes him a “chameleon,” producer Nina Jacobson told me.
- The two qualities that Frank finds most appealing in a character are competence and a sense of humor, and he possesses both, friends say.. “Like so many assholes who’ve come before me, I spend the summer in Martha’S Vineyard,’ Frank told me, adding, “I’m also that asshole who goes to Connecticut on weekends.’” “My work doesn’t so much change the aesthetic as it does provoke adjectives like ‘solid’ and ‘dependable’ ”
Scott Frank - A Short Story
- Scott Frank wrote his first script in 1980, when he was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
- He and Lindsay Doran developed a campy Hitchcockian thriller called “Dead Again,” which Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in, alongside Emma Thompson.
- Like other Hollywood success stories, Frank has been known to reminisce about his humble early days as a bartender.
- But, as Tony Gilroy, another prolific screenwriter, who wrote and directed “Michael Clayton,’ points out, Frank broke into the business almost immediately.
- The writers’ floor at Paramount was not so different from the one where F.Scott Fitzgerald had toiled at M-G-M.
- But Frank loved it, and he and Doran went on to make a string of successful films, including “The Godfather’s” “Gone with the Wind” and “Jurassic Park.”
Film Review: Scott Frank
- Scott Frank believes that moviegoers have learned to recognize “baldly expositional” writing as a sign that they might safely sneak out for a bit.
- The exposition in his scripts is often imparted by an eccentric minor character, in an unusual milieu.
- “Most people can do story or character,” Stacey Sher, who produced “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight,’ told me.
- � “Scott can do both, and that’s really rare.” He avoids outlines, preferring to navigate his scripts without G.P.S.
- The Tom Cruise character in “Minority Report” is, essentially, a fascist: a cop who works for a futuristic “pre-crime” unit that apprehends people who intend to break the law.
Frank Frank - The Writer's Guide to the Movies
- On rewrites, Frank tends to work quickly—and often under enormous time pressure.
- On his own projects, it takes a year or more to write a script.
- After the success of “Dead Again,’ Frank signed on to adapt the Elmore Leonard novel “Get Shorty” Frank especially admires Ted Tally’s script for “The Silence of the Lambs,” which, apart from some judicious pruning, seems to have been lifted directly from the Thomas Harris novel.
- The screenwriter Steven Knight has remarked that, if a book is a mountain, then a good adaptation is a painting of the mountain—a vivid impression that can never be as multidimensional as its subject but that retains its essence.
- The company of his production company is Flitcraft, Ltd.
- The first time Frank read “ get Shorty,�” he went through it with a green highlighter, coloring the parts he thought he might use.
Scott Frank Adapted Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" for Soder
- Scott Frank adapted Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" for Soderbergh.
- The film's success led Frank’s agent to say that he would be guaranteed ten years of steady work as a screenwriter.
- Frank is philosophical about the mercantile aspect of his profession.
- If you set out to make great art in Hollywood, Frank found, you frequently ended up in a purgatory of development.“Sometimes you do your best work when you got a gun to your head,” Frank says.
- The screenplay that Frank wrote to pay for his new house was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
- It was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and was a commercial and critical hit.
- Even Leonard liked it.
- He later said to Sher, “I never know the themes of my books until Scott Frank tells me.’” The film’S “The Panic in Needle Park” and “A Star Is Born” with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, once suggested that “to understand whose picture it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo”
Scott Frank: Rewriting a Novel
- After “Out of Sight,” Scott Frank was inundated by rewrite offers.
- He realized he had just been “picking places to land.” Frank stresses that these gigs allowed him to work with many directors he admired.
- He did a rewrite several years ago on a “Scarface’ remake for Luca Guadagnino, which has since been abandoned.
- He used to book himself up three years in advance, out of fear, he says.
- He says, “My career is probably best defined more as a failure of nerve than anything else.’” The writer is currently working on “Gravity’s” fourth installment, which is due out in 2015.
- He is also working on the fifth installment of the “Saving Private Ryan” series, which opens in April 2015.
Scott Frank Directs a New Limited Series, “Monsieur Spade”
- Scott Frank is directing a new limited series, “Monsieur Spade.” Frank saw an opportunity to build a new tale around the famous detective.
- Clive Owen, a lifelong Hammett fan, expressed amusement to me that when the opportunity arose to play Spade it was in a series that would deconstruct the very macho iconography that made the character famous.
- The first scene Frank wrote finds Spade with his pants around his ankles, prone on an examination table, being given a prostate exam by a droll French physician who says that it’s time to quit smoking.
- The book, which Knopf published in 2015, didn’t find a big audience, but writing it was cathartic.
- “Part of the exercise was getting all these other voices out of my head—all these people I liked collaborating with,’ Frank said.
- ‘I wanted to just write for myself’
Frank Frank: The Writer
- The movie business had become unrecognizable, with the studios essentially giving up on freestanding R-rated thrillers and dramas.
- Frank was forced to admit that most of the films he had built his reputation on would probably not get made today.
- By the time ‘Logan’ came out, in 2017, Frank had discovered a new medium in which the stories he actually wanted to tell could still get made: streaming.
- Frank finally ended up at Netflix, which offered him the broader canvas of six episodes of “Godless,” which appeared in 2017 to strong reviews.
- One curious feature of Hollywood is that people who write movies may be wretched, powerless, and replaceable, but in television the writer is the king.
- Frank wrote the X-Men movies “The Wolverine” and “Logan.” He also wrote all the episodes of the showrunner he enjoyed on a film set.
Film Review - Frank Soderbergh
- For about a decade, Frank had been developing into something like an auteur.
- He shot it in Manitoba, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeff Daniels.
- The finished film is moody and effective, but Frank was forced to admit that his level of mastery as a director lagged considerably behind his abilities as a writer.
- After such an appraisal, it must have been tempting for Frank to retreat to what he knew he was good at.
- Instead, he directed a second film: a grisly detective story, based on a book by Lawrence Block, called “A Walk Among the Tombstones.’“I said, ‘Look, you are a writer who has directed now, but you are not yet a director,’ ” Soderbergh recalled.
- “The fact that he was right, coupled with the fact of he got to be tough on me, was probably a necessary and helpful step in our reconnecting,” he said.
Scott Frank Directs "The Queen's Gambit"
- Scott Frank is the writer-director of the new Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit" The series was a success, so Netflix agreed to make “The Queen’s Gambit.” Frank secured a green light from Netflix before he wrote all the scripts.
- He was less interested in whether the protagonist, Beth Harmon, would win the big tournament than he was in a theme that he had first explored in “Little Man Tate.’ “You have this thing in your head, and you can’t do it,” he went on, “you see your vision leaking away.�” “A lot of great directors, they’re out of reach.
- There's a persona when they get on set.
- But Frank directs without the armor of such a mystique”
The Queen’s Gambit
- “The Queen’s Gambit” was watched by sixty-two million Netflix subscribers in its first month of streaming.
- The series triggered an international boom in the sale of chess sets.
- The show was nominated for eighteen Emmys and won eleven; Frank got one for directing, and was nominations for writing.
- “The 2021 Emmys Featured the Worst Acceptance Speech in History,” the Independent declared.
- After decades of success making such movies as “Three Days of the Condor” and “Out of Africa,’ Frank said of director Sydney Pollack: “And it stopped working.” He even tried to get Pollack to direct ‘The Lookout’ But Pollack couldn’t change, the lesson was clear: The only way to remain vital is to take chances and take chances on what you used to be able to do.
Frank Frank: The Killers
- Frank is working on a new project, an opera set to the music of the Killers.
- He has been an adviser to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab since the nineties.
- Netflix passed on Frank’s next three projects.
- One was an adaptation of “Laughter in the Dark,” the 1938 novel by Vladimir Nabokov.
- Frank is also working on follow-up to his novel, “Faker,’ which is centered on a crooked manager “A sequel to the novel, he said, is how I roll.
- Giving the people what they don’t want, that's how IRoll.’” He has also secured the rights to “Red Harvest” and will write a script for A24; he and Megan Abbott will co-write the script for “Monsieur Spade” “That’S how I Roll’, he told me.
- “I’m listening to theKillers’ songs over and over.
- But the bastards just released a new album.”
Killers - The Musical
- Frank has never written an opera, or anything like it, he acknowledged, and that was a little scary.
- “I literally Googled ‘How do you write a libretto?’ ” he said.
- When the band had run through eight or nine Killers songs, the audience applauded.
- ‘It feels good to not know what I’m doing,’ Frank said.
- 'It’s so different.’
Scott Frank - A Review of the Film Industry
- Scott Frank is one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful screenwriters.
- His first movie, a cop-goes-undercover-in-high-school stinker called “Plain Clothes,” came out in 1988.
- Frank has also enjoyed a quiet, and extremely lucrative, sideline as perhaps the most in-demand script doctor in Hollywood.
- For such assignments, which are generally uncredited, he commands a fee that he acknowledges is “insane”: three hundred thousand dollars a week.
- “My work doesn’t so much change the aesthetic as it does provoke adjectives like ‘solid’ and ‘dependable’ ” Scott Frank wrote his first script in 1980, when he was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
- He and Lindsay Doran developed a campy Hitchcockian thriller called ‘Dead Again,’ which Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in, alongside Emma Thompson.
Frank Frank: The Writer’s Life
- After the success of “Dead Again,’ Frank signed on to adapt the Elmore Leonard novel “Get Shorty” Frank especially admires Ted Tally’s script for “The Silence of the Lambs,” which, apart from some judicious pruning, seems to have been lifted directly from the Thomas Harris novel.
- On rewrites, Frank tends to work quickly—and often under enormous time pressure.
- On his own projects, it takes a year or more to write a script.
- He used to book himself up three years in advance, out of fear, he says.
- He says, “My career is probably best defined more as a failure of nerve than anything else’” The writer is currently working on “Gravity’S” fourth installment, which is due out in 2015.
- He is also working on the fifth installment of the “Saving Private Ryan” series, which opens in April 2015.
Scott Frank Writes and Directs "The Queen's Gambit"
- Scott Frank is the writer-director of the new Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit" The show was nominated for eighteen Emmys and won eleven; Frank got one for directing, and was nominations for writing.
- Frank is working on a new project, an opera set to the music of the Killers.
- He has also secured the rights to “Red Harvest” and will write a script for A24; he and Megan Abbott will co-write the script for “Monsieur Spade’ “A lot of great directors, they’re out of reach.
- There's a persona when they get on set, but Frank directs without the armor of such a mystique” “The Queen’s Gambit” was watched by sixty-two million Netflix subscribers in its first month of streaming.
- The series triggered an international boom in the sale of chess sets.