How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice

January 22, 2024 7:19 PM

For decades, Scott Frank earned up to three hundred thousand dollars a week rewriting other people’s screenplays—from “Saving Private Ryan” to “The Ring.”
posted by folklore724 (45 comments total)

“Nevertheless, it can be demoralizing to expend so much of one’s creative energy servicing someone else’s vision.”

At that pay scale?! I’d have morale to spare. All the morale. No problem.

Good lord. Gimme a year of that kind of work and I could retire and set up my rescue cat ranch.
posted by jzb at 7:33 PM on January 22 [53 favorites]

I haven't read the article, but do plan to even if I need to burn a free article and there has been no archived version linked..

but honestly if you're earning $300,000/week, is there any article that needs to be written that celebrates you breaking out and finding your own voice?

Because there are very very few jobs that pay $300,000/week and even if you're being a ventriloquist through your script-rewriting, is that really the headline you want? That you were paid $300,000/week and weren't happy with your job?
posted by hippybear at 7:35 PM on January 22 [17 favorites]

If I made $300k a week, I would work for six months and never work again in my life.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:42 PM on January 22 [31 favorites]

I might go through life typing "fuck you scott frank" into random places on the internet now, just as a reflex.

I've already started, to be honest.
posted by hippybear at 7:53 PM on January 22 [19 favorites]

But think of all his medical school loans.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:59 PM on January 22 [6 favorites]

I mean if you're getting that kind of cash you gotta be providing, er, snacks for the crew, right?
posted by credulous at 8:01 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]

The number of crew that is involved in doing screenplay rewrites is... counted in the very low single digits. Possibly a binary question and not much more.

So, yeah, $42,857/day pays for all the snacks that one person might require.
posted by hippybear at 8:05 PM on January 22

and I swear to god, I will read this article [ungated], but it is so so very long, like so much longer than I was expecting... and I need to dig up the "give a fuck" to read it. So maybe in the morning.
posted by hippybear at 8:09 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]

I saw this article being discussed on r/screenwriters. The people on that sub say that its an intense and stressful job because you will have to create a workable script from the existing material while handling many stakeholders. Its one of those jobs where you will earn this wage a couple of times in a year. Not work 52 weeks a year.

Its still a very good job.. but the guy had even higher expectations of his life.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 8:09 PM on January 22 [9 favorites]

Its one of those jobs where you will earn this wage a couple of times in a year. Not work 52 weeks a year.

Earning this once in a year would be earning my life pay for 10 years during that once.

I'm not sure why people are casual about throwing these kind of pay numbers around. It's eye watering, not a casual figure that is just slid by in conversation.
posted by hippybear at 8:12 PM on January 22 [24 favorites]

it's about 12k after taxes, insurance, utilities, children and the college fund, cars, houses....airfare,amenities,luxuries,catastrophes,perpetuities, testaments, perhaps various leisure craft certainly not a hovercraft. you got the dogs, your agent and then again I don't know does he have an agent I guess he wouldn't need an agent. did I mention taxes, Connecticut taxes, New York City taxes, and California taxes. donations to charity, balloon rides, pen paper ink new phones new tablets new computers new typewriter book collection... got to be a good book collection.
but if Elmore Leonard got insight from the dude he's worth every dime.
from the article.
"Most screenwriters grapple with the tension between art and commerce. Joan Didion, who wrote films such as “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.”

imagine a young F Scott Fitzgerald doing the screenplay for Dracula, it would be 20 minutes before the regaling in the tavern would be over highlighting how innkeeper still hasn't acknowledged the undead henchmen that perch n the back away from the fireplace, alas, something more sinister in their heart SIC than mere curiosity, robbery or the occasional kidnapping for its Wallachia in the mind's eye of the gray sky with massive forests rolling down through mist, to wrought iron gates, thatched huts on gravel ground that gives way to incomprehensible mysteries that lie just outside town near the lake with a single lit torch jutting from the embankment.
or double indemnity there's no way Fitzgerald could diall back the dialogue that was Fred MacMurray.
posted by clavdivs at 8:16 PM on January 22 [30 favorites]

I admire clavdivs ability to type so quasi-lucidly into the interwebs while tripping balls.
posted by hippybear at 8:18 PM on January 22 [30 favorites]

I'm extremely interested in reading a before/after of one of these things.
posted by tclark at 8:39 PM on January 22 [5 favorites]

I remember Tom Stoppard writing a script-doctoring analysis. I should try to dig that up when I’m not on my phone.
posted by adamrice at 8:49 PM on January 22 [6 favorites]

I believe Stoppard got a cool million for "Shakespeare in Love." I don't know how many weeks of work, though.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:00 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]

The article is the clunkiest I have ever read in The NewYorker. Almost like the first line of each paragraph is by the actual writer and the rest of the paragraph is by Chat/AI.

Information is deconstructed and interleaved. For instance, Hammett's "Red Harvest" gets referred to three times, and if there had been a single paragraph pulling those three references together, it would have made a solid contribution to understanding motivation, method, etc. Instead - ?
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 9:01 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]

Saving private ryan and the ring were both released a loooooong time ago. Not sure if dude has been making $300,000 in any reasonable timeframe since then.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:04 PM on January 22

Its one of those jobs where you will earn this wage a couple of times in a year. Not work 52 weeks a year.

Every screenwriter working today may have already received their last payday. Yeah, even that famous one you just thought of. And that's to say nothing of the ones who will never be paid at all.

I'm not sure why people are casual about throwing these kind of pay numbers around. It's eye watering, not a casual figure that is just slid by in conversation.

Guess since it's only been a few months since the strike and everyone got their shows back we can return our regularly scheduled programming of: Fuck Writers.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:13 PM on January 22 [15 favorites]

celebrates you breaking out and finding your own voice

Yeah, the framing is odd and misleading - he's been writing his own super successful scripts all his life (he wrote Little Man Tate when he was in college). He's got two Oscar nominations. He wrote Out of Sight and Get Shorty and The Queen's Gambit. I guess most of his screenplays have been adaptations (and TV episodes) but it's not like he's worked in the shadows all his life and is now at long last breaking out. He wrote some extremely well known and well loved movies! He's a script doctor in about the same way as William Goldman was a script doctor. (Fittingly, the article says Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the first screenplay he ever read.)

Anyway, it's a profile of a guy who's apparently widely considered an unusually good scriptwriter and script editor. It's one of those meandering long reads, probably more interesting if you think editing is interesting.
posted by trig at 10:44 PM on January 22 [12 favorites]

Wow, well, I thought it was interesting. Congratulations to this guy. Decades of work paying off, perhaps too much so but that's probably due to having a good agent and desperate Hollywood types with 9-figure budgets but a story no one cares about. Maybe after paying someone $300,000 to make up for their mistake they'll hire and pay a good writing team in the first place next time... sorry, couldn't resist making the joke. May writers remain poor and miserable forever!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 11:04 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]

Stoppard got a cool million for "Shakespeare in Love."

Worth it IMHO
posted by Phanx at 2:41 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]

Interesting article, and it does square with what I’ve experienced interacting with multiple screenwriters (desire finally to publish “their own” work). The big payday thing—as always, it’s feast or famine for most creatives. Every single one I’ve known who winds up at this sort of level has had to get used to major peaks and troughs.

I'm not sure why people are casual about throwing these kind of pay numbers around. It's eye watering, not a casual figure that is just slid by in conversation.

I mean, it’s an article about a well-paid script doctor, and the attendant ups and downs of that career—the money is part of the story. I don’t make that kind of money, but I don’t begrudge a writer who’s succeeded at learning the craft and made it, particularly in a country with (as often discussed on MetaFilter) little safety net and no national healthcare. For every one guy like this I’ve met, I know a couple dozen who’ve had to do GoFundMes for minor health emergencies, a couple who were headed toward destitute, and dozens who were exhausted from hustling multiple jobs to try to maintain a creative life.
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:07 AM on January 23 [7 favorites]

Yeah, this is an interesting article which is being given short shrift here in this thread. Would you read an article about Stephen King's artistic ups and downs even though he makes a ton of money? Then why not this? Next time there's a thread about Taylor Swift having a hard time let's all make sure to tell everyone how we'd spend her bajillions of dollars.

It sounds as if Frank has helped significantly improve a ton of films that a lot of people love, which given how much rides on the success or failure of any film—if only because every film represents the collective effort of hundreds of people—is no small thing. If he helped turn Gravity from an okay movie into the awesome ride it ended up being with a few weeks of rewriting that made him a million bucks—well, more power to him.

His turn to directing late in life (and giving up script-doctoring) was also interesting to read about, including the help he needed to find his director's feet. The Queen's Gambit was great, and I'm totally going to binge Godless now, which going by the Fanfare thread also sounds great.
posted by rory at 3:08 AM on January 23 [13 favorites]

I was surprised that in the middle of writing for all these big movies and directing shows like "The Queen's Gambit," he made a small picture I love: "The Lookout." Sure, he makes lots of money. He's also talented.
posted by pangolin party at 4:10 AM on January 23 [4 favorites]

Hey, I'm not saying, "Fuck this guy." I'm saying, "Go this guy!" $300k is a lot of money to me, but it's nothing to Hollywood. He found a way to turn the filmmaking industry into an ATM, and I think that's great. I simply would probably have walked away after a while and done something else with my enormous bank account.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:29 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]

I believe Stoppard got a cool million for "Shakespeare in Love." I don't know how many weeks of work, though

Creative work is cumulative. He was sixty when he wrote it. So you can argue (more or less) 312 weeks.
posted by BWA at 5:22 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Why six years?
posted by biffa at 5:25 AM on January 23

So you can argue (more or less) 312 weeks.

Or maybe n weeks to fix it, and 60-n to know how to fix it.
posted by synecdoche at 5:37 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]

Utterly baffled by the "screw this guy" responses, both implicit and explicit, considering that Hollywood working conditions are so bad for 99% of the workforce that two major unions struck for five months just to arrest the slide. From another New Yorker article, right before the strike:

Alex O’Keefe, who is twenty-eight, grew up poor in Florida and worked as a speechwriter for the senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and as Green New Deal campaign director before getting staffed on FX’s “The Bear.” “It should be this beautiful rags-to-riches story, right?” he told me. “Unfortunately, I realized not all that glitters is gold.” During his nine weeks working in the writers’ room for “The Bear,” over Zoom, he was living in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with no heat; sometimes his space heater would blow the power out, and he’d bring his laptop to a public library. (He was never flown to set.) He thought that he was making a lot of money, but, after reps’ fees and taxes, it didn’t add up to much. “It’s a very regular-degular, working-class existence,” he said. “And the only future I’m seeking financially is to enter that middle class, which has always been rarified for someone who comes from poverty.”
...
Last month, “The Bear” won the W.G.A. Award for Comedy Series. O’Keefe went to the ceremony with a negative bank account and a bow tie that he’d bought on credit. He’s now applying for jobs at movie theatres to prepare for the potential strike.
posted by reclusive_thousandaire at 5:37 AM on January 23 [5 favorites]

If I wrote for a major TV show and couldn't make rent, I'd get a different job. There's a lot of weird stuff about that anecdote, and I'm not saying it's not real, but like normal 20-somethings don't just find themselves writing speeches for presidential candidates, and a tiny apartment in Brooklyn might cost ten thousand dollars a month, and...I'm just saying, I think it's a mistake to presume this is just an average working class dude. I'd like a lot, like a lot, of background filled in here.

That said, I am in absolute favor of writers making all the money in the world. I want to reiterate how much I love this man who made $300k rewriting scripts; that's actually all I know about him, because I can't really afford to subscribe to The New Yorker, but it's enough. Hell yeah, man.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:10 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]

I believe Stoppard got a cool million for "Shakespeare in Love."

He also was brought in to masssage 'Attack of the Clones'.

Could you imagine just how bad the script was before his input?
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:16 AM on January 23 [4 favorites]

Here's that script-doctoring analysis I mentioned upthread. It's about Tom Stoppard's work on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but it's not by Tom Stoppard. Toward the end of the page you'll see links to the "full analysis," which is a scene-by-scene breakdown. The author of this analysis, Mike Fitzgerald, also writes about performing the analysis.
posted by adamrice at 6:28 AM on January 23 [5 favorites]

If I wrote for a major TV show and couldn't make rent, I'd get a different job.

There is a lot of weird anti-labor language in this thread.
posted by Think_Long at 6:29 AM on January 23 [5 favorites]

It's actually anti-capitalist, speaking only for myself.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:33 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]

Archive link for the Frank piece. The other New Yorker article that reclusive_thousandaire linked already goes to archive.org.
posted by rory at 6:45 AM on January 23

The Queen's Gambit is rather well-directed, it has a visual style that comes together nicely.
posted by ovvl at 7:28 AM on January 23

It's interesting for me to hear people who can approach writing from a standpoint of what they want to achieve artistically, commercially, and in terms of how they want to present themselves as a person.

The writing I've done in my life is like a tense negotiation between me and my brain, in hopes of freeing the hostage that is my story.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:27 AM on January 23 [5 favorites]

I haven't read the article yet but Scott Frank's a pretty talented guy. With the exception of Quentin Tarantino, no one else has ever successfully adapted one of Elmore Leonard's crime novels — plenty have fucked up that job.

Frank did it twice with Get Shorty and Out of Sight.
posted by dobbs at 9:04 AM on January 23 [5 favorites]

> and dozens who were exhausted from hustling multiple jobs to try to maintain a creative life

I feel seen.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 9:51 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]

I thought anyone who made that kind of bank only deserved the guillotine. Did I miss a meeting?
posted by kjs3 at 10:34 AM on January 23

Scott Frank co-wrote and co-produced "Monsieur Spade", which is well worth watching if you like Dashiell Hammett or noir in general. The show is on Acorn TV.
posted by Agave at 11:09 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]

I thought anyone who made that kind of bank only deserved the guillotine. Did I miss a meeting?

This man is a worker. He makes his money from his labor. And when his union went on strike, he relinquished the chance at another large payday to help his fellow workers get a better deal for their labor.

No guillotine needed.
posted by Uncle Ira at 1:04 PM on January 23 [5 favorites]

The saddest thing in that article is the observation that Hollywood can't really make "Dead Again," "Get Shorty" or "Out of Sight" any more, certainly not as theatrical releases. Those were perfect movies, perfectly experienced in the theater.

There's probably no greater nostalgia for me about the 90s than the feeling of a Friday night going to a dinner with friends or a sweetheart with no one distracted by smart phones* and then seeing those movies with an opening night crowd. (Add to that: GoodFellas, Heat, Casino, The Matrix, etc.)

*because they didn't exist until 2000, and most people didn't have them until 2006 or 2007...
posted by MattD at 1:06 PM on January 23 [5 favorites]

... oh and $300k a week is in no way too much money for the guy who wrote Dead Again, Get Shorty and Out of Sight. That's what money is for as far as I am concerned...
posted by MattD at 1:07 PM on January 23

I haven't rtfa yet, but I will say that Scott Frank gave the commencement address at UCSB in.. 2000? and it was really, really good. As it should be, for a professional, but really very good.
posted by ApathyGirl at 2:06 PM on January 23