While he’s not as well-known as some auteurs, writer/director Scott Frank is one of the most well-regarded and respected writers and filmmakers in Hollywood. There’s a terrific new profile in the New Yorker that puts a lot of his stature into context with tons of quotes from friends and admirers like filmmakers Steven Soderbergh and Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton,” “Andor”) who have solicited and offered to Frank over the years.
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Like Gilroy, Frank is also one of Hollywood’s most prolific script doctors, and the profile reveals he charges a $300,000 weekly fee. He has punched up nearly 60 films, including “Saving Private Ryan,” “Night at the Museum,” “The Ring,” “Gravity” and “a lot of the ‘X-Men’ movies.”
As the piece and the aforementioned script doctoring facts detail, Frank was a well-known writing commodity. Still, it took Hollywood several years to take him seriously as a filmmaking voice. That finally changed with two Netflix series: the Western “Godless” which was critically acclaimed and of course, the global success of “The Queen’s Gambit” which turned Anya-Taylor-Joy into a star and won a ton of Emmys including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie (for Frank) and Golden Globes (Best Television Limited Series, Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series (Joy).
But it’s also wild to think that after all that success for Netflix, the streamer passed on three of Frank’s following projects, according to the profile. One was even a project starring Anya Taylor-Hoy again. Here’s the New Yorker excerpt.
One was an adaptation of “Laughter in the Dark,” the 1938 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Frank is co-writing the script with the novelist and screenwriter Megan Abbott. The material is tricky; the novel, often described as a precursor to “Lolita,” tells the story of a middle-aged art critic who becomes infatuated with a seventeen-year-old girl. Frank wanted to do it as a film noir, and Abbott, who was an academic before she turned to popular writing, is an authority on women in noir. “We talked about the femme fatale as this character who gets short shrift,” Abbott told me. “But really great noir is always toying with that. Scott wanted the female point of view to be foregrounded.” If they can get the movie made, Anya Taylor-Joy is slated to play the femme fatale.
So file under one day maybe, but perhaps the “Lolita” aspect was too risqué for Netflix. The other two projects are unknown, but it may show that Netflix isn’t as greenlight-happy as it once was back in the day when it felt like they were giving out projects to auteurs like candy.
Frank’s next project is “Monsieur Spade” starring Clive Owen, and it will begin airing on AMC in January (it’s on our 2024 Most Anticipated TV list; one has to wonder if that’s one of the projects that Netflix passed on). There is a silver lining, though: Netflix did greenlight one project that he’s shooting next, “Department Q,” a series based on crime novels by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. Read the New Yorker profile; it’s fantastic and really puts this tremendous and underrated filmmaker into much-needed context.