A Hollywood Script Doctor Has an ‘Insane’ $300,000 Weekly Fee and Punched Up ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ‘Gravity,’ ‘Hunger Games,’ ‘X-Men’ and More
variety.comZack Sharf Digital News Director The career of Scott Frank got a lengthy deep dive courtesy of a profile in The New Yorker that revealed the writer-director has a $300,000 weekly fee as a Hollywood script doctor.
Frank acknowledges this fee is “insane,” but being a script doctor is how he’s made a life for himself despite being a credited screenwriter on films by Steven Soderbergh (“Out of Sight”), Barry Sonnenfield (“Get Shorty”), James Mangold (“The Wolverine,” “Logan”) and more.
He’s also the Emmy-winning writer and director of Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit.” Plus, $300,000 a week feels earned after putting the finishing touches on nearly 60 films, including “Saving Private Ryan,” “Night at the Museum,” “Unfaithful,” “The Ring,” “Gravity” and “a lot of the X-Men movies.” A “script doctor” is the term given to a screenwriter hired to punch up or reshape a pre-existing script, be it smoothing out a messy third act or overhauling the dialogue to make a character more memorable.
This screenwriter will often go uncredited, although Frank’s work punching up the script for Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” ended up being so extensive that he got an official credit alongside original writer Jon Cohen.
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