Scott Frank Discusses The Films He’s Worked On As A Script Doctor, Including ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ‘Gravity’ And “A Lot Of The X-Men Movies”
deadline.comIn a recent New Yorker profile, Craig Mazin, who wrote The Last of Us and Chernobyl, calls Queen’s Gambit co-creator Scott Frank “one of the best screenwriters of all time.” Long a known quantity for Get Shorty, Out of Sight, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Marley and Me, The Wolverine and Logan, Frank opens up to the magazine about his less-recognized work: The nearly 60 films he has worked on as a script doctor, earning at times $300,000 a week.
Among the films on that less-well-known list are, according to the piece, Saving Private Ryan, The Ring, Gravity, Night at the Museum, Unfaithful, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Night at the Museum and, says Frank, “a lot of the X-Men movies.” Which ones? “I don’t remember their titles,” he said. “Ninety-percent of what I get called in on is character work,” Frank told The New Yorker.
But Paul Thomas Anderson maintained that Frank also has a master’s understanding of structure. “He’s a formalist, and I mean that as the highest compliment,” Anderson said. “It’s what I always admired and wanted to emulate.
He understood classic structure in a way most people can’t ever grasp.” Frank downplays the accolades. “I’m a bit of a hack,” he once said.
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