This screenwriter paid $300,000 per week in Hollywood!

“Script doctor” Scott Frank has saved a bunch of projects, from Private Ryan to Gravity. And he also created Queen’s Game for Netflix.

He is one of the most sought-after authors in the Hollywood industry. At 63 years old, Scott Frank has behind him a rich career as a screenwriter, which the New Yorker explores in a vast portrait, where we learn that he earns $300,000 per week as a “script doctor”! A salary that he himself describes as “crazy“But it is by standing at the bedside of sick scenarios that he has built a unique reputation.

A “script doctor” is, in effect, a screenwriter hired to refine or reshape a pre-existing script, whether that means smoothing out a messy third act or reshuffling dialogue to make a character more memorable. A work often not credited in the credits. Scott Frank thus put the finishing touches on nearly 60 films. Around sixty overdue scripts, which he retouched and helped to complete. Among them we find some masterpieces, such as We have to save the soldier Ryan Or Gravity. And also a lot of films X-Men or Minority Reportwhere he rewrote the depth of Tom Cruise’s character (emphasizing the hero’s grief), so much so that he ended up being credited as a co-writer on the film.

“90% of the tasks I’m called upon for involve character work”, Frank explains to the New Yorker. For example, for Gravityhis mission was to give Sandra Bullock’s character “life outside of space”. Sometimes it fails. Like when he was hired several years ago to rewrite the script for the remake of Scarface by Luca Guadagnino, abandoned project.

Nina Jacobson, hired Frank to rewrite Hunger Games 2, just a few weeks after filming began. The producer says her work on the film was comparable to “laying a new railway track while driving the moving train at the same time. Scott gets involved in the process. He knows how to diagnose what you need, and team up with the director. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an executive or producer who doesn’t think of him first every time he has a problem with a script!”

Hence this insane weekly fee. However, Scott Frank also has babies of her own. Screenwriter of Out of reach by Steven Soderbergh, Get Shorty by Barry Sonnenfield or Logan by James Mangold, Frank is also the Emmy Award-winning creator and director of Queen’s game for Netflix. And his next series will be Mister Spadein France, with Clive Owen.