Gordon MacRae Blog

From a recent issue of The New Yorker, the subtle skill in finishing a screenplay, with Scott Frank. This from Out of Sight which doesn’t finish like the Elmore Leonard book, where Foley (George Clooney’s character) is merely arrested.

The film needed a small dose of hope, but one that was in keeping with Leonard’s “playfully sardonic tone”.

Frank has long been the amenable everyman for Hollywood directors needing a re-write. He said “yes” to everything that came along. Mostly from an anxious fear the work would run out.

By 2010s he was getting $300k a week for re-write jobs. But he wasn’t creatively satisfied. He directed The Lookout and A Walk Among Tombstones, neither of which did particularly well. He wrote a novel, Shaker which did worse.

But he found better success in TV, where scriptwriters weren’t hired hacks, they were auteurs. Given a creative license Hollywood never allowed.

In 2017 he wrote and directed Godless, then in 2020 came The Queen’s Gambit. He’s currently working on an opera with The Killers.