Frank knows when you’ll go to the bathroom

Scott Frank knows screenplays so well that he can predict the moment in a movie when an audience member will leave their seat for a bathroom break.

He intuitively senses the lapse in the narrative when things become predictable, and the viewer gets bored.

But Frank is not a screenwriter, or at least not a practising one.

He’s a script doctor.

“Perhaps the most in-demand script doctor in Hollywood”– according to Patrick Radden Keefe in the New Yorker.

Frank makes $300,000 per week fixing bad scripts, and most jobs last a few weeks. “Studios summon him to punch up dialogue or deepen a character or untangle a contorted third act.”

Although he’s often uncredited, he has worked on nearly sixty movies, including Saving Private Ryan, Night at the Museum, and Gravity.

Frank solves a painful and expensive problem as defined by the customer, not himself

That problem stems from the movie executive’s underlying fear, “What if this movie flops?”

Paramount spent an estimated budget of $70 million on Saving Private Ryan. There’s big money at stake here.

The movie grossed over $470 million at the box office–even bigger money at stake.

If there’s any sense that the script is broken somehow (but redeemable), executives will throw money at the problem to fix it, and they’ll throw it in the direction of the person they believe most likely to solve the problem–Scott Frank.

“Frank’s ability to offer solutions within an existing stylistic idiom makes him a chameleon…You’d be hard-pressed to find an executive or producer who doesn’t think of him first virtually anytime they have a problem on a script.” Nina Jacobson, Producer

He has a highly specialised skill of amending existing scripts (rather than throwing everything out and starting from scratch). That’s incredibly attractive to a movie studio that’s already invested time, money, and reputation on a script.

Here are three observations:

• The client’s overarching goal is to produce a hit movie that grosses multiples of the budget. Frank does not anchor himself to that goal. Outside of fixing the script, there are many components that determine whether this movie will be a hit.
• Instead, he anchors himself to a painful problem that the client acknowledges and recognises, and fears will block them from achieving the overarching goal. It’s unlikely to be the only roadblock to their goal, but it is a critical one.
• There are likely hundreds of other jobs a movie executive needs to do in order to produce a hit movie, some of which will be relevant and adjacent to Frank’s role as script doctor. He doesn’t take them on.
• He becomes the Undisputed Authority, the best in the world, at solving this one painful and expensive problem. That’s only possible when he commits to the long game and focuses all his energies on becoming the best at that specific thing.

Undisputed Authorities are Screen Doctors

April Dunford solves positioning problems for SaaS that believe they have a positioning problem. She doesn’t work on messaging.

Donald Miller creates clear messaging for companies, experiencing rapid growth, that know their story is getting lost. He doesn’t help you build out your social media content.

Nigel Green helps founders build and recruit elite sales teams. He doesn’t help you train sales teams to become elite.

Often, the only prospects looking for you to ‘own the entire problem’ are the ones at the shallow end of the pool. They don’t have the budget to hire specialists, so they hire a generalist who claims they can help develop a $500 million-grossing movie.

The most lucrative opportunities come from the firms looking for script doctors.

Maybe you’ve already found your version of script doctor.

If you haven’t, the question for you is:

“Amongst the problems I solve, which one is the most painful, as experienced and articulated by my best clients?”

What happens if you become the best in the world at solving that one problem?

P.S.Story on Scott Frank comes from this article in the New Yorker.