Scott Frank
Scott Frank is a writer, born 1960.
Frank spent most of his career as the writer other people's films were built on, and only lately became the name on the poster. He has two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, for Out of Sight in 1998 and Logan in 2017, neither of which is among the credits listed here, and a long list of film work both credited and uncredited.
Adaptation is the whole trade for him, and crime fiction is the material. What he is good at is patience with procedure: he lets characters do their jobs on screen, at length, and trusts that competence is interesting to watch. The Lookout, the earliest film he directed in this list, is a heist picture far more interested in a brain-injured man's daily routines than in the robbery. A Walk Among the Tombstones is a detective film that refuses to accelerate.
Netflix then gave him the format that suits him best. Godless is a western with a hole where its hero should be. The Queen's Gambit turned a chess novel into a genuine popular hit by treating the games themselves as the drama rather than an obstacle to it. Dept. Q and Monsieur Spade continue the pattern: crime stories at a deliberate pace, with dialogue that is written rather than merely functional.
His weakness is the same as his strength. When the material is thin, the patience reads as slack.
Movies (2)
TV (5)
Where to start with Scott Frank
Start with the miniseries everyone saw. The Queen's Gambit holds up as the best argument for him: a miniseries about a solitary discipline that never once explains chess condescendingly, and never mistakes montage for character.
Godless is the more ambitious piece of writing, slower and stranger, and worth the extra effort. Dept. Q is the most recent and the most conventionally satisfying of the crime shows, Monsieur Spade the most self-indulgent, in a way you will either enjoy or resent within twenty minutes. For his films as director, The Lookout is the sharper script and A Walk Among the Tombstones the better mood, a grim, unhurried detective picture that treats its violence as ugly rather than kinetic. Start with the miniseries, then go backwards to the features.