5 ms·
> For decades, Scott Frank earned up to three hundred thousand dollars a week rewriting other people’s screenplays "Decades" (plural) suggests this must have b
by kleiba 3y ago
> For decades, Scott Frank earned up to three hundred thousand dollars a week rewriting other people’s screenplays
"Decades" (plural) suggests this must have been at least 20 years. So let's see, what that would have made in the best case:
$300,000 * 52 * 20 = $312,000,000
Not the worst reason to keep that job.
- epmaybe 3y ago“Up to”
- kleiba 3y agoTrue. So, in the worst case, there was a single week where he earned that.
- grogenaut 3y agoIt's a newspaper article. It's very likely there was one week he was paid for the previous 5 years of messing around with a script all at once. Or it was actually a week and he holed up with some director for a week to save a show off the rails. Is this how the final season of game of thrones happened?
- simonw 3y agoThe New Yorker have an extremely strong reputation for fact-checking every detail in every one of their stories. A couple of fun New Yorker stories about that: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/09/checkpoints https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/09/checkpoints and https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/daniel-radcliffe-and-the-art-of-the-fact-check https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/daniel-radclif... I'd be really interested to hear what their fact-checkers came up with for this $300,000/week note!
- fieldcny 3y agoYeah so that’s the best case scenario, but it’s an absurd estimate. I can assure you the first years doing this were hard work and low pay. What point are you trying to make, that he was just doing it for the money?
- merrywhether 3y agoHe was doing it for the money (at least at the end)! That and the psychological safety of not doing his own things.
- kleiba 3y agoHonestly, I don't really know what point I'm trying to make or if I'm trying to make one at all. Sorry.
- owyn 3y agoThat's not how it works. It's literally in the article. For undivided attention on a script for a couple of weeks, for a movie that might have a budget of tens of millions of dollars, this is completely reasonable. The article also says he's worked on scripts for 60 movies in 20 years. So yeah, maybe 3 per year. How much is it worth to the studio to have Saving Private Ryan be a better movie? For such assignments, which are generally uncredited, he commands a fee that he acknowledges is “insane”: three hundred thousand dollars a week. Most jobs last a few weeks.