On Scott Frank
A focus on Queen's Gambit, A Walk Among The Tombstones, Monsieur Spade, and Godless
Hey everyone,
Welcome back to our weekly letters on things I’m hyperfocused on. Maybe that's why my letters don’t get a lot of action; I'm pretty much writing them to see what I focused on that week. That's what a long break from doing something does-it gives you distance on what you did and whether it's just for you or for others. So here’s what I’ve figured out in the context of examining a creator I’ve grown obsessed with.
(A quote from Scott Frank on writing as a play in my spring journal.)
ONE—This one is mostly focused on my current deep interest: the work of Scott Frank, popularly known for his pandemic hit The Queen's Gambit. I'm halfway through, and I’m not sure I'll finish. It has a Mad Men problem. It is more a mood than about anything. The opening of the third episode destroyed me, though, and definitely pulled me in, but the fourth episode I've started and stopped twice, and it is, uhh... boring. It's actually quite dull. It is basically just Oliver Twist revised to be a woman chess prodigy in 1960s southern America. It fits in with Mad Men in the sense that it is suburban fiction. Like Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. My least favorite fiction in any medium, but unlike Mad Men, there are no compelling characters. Beth Harmon couldn't hold a candle to Peggy or Christina Hendricks’ characters, but then again, Scott Frank only had a little more than a handful of episodes with which to work. If he had 5 seasons to work with it might have been a different story. So I’m probably not being fair. So why is it that I find it not that interesting?
TWO—Scriptnotes with Scott Frank. At the height of Queen's Gambit fever around the election in 2020. I don't listen to the show because John August's voice is hard for me to listen to, but it's usually pretty nitty gritty in terms of the craft of screenwriting, and for the longest time, I didn't have much interest in screenwriting at all. This was a memorable time capsule to what wasn’t all that long ago but feels like forever ago. But the highlight I took from this is the focus on character, and I think it gave me a solution to my newsletter problem, and why I don’t even get any kind of response when I send these out:
And so, you know, if you spend a lot of time just thinking about who you’re writing about, every character. Even if they only have a line or two. They should be someone that’s understandable and readable. And so that helps you. Then when you get to your scenes you have all this information that you have that you can use to show, give it an attitude, what’s happening, how would they respond here, what would be the honest way they would respond. And maybe in your outline, they have to disagree here, but if it doesn’t feel like they would disagree then you need to either, A, have them agree and figure out what’s going to happen, or figure out what you did wrong where they’re not disagreeing anymore. It’s no longer true to the person you’ve created as opposed to again what the script says so.
But sometimes, it’s not really the content that’s the problem; it’s the character. I’m just sort of doing what everyone else has done in newsletters but only on the things that interest me, and that’s pretty niche.
THREE--Probably my favorite of all of Scott Frank's recent work was Godless, about a western mining town run entirely by women after most of the men die in a mining accident. that was compelling, from Jeff Daniels's performance to Scoot McNairy's going blind sheriff and Michelle Dockery's widow with her mixed-race son. It's the relationships that were interesting to me. From Dockery to McNairy to McNairy and his sister, played by Merritt Weaver, her relationship with the young gun deputy (Thomas Brodie Sangster), and Weaver’s relationship with the ex-prostitute turned teacher. Of course the relationship between Jeff Daniels criminal father figure to Roy Goode's (Jack O’Connell) that is the crux of the plot of the show is wildly interesting. And of course, the way it is shot in the natural world is really well done. This goes back to what I wrote about the sense of scale in
Dune 2—that’s something Frank often plays within his most recent work. The other thing is that there needs to be a sense of scale. Is to give this some more setting and that really it’s about the relationships. My relationship to you, the reader of these letters. What do you think? Are we in a good relationship or a busted one?
FOUR-A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES and MONSIEUR SPADE. Probably the most interesting thing about Frank's work is how he shifts between external and internal lives with his most recent work. Spade, which Frank directed all of the episodes but co-wrote with Tom Fontana, creator of OZ, is what happened to Sam Spade after the Maltese Falcon. He retired to Southern France. It's a beautiful show. Like Godless, it's about fatherhood, but it is almost entirely a foreign film. Most of it is in French. But Clive Owen's Humphrey Bogart impression is perfect.
WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES- quite a cast including a post Downton Abbey, pre-Legion Dan Stevens playing a drug dealer. This is a blending of the two states—a crime noir and a psychological drama in the form of Queen's Gambit and Spade. In fact, it's a bit of both, in the sense that both are crime fiction. This feature film, however, is adapted from the Laurence Block book. All except Godless are adaptations, and it's clear that Frank's strength is in adaptation, specifically in crime noir and Westerns. I'd like to see him do more Westerns, but I look forward to his adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which I'm reading now. I think that is one of my strengths is that I read everything. Even podcast transcripts.
FIVE--SHAKER. Check out my reading from the book, which is very much like a cross between Breaking Bad and The Fan. I loved the baseball angle, the 'dialogue' of the gang banger characters, and the main character’s back story.
From My Desk
I wrote a character analysis of John Candy and Dan Aykroyd's characters in The Great Outdoors, about my home in the outdoors of the Adirondacks, and what fatherhood means to me as taught by my dad and what I've read about Great Outdoors writer John Hughes.
But I think that’s maybe overall what I’ve learned from Scott Frank—is that character has to come first and not really content. Come at this from the reader’s perspective rather than just what I want to say, frame the whole thing around a setting, or the natural world, and finally talk about what it means to be a fan of something.
I think my favorite Scott Frank work is Get Shorty, Minority Report, and Logan.
I'd love to know what you think may be your favorite John Hughes or Scott Frank work.
Cheers,
Dave
Written in my backyard.