> “There is something so vulnerable and frightening about doing your own thing, because it’s your fault if it doesn’t work. And then there’s this other kind of work, where you’re paid an extraordinary amount of money, you’re the hero before you walk in the door, you’re not even held that accountable, because you have a limited amount of time, and all you can do is make it better.”
This quote from Frank resonated with me as very similar to software dev. It’s so much psychologically easier to work a day job than even small side projects. And that’s for a variety of reasons but I normally focus more on the “mechanical” obstacles like context-switching and the difficulty of shapelessness. But with enough reputation your job can also give rise to something of a “risk-free” external-affirmation loop that your brain doubtlessly pushes you to keep spinning.
Frank's transition from script doctor to top screenwriter mirrors a classic dev story: a shift from fixing bugs to building entire systems. His journey underscores the universal truth in creative fields: mastering the basics leads to groundbreaking work.
From reading the article it sounds like he first wrote his own scripts, had one of them produced, then adapted a couple of novels. After the success of the adaptations he was "inundated" by rewrite job offers.
One thing that leapt out at me, is the use of the deeply archaic spelling "coöperating" (with the 'ö') which I love — is that a thing the NYT is generally doing these days?
(Although I wonder if it's a way they can track people ripping off their content).
The New Yorker (not NYT) has used diaeresis in their style guide since they started and have stuck with it ever since.
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Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just getting started, someone decided that the first misread and the second was ridiculous, and adopted the diaeresis as the most elegant solution with the broadest application. The diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most.
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(2) Including commas for nonrestrictive apposition, even when there is no possibility of a restrictive interpretation:
When he died, in 2004, his books and exhibitions were too numerous to count, and his magazine work had been published all over the world in the best publications.
I read "Maltese Falcon" in the eighties. I remember vividly that story about Flitcraft, even if I had forgotten where it came from. It's really powerful.
That'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.
It'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?
