The Watch - Scott Frank on 'Monsieur Spade' and Lessons Learned From Over 25 Years of Screenwriting

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Chris and Andy are joined by screenwriter Scott Frank to talk about making 'Monsieur Spade' and what pulled him toward that adaptation (1:00), how he shifted from being primarily a script doctor to running his own shows (21:39), and how he feels about the shifting ways in which people consume TV and movies (41:49). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Scott Frank Producers: Kaya McMullen and Eduardo Ocampo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me in the studio, as always, is Andy Greenwald. The reason why the special introduction, Andy, is because we have a special episode today. We don't actually get a chance to do this too often, where we have an entire episode dedicated to an interview. But when we get a chance to talk to Scott Frank, we take it. Yes. Scott Frank, one of our favorite guests, one of our favorite screenwriters. You've heard us talk about him a lot.

You've heard his words and seen his movies and did. TV shows a lot. He was, he joined us in the past to talk about Godless on Netflix, Queens Gambit, big hit show on Netflix. We spent some of this year talking about his series that he did with the great TV creator Tom Fontana, Monsieur Spade on AMC. We also spent time talking about Patrick Radden Keith's profile of Scott that was in The New Yorker this year. It was such an incredible window into the world of screenwriting and into Scott's career. We love talking to him. I think it's important to be clear that we do talk about Monsieur Spade. and he wanted to talk about the ending.

In fact, he emailed us to insist that he come on to the podcast to talk about the ending, which we appreciated. I feel like this is not a spoilery talk, though. I feel like if you haven't seen Monsieur Spade, you should. It's awesome, even though we took some issue with some bits that we get into. I think that to hear Scott talk about the choices he made, I think it's interesting regardless of if you've seen the show, or even if you one day plan to see the show, I don't think it gives it away. And overall, I would tell people who maybe are looking, listening to the intro to find a reason to keep listening, I find talking to Scott really inspiring.

Oh, yeah. And exhilarating and a little bit moving because of his approach to story, his approach to writing his way and failing his way until he finds. Living his professional life is very inspiring. And living his professional life from being the best paid script doctor in Hollywood from the 80s and 90s into now being like, I'm going to do an opera with the killers. and Tommy Kale, the director of Hamilton. And a Nabokov adaptation. Yes, and if only someone would give me money to do,

Vladimir Nabokov's book. It's kind of cool because it's like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Scott Frank would be a pretty good answer. Yes. You know, he has credits including Logan. He did Minority Report. He worked on Out of Sight.

Heaven's Prisoners Get Shorty. These are some of his films. Of course, he kind of like debuted with Dead Again, the Kenneth Brana film, when he was just a pup. Now we get to talk to him about Mr. Spade and everything else. Thanks. And think anything else that we talk about without referencing Tom Fontana,

we make it clear who he is for people who don't know. He talks about Red Harvest, which is... That's a Datchel Hammett novel. That he's been chasing for a while, and then Spade kind of jumped the line in front of it. I asked him about something that I'm still dream of seeing one day, which is an adaptation of John D. McDonald's character, Travis McGee.

He had a script that we talked about years ago that he had written for James, mangled called the Deep Blue Goodbye. All that fun stuff is at the end. But I really feel like, as an antidote to some of the doom and gloom algorithm stuff that we have either been parroting or reacting to or feeling deeply in our bones, hearing Scott talk about what you can do creatively is a tonic for that. So, Mr. Spade, in case you've lost, the thrive with that, is on AMC. And I imagine you can stream it on AMC plus. And I think, you know, it's pretty easy to find through Amazon. We will be back.

So this is, we're recording this in advance because we're away. Yeah. So this is running next Thursday. You're hearing this on Thursday. I will figure it out. But we'll talk to you guys early and often. Don't worry about it. But we will not be back for a show on Monday.

Okay. Because we're traveling. Because we are traveling. Because we are traveling. With just so much content. So much. Basically, you know there was solo travel logs? Yes.

Imagine that, but like way, way, way long. But with two guys instead of one. Two guys. What if two guys? You guys are going to love it, but not as much as you're going to love this interview with Scott Frank. Andy and I are so happy to be joined by, I think this is his third time on the watch, legendary screenwriter, co-creator of Mr. Spade, one of our favorite shows of the year. He was the man behind Godless.

He has the man behind Queen's Gambit and have so many screenplays and films that we adore. It's Scott Frank. Scott, welcome back to The Watch. Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be three-piting. Where in the world do we find you right now? Because it seems like if I were making Monsieur Speed, I would never have left the set.

I'm home in New York City and West Village. So I'm here. But I am in between trips to Scotland. I've been shooting in Scotland and Edinburgh, Scotland. So I go back Saturday. Oh, my gosh. So that's actually a pretty good place to start, which is, are you enjoying this?

The last, whatever it is, I guess it's like eight years or eight or nine years since Godless. And now you are your own kind of mini industry where you do these long form TV series, limited series, where you're directing these episodes. It's a huge task, but are you enjoying this sort of chapter of your professional career? Very much, very much. I mean, it's bizarre. I've had a pretty lucky, happy career for 40 years.

You know, I started when I was 24 and this is all I've done. You know, that's all I know how to do. And so I would say there have been different chapters in my career as things have gone on. But this, since I moved to New York 10 years ago, since we've come here, I have to say, I don't know what happened or whether it's the water or the noise out the window that you can hear. that changed it, but something I just, I became more focused and maybe it's mortality, I feel, but it's definitely been a huge, huge change. And it's been flowing better for whatever reason. Well, I think we want to start. We want to get, we want the whole flow. And I feel like we have

enough time to cover it. But we do want to start with Mr. Spade, which, as you know, we were big fans of. We had attempted to talk to you. You were in Scotland. And then, you know, I don't want to fudge the details, but you banged on the door and you said, let me in. I have to come back on this podcast to talk to you specifically about the show. I don't know where you want to begin with it, because we have questions about how the entire process went, but I had a feeling that you wanted to come at us about the ending. I did.

I wanted to talk to you about the ending, which is controversial, to say the least. Did you know that? Did you expect that? Oh, yeah. I mean, anytime you write, you set people up for a kind of conventional solution, a sort of narrative that's sort of following something familiar. And then you introduce something brand new, like an alien, shows up. Or Alfred Woodard, yeah.

Or Alfred Woodard shows up, and suddenly everything's different. And I have always wanted to do that. I've always wanted to, ever since I saw absence of malice, and Wilford Brimley showed up at the very end of the movie, and completely cleaned house, I thought, I want to write a scene like that. You want to pull a Brimley. I want to pull a Brimley.

And I thought, you know, and you know Paul Newman is smarter than anyone in the room. He says, are you really that smart, sir? I think that I always wanted to do that. And Spade was never, this was always supposed to be. Originally, the show opened with him getting his prostate exam instead of it being three or four scenes in. was always supposed to go, okay, this is not your great-grandfather's Sam Spade. We're going to talk about what happens when these guys get old. Your male icons in particular, it's an absolutely unrealistic kind of life that they lead,

yet we all kind of admire them. Who doesn't want to be Humphrey Bogart and be smoking and drinking and do all those things until, you know, you're told you have emphysema and, you know, the young women are no longer, you know, attainable. And so I thought, what if he's older? I, you know, I really wanted to do something that sort of turned that all on his head. And what if he's older? What if he's not even living in his comfort zone anymore? He's married for crying out loud, which she would never be. And he's, he's not only married. He married someone age appropriate. He's living on a vineyard. He's a widower now. and growing grapes to make wine a drink he probably never had a sip of in San Francisco.

And so I thought all of that was interesting. And we emasculate him in the first couple of scenes. And in the end, getting back to the end, he's not the guy who shoots the bad guy. The constable does, the French constable. He does. He misses. He coughs because of his emphysema and he misses. And so ultimately, we know he knows.

what's going on, but he's not the one who sort of says it. Alfred Woodard comes in, and what she does is not so much solve it as take it away from every... That's really what she does, and that was sort of for me metaphorically interesting because we're taking away everything from Sam Spade, you know, in the course of the show. And Tom and I were sort of very aware of that as we were scribbling. Can you tell us a little bit about your collaboration with Tom? Because I I spent the first few minutes just sort of lauding this otorist phase for you,

but it was really cool to see two of my favorite writers collaborating on a piece about one of my favorite characters. And Tom Fontana, we're talking about for people. I assume that everyone listening knows exactly what we're talking about

at all times when it's about TV we love, but to be clear, Tom Fontana. Tom Fontana, going back to St. Elsewhere, to Oz, to, I mean, so many shows, homicide that he's been involved with.

He's a legend, and he's my neighbor. So it was really, geographically desirable. And one day we were having lunch, and I'm just a huge admirer of him and have learned so much from what he's done over the years. And we were having lunch, and I was going off to make the Queen's Gambit, I think. And I had Carlo Martinelli, who was one of the producers on, Monsieur Spade, had called me up.

and said, you know, I have the rights to the character, would you like to do something with it? And I said, well, the character's only in like a couple short stories in the Maltese falcon. Do you have the rights to the Maltese falcon? No. And I said, well, I don't know what to do with that. Plus, I'm really desperate to do Red Harvest. So I don't think that I want to get distracted because I've been chasing Red Harvest for forever. And I hung up and got in a lot of.

idea. It was the weirdest thing. I said no and was feeling good about saying no. And then I hung up and everything I just pitched to you sort of fell on my head. And so when I'm having lunch with Tom, I knew I couldn't write it and I knew I wanted to write it. And I thought, oh my God, the perfect partner is sitting here. And so I started to pitch him the idea. And I basically got as far as Sam Spade living in the south of France before he said, yes, I'm in. And then we just started meeting. once in a while we would we would have these conversations every couple weeks where we would scribble some ideas down and he Richard Belser who was in a homicide lived in a town called Bozool because I go where should we set it and

he said well Richard lives in this really cool town's like a big on the ground and so I looked at I went online on my phone and I was like oh my God let's I've never seen anything like that that looks really really interesting let's let's set it there. And the whole can be a metaphor for something. I don't know, maybe who knows, but we can figure something out. And then we're thinking, well, what year should it be? It's got to be. He's got to be of a certain age. And then we started talking about the Algerian war, because contextually in terms of what was happening in the country, a lot of sort of darkness came to visit. It's the same way the Vietnam War had a kind of shadowy effect on the culture and this country.

And we just started riffing back and forth. It was incredibly easy. We had no formal way of working. We just sort of wrote down notes and things. At one point, I wrote the opening scene in the doctor's office where he's told that he has to quit smoking and so on. And then we kind of, I had to go off and shoot. And he had to go off and he was working on City on a Hill. So we both sort of went away from it.

And while in during COVID, while I was in post on on Queen's Gambit, he said, I'm just going to rough out the first episode. And like three days later, he gave me, you know, 60 pages. And he kind of made it downhill. And then I thought, oh, my God, I love this. And then I took a whack at it and gave him probably 100 pages back knowing me. and he began just sort of helping, you know, he began editing it, and we began sort of, there are things he could do really well, there were things I could do really well, there were plenty of things I could not do at all, and so we just, it was very easy.

We passed it back and forth, and before we know it, we had a script. But it was a year or so of talking beforehand. I think one of the things that Chris and I love about this project, not just on the screen, but just in the conversation about it, is as fans of your work, as fans of Tom's work, and fans of exactly where you're describing. In our imagination, it's like two guys who know how to do this, working well together because you've done it before. He can sit down and you can rough out a script.

You can imagine what it's going to look like. I wonder if you could talk us through the collision between the ease with which you guys can do some things at this point in your career, having done many, many things, but also how you integrate the challenges because there were aspects of the show, whether it's like practical aspects of where you were shooting and how you were shooting, the language you were shooting in,

that were likely new to you. but then also the direction of it because it's not just you have directed before, but you were intentionally directing in a style that was calling back to Maltese Falcon and classic noir, but also trying to do something new. Right. In terms of the writing of it first,

I think that we, you know, if you watch the Maltese Falcon, you kind of never know where you are. I mean, I can't tell the story, story of it beat by beat, and I've seen that movie probably more than any other film, maybe, that and say the parallax view. But I can tell you the parallax view of beat for me. I cannot tell you the Maltese Falcon beat for beat. I can tell you lines. I can tell you scenes. I know what happens. I know what the gist of it is, but the road is so crazy. So we knew,

and that was sort of more my wheelhouse than Tom's. Tom's, Tom has a more straight ahead way of thinking and I have more diarrhea of the plot. And so we both sort of had to figure out how to reconcile that. And it turned out to work really well because we sort of helped each other. You know, he could simplify in those places where I needed to simplify and I could mess it up in those places where we needed to mess it up. And if you think about the Maltese Falcon, it gets messed up. It's character stuff that you're getting. The pleasure is not the plot. The pleasure are the scenes and the conversations and the characters. Everybody is after this bird, the black bird in the Maltese falcon. And our Maltese falcon is this little kid. Everybody is after this little kid.

In the end of the Maltese falcon, the one they have turns out to be fake. At the end of this, this kid, in my mind, isn't really what they say he is. And we actually shot a scene that said that. There was a, we had a couple scenes with a mathematician from Senegal. And she shows up from the University at Leone and the constable and his idiot brother both develop immediate crushes on her. And they brought her in to look at the numbers on the wall to tell them what it is. And she, in the end, comes back and she's got this very flat effect because she's clearly on some mathematical spectrum somewhere. But they're just completely in love with her and both stepping all, tripping all over

each other to get her to come have lunch with them. she comes back in the end and basically says it's nothing it's not a code it's not anything it's not it reminded her of a monk in some other country who just like to write numbers and symbols all day and he said so he's not brilliant he's not a genius and she said no he has great handwriting but he's not he's nothing and that was it and i can't believe you took a character away I don't want to talk about that I took a character away and I have mixed emotions about it But you shot this. Shot it.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's all there. And but so working out that kind of stuff and kind of us both figuring out and sort of saying Tom's sort of Jesuit background, he's sort of a, I don't know how he would call himself lapsed, reformed, once upon, still all of the above probably. But he, a lot of that thinking and knowledge and knowledge of the Bible and knowledge. knowledge of sort of the Catholic kind of ritual and the saints, all that's Tom. All that's Tom. Which one of you killed the nuns?

That would be, so I'm responsible for the dead nuns and Al for showing up at the end. But so I have to take the blame because I thought Tom would save me from myself when I showed him that. I said I have this crazy idea and I wrote that scene. and he liked it. And so we went with it. And I'll tell you something else, the Matthew Beard character

who plays the son of the British couple, the so-called the MI6 agents living next door, he was supposed to be on the bridge in the end. The bridge was supposed to be this incredibly confusing thing where everybody is going to converge on the boy at the same time. And the boy is going to go this way on the bridge, then this way on the bridge.

and nobody would end up having him. And in the end, he's gone. He ends up in the arms of the club owner, you know, because he just wants, you know, someone maternal. And Matthew Beard, the actor who played him, had COVID, the day we were supposed to shoot. I didn't know what to do. We're only in Bozou for 10 days because the rest of it we shot in a town called Sov,

where our crumb lives, which is amazing. And that's a whole other story. but we were in Bozul and we had to get out of there. So while I'm in Bozul, I have to figure out how to shoot and it's super complicated on the bridge because we have to cover for the action and cover for the rifle sites and it's a nightmare. And so I decided to kill him. And I would kill him before this scene happened, but we would shoot it back in Sov. And so I wrote the whole thing where she runs him over.

And I wrote the whole thing where he's suddenly, he's having this relationship with Gazala, the FLN operative. And they're basically going to steal the money. So again, like with the Maltese Falcon, it was another sort of little betrayal that we could put into it. And so that was- Teach that guy to get COVID. Yeah.

Or it seems like you, so she could get COVID to you. Like you sort of contained the problem. Well, it was a month late. Oh, you shot it late. So we could shoot that and I, you know, she runs him over and then backs over him. And so Tom and I could say to him, I'm in the middle of shooting. I could say I have this idea. How do we make this work?

And the way we would sort of work together is I could give it to him and then he could give it back to me. And we could lay it out. And it was just so easy. It was one and one equals three, which is what you just want with every collaboration. So that was the writing of it, certainly. I have a question that's both process and writing and maybe a little high-minded, so bear with me. But one of the things that we, in addition to being big fans of your work as a writer and director, we are also fans of your work as the subject of New Yorker profiles.

That was an excellent, excellent piece that we loved and talked about on the podcast. And one of the things that was Patrick Radden-Keefe, right, who wrote that. One of the things that he did was in order to communicate what makes a Scott Frank special to the layman audience, was to carve out a couple examples of scenes that he and I guess other people he spoke to as secondary sources are like, that's what Scott does. And it begins with the out-of-sight scene, the Samuel Jackson scene that sort of is all character

but also deeply connected to the story and moving us forward. In a lot of the examples that he's using and sort of in the crux of the piece is you moving from the guy who comes in and saves the day to the guy who's running the day in your own projects and directing them. When covering Monsieur Spade,

Chris and I were totally blown away by the scene where the other veteran of Algeria who's had his eyes put out is talking. This is an episode, I think, four or five. And it's just a show-stopping, literally moment when two characters that we were not tracking, one we had never seen before, deliver something that is unforgettable.

You could undo my entire question here by saying, oh, Tom wrote that when I wasn't there. But the bigger question I have is not just to celebrate that scene, but to talk about how you balance the Scott Frank moments, now that Scott Frank is in charge of the production. Do you know what I mean? Because that scene filled me with exhilaration and joy because there's room for it in a series like this.

And there's increasingly, like in movies, it feels like there's not room for scenes like that or moments like that. How do you put these scenes in and deploy them and also edit yourself if you are at the end of the day calling action and cut? Wow. I don't know what I do.

To be honest, it's a way of thinking. You know, it's why I have a big problem with people who supposedly teach screenwriting, you know, the books, the podcast, and so on, because I honestly couldn't, I couldn't boil it down. I, sometimes I get it right and sometimes I'll write a scene like the scene with the other veteran. And sometimes it's more controversial, like with Alfred Woodard showing up, you know? It's a thing that's out of time and out of place. But I just feel like the story needs it, you know.

and in every script, there's something that I feel like most people might cut out, but I feel like you need it so that at the very end, it adds to how you feel about it all somehow. And I don't know how. It's not a calculated thing for me. It's a gut thing. I guess, you know, I'm just, I'm looking at it and I just know I need, I feel like I need something here. And that happens while I'm shooting. I can, I'm watching what's happening with the character.

and I realize I need more from this person. Like even that little man who was following him everywhere and then shows up at Sam's house in the last episode, that scene was never in the script. I wrote that in the middle of shooting where he comes over and sort of explains because it resets who Sam is. It resets what everything is. It sort of relocates who all the players are

and the history of it and so on. And I just knew that we needed it. But then when I write, I can't write unless I can make people talk. And if I can't get them talking to each other, so then I realize if I can't make them talk, I don't have a character. I have a type or I have someone with a job, but I don't have a real character. And so the only way I'm thinking to answer your question not remotely is that I'm just thinking of when people start talking, who are they as a character?

And what is my instinct to make them a character? what kind of character, and if it's not there to go back and create plot, that will make it work. Or while I'm shooting to create plot, to create character, buttress character later, by adding scenes later,

because I don't know what to say to the actor. I feel like I don't have enough to talk to them about. Do you, when you're doing it an adaptation, well, I guess it's not an adaptation. This is a special kind of piece because it's obviously deeply rooted in the work of an author, but you're fashioning this new story with time, And I was wondering whether or not, obviously you love Hammett.

You were talking about wanting to adapt Red Harvest. But as you're making something that is set in a different era, has a different language for the most part, and certainly a different sort of maya. Like, do you feel the influence of perhaps other writers or other films and filmmakers that are not associated with noir, not associated with John Houston, not associated with kind of the hard-boiled detective films

that we both all of us love, but perhaps, you know, more languid, more pastoral, more whatever kind of of work that winds up influencing spade. Your spade. I'm sure that I do. I'm sure because I suck up everything, you know, and it's hard not to read something or watch something, and particularly read something and think about how the watch works and what they did and what the you know, and look at sentences sometimes or descriptions or just, you know, ideas for characters are much better in books than they are as a rule in scripts. With this, the trick was to be, okay, you want to ape Hammett as much as you can. You want to really have it be his kind of dialogue, but what you don't want to do is a movie where you're just adding a story to the Dashel Hamlet

Uber. You're just telling another, you know, Sherlock Holmes story or Marlowe's story or whatever. It's just a, you're doing it now. And I didn't think that was interesting. So this is a real feathered fish because it was about for me, you know, everyone is talking about, you know, the problems with the way we're taught to be men. And that's really what I was thinking about. More than anything is that he was confronted with that. He was confronted with a daughter. He was confronted with, you know, all sorts of things in his past. He was confronted with a wife who left him and finally, you know, being in love and what that meant and all these things. So I was, I'm sure I was thinking about John Updike as much as I was thinking up to Ashland. That's pretty much

all we think about. So this is a very safe, inside of us are two wolves. Yeah. You know, but there's so many people that I love to read. And so I'm sure a lot of that informs what I do because I'm sure I'm just sort of taking what other people have done and repurposing it. I think of a lot of my work is kind of collage that way sometimes. The playoffs are here and you can predict the action all the way to the finals with Fandul Predicts. Follow all the playoff dishes, swishes, wishes, and misses. Predict the spread, the total points and even the game winner. Sign up for Fandual Predicts and predict it from the count.

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So whether it's buying tickets at the game or grabbing a coffee, it earns unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Say it with me. The active cash credit card from Wells Fargo, be a two-percenter. Learn more at Wells Fargo.com forward slash active cash terms apply. Not to read too much into anything, but when you describe your version of Spade as a man who is sort of aging out of his moment and confronting a new reality. And then you talk about you and Tom meeting in the West Village and talking about story and structure and television, it's hard not to draw a couple parallels. And, you know, I'm thinking about,

I love the answer you gave a moment ago about how you are making this show based on your own internal clock, your own internal radar. Like it doesn't feel right. It's almost musical, right? There's a discordant note or there's a middle eighth. I don't understand music, only John Updike books.

But there's something missing there. That isn't really in favor, if it ever was in favor with our hyper-alorhythmed moment, you know, where everything has to be planned in a different way, written to serve something else. When you and Tom get together, or again, there was this beautiful moment in the New Yorker piece where our other podcast pal, Tony Gilroy, is a part of it too, and there are these, you guys got these like, you know, these great lions meeting somewhere

in the West Village to talk about this stuff. What do you say about this moment of writing and where you guys fit into it and your ability to do things the way that, you know, again, we feel things should be done within the system that exists now? And that can be, you can take that in a hundred ways because I'm realizing that is an enormous question to get your arms around. Yeah, because you're asking about me and you're asking about what's happening. Let's ask about you first. Let's start with character and get the character talking. And then we can do plot. And then we can do plot later. I feel fine. I mean, I've always been able to, it takes a long time, but I've always been able to tell my

stories. And people don't say yes right away. Some things they've still yet to say yes to that I'm still going to try and get made. And I feel like it's changing so much that to try and locate myself in it and have a plan is impossible because of technology, because of economics, because of taste that could be also driven by the first two. It's hard to sort of place yourself anywhere. And the only thing I can trust, my only fastball, as Bill Golden used to say, is I can spin yarn.

I know how to spin yarn. I don't know how I spin yarn, but I know how to do it. And I can talk about the things I focus on and my way of thinking, but I don't know that there's any secret. Sometimes I get it wrong. I get it wrong way more than I get it right.

And I know Patrick talked about all these projects I worked on that, you know, I may have fixed or may not have fixed, but there are a lot more that I have improved into a failure. you know, have really not done well with. And so there's no rhyme or reason to it. And I remember finishing the Queen's Gambit, for example, and thinking, all I thought was I was so grateful that they let me make it finally. I was so happy. The experience was great. I said to my wife, I said, I don't think anyone

will see this, but I'm so happy I got to make it. And in fact, while I was shooting it, all I could think of was how much better directed Godless was than this. And my bar is always just not be embarrassed, which is why I should never speak in public. But that is that sort of, you know, the thing for me. And so I don't know. And I just, I think if I try and figure it out to answer your question too much, I think I'll get lost and get frozen. And I think what's been so good about what's been happening the last 10 years is I've just sort of fallen forward. And, you know, Patrick wrote about letting go of a lot of anxiety, which made me too careful. And I think the only thing I could say is not a creative thing. It's just an approach thing,

which is I'm just less careful now. And sometimes I fail and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But, you know, they say you learn a lot more from when it doesn't work than when it does. And that's the truth. I would also say it's a faulty construction to suggest that you are sort of an older animal surviving in a newer ecosystem because you have, first of all, no disrespect meant, but second of all, what you do have, and clearly, you know, when you've been on podcasts with us, when you're talking to Patrick, like, you're excited about a lot of things. And one way to stay working in this insane industry is to be excited, right, and to have a lot of irons in the fire because you cannot control the fire. And that feels like that's something, I don't know if that you've always been that way, but that seems to be your North Star. I've always been that way. I've always been enthusiastic and anxious at the same time, which is a very tricky push me, pull me. But I know that, you know, I really, I love what I do. I was so afraid I wouldn't get to do what I wanted to do when I was younger. And I was so, I was on the Paramount Lot at 24 years old and I thought I was behind. I honestly believed, you know, you. you know, two years after graduating college, that took too long. And I had this weird, skewed idea because all I wanted to do was make shit up. And the fact that I could get paid for it, all of that

felt, felt very good, you know. And I am always working on lots of things because if you spend, I have friends who can only focus on one thing at a time, and it's probably better. And they, that thing doesn't happen after five years. And I wrote Godless in two, 2004 as a film. And if I had just been trying to get that made, at a certain point, I feel like, you know what? The universe is saying, let go for a minute. Because letting go sometimes is the best strategy to having something happen, to making something happen.

And, you know, Queen's Gambit, Bill Horberg showed me that script, I mean, that novel 15, 20 years ago, I think. And we tried at several occasions to get that made. The lookout was an eight-year hall. Walk Among the Stones was, you know, nine or ten years. And so occasionally they come together quickly like a miss year spade, but mostly they don't. The Department Q, the thing I'm working on, I've had the rights to since for 15 years. And I wasn't even going to write any of them or direct any of them.

And I'm writing all of them and directing five of the eight of them. And I'm having a ball. And I didn't think I would. I didn't. It was not something I had planned to do, but I'm really enjoying it. So, you know, other projects and other genres, I feel like if you plan too much, you can't plan because you have no control. You only have control when you're by yourself sitting in a room.

And even then, it's you feel like you have the flu where you know you'll get better. But right, you feel miserable. It's interesting. Sorry, because there's one more thing on this idea of like what you can and can't control. It's so possible and so maddening, I think, that many people who have the career that you do or you're in the same field have careers that are essentially iceberg. where they're living desperate for projects, working hard, writing things that might be beautiful, 90% of the time, but they're never seen.

I think about someone who I don't know if you've ever crossed paths with at Cafe Clooney or whatever, but like Todd Field didn't make a movie for 16 years. And the perception from some is like, he was really sharpening tar. Like he was just getting that diamond sharp. But that's not the case. He had 20 other things, right, that fell away in the meantime. Do you think it is this ability that you have now at this. moment to stay up on all of these things and pivot. Do you feel like that's later in your life

and career ability? Or is that the advice they should be teaching in screenwriting programs instead of how not to kill the cat? Two things. One, I'm not sure it's an ability so much as it's an attitude, you know, so much as, like I said, there are plenty of things. I have failed at getting made, you know, that I haven't been able to get. I've tried plenty of things. And there are certainly periods in my career right after the lookout where I wandered in the woods, working on lots of different things, you know, getting paid, but nothing was really happening. And it's the only reason I made a walk among the tombstones was just to kind of juice my life a little bit. You know, I never planned on directing it. I'm not sure there's anything personal in that movie, but I felt like I needed to move,

just be moving in some direction. And I'm glad I did. But right after that, I made a pilot, Hoke for FX that I loved, that they didn't pick up. Willaher. Yeah, with Paul Giamatti. But because they didn't pick it up, I had all this time in front of me to do nothing because I had really planned on writing that show. And so I wrote my novel that I'd wanted to write for 12 years. I finished it, you know?

And then while I'm doing that, Jim Mangold calls me up and keeps annoying me while I'm in the writer's room in the village and saying, can you know, look at Logan for me? and he kept sending me scripts that one after another that he'd been working on worse. And finally, I didn't want to do it. I just didn't want to do it. But then I have some time. I finish the book. And I say, I have six weeks before I have to go off and prep godless.

Let's do it in six weeks. And we wrote the whole thing that way, which is unusual, which will never happen again. But he, like Tom and I, have a very easy collaboration. and we're able to make the other one better, you know. And so I don't know. It just changes. And I think you just have to know it's going to change and you kind of follow the momentum. And sometimes people, something dies and they're still trying to till this hard pan.

And I think, nope, you got to wait until it rains and go somewhere else now. And for teaching, there's a fundamental thing that's happening now. because everybody can game anything now, including art. And so the algorithm is a great way to sell things. It's not a great way to decide what to make things, what to make, what things to make. And screenwriting, books, podcasts, film school, it's all about analyzing. It's all about looking backwards at something, not creating something. And then deciding what something is by looking back at it.

And I don't think that's a way to teach anyone anything. There was, when my kids were very little, there was a company called, I think they were, I don't want to say what they were, because maybe they'll get mad at me. But they said we could teach anyone how to draw. Yeah, I agree. Classes there. We can teach anyone how to draw. And what they would do is you would have an object or something you would copy, a picture you would copy,

and you would turn it upside down. And so you're copying it upside down. So you're not looking at it as the thing. You're analyzing it. And it's much easier to copy something when you're analyzing it rather than reproduce something real. And so you're just copying it. And when you turn it right back, right side up again, it looks kind of like the thing that you were drawing. And same with the way they teach writing. They turn it all upside down. So when people turn their scripts right side up again, it's all been analyzed and they know where things go

and what it is, they kind of look like scripts. Everything's in the right place, but they're these cold, things. And so what, you know, somebody's as singular as Todd Field, it's going to be a very narrow target in terms of who will connect and who will, you know, be able to support the way he thinks, you know, and not every, sometimes getting it made is the worst thing. There are times where there are people who wanted to make something I knew we're not going to see it. It's why I walked away from, you know, the monkey movie when Scott Ruden and I were going to do the eight movie way back because I knew I would never make that particular studio. It was going to be a nightmare, and I don't know how to fight those kind of fights and remain vigorous on the set.

So all of these things are happening and you can't control any of them. You can just control your reaction to what's happening and you can stay calm and you can try and figure, you know, sit with something for a while, the disappointment, whatever it is, and then figure out what to do next that will feel good or will make the process downhill. And it's always different. That's the thing. There is no way. That's why it's screenwriting classes and all that.

Anything beyond a workshop is useless. How to pitch, how to write a thriller, how to write a comedy, how to outline. That's all nonsense. It's all nonsense. All you can do is write and fail and learn from going in the wrong direction. There is no right direction. That's why when studios say, can I have an outline? I can say you can have an outline, but there's,

the movie's going to be different by the time it's going to change on page two. You mentioned something when you were talking about the different variables that affect what you do as a profession. You were talking about technology and the economics of it. You mentioned taste. And as somebody who has spent such a long time in this business and has obviously got a personal affection for things like the Parallax View and the Maltese Falcon, do you sit here where you are today in 2024 and think?

I think, wow, taste is much different now than it was. The general story watching public's taste is much different now than it was in, say, when out-of-sight was made or when the parallax view was made. Or do you think that there's a consistent through line of what audiences respond to, whether it's on TV or in films? Well, I think they respond to good story no matter what. That's why documentaries became the best American film format, you know, format, because they were curating character and then creating a story from all that character that they had gathered up and sorted and rearranging. It's why podcasts like cereal and so on are so good because we love story and that will never change.

How we take in story changes, our patience are, you know, we learn the language so we jump ahead. That's tricky because, again, it's a gaming thing where you're watching. the audience can game the story too and just want to jump ahead. But what they don't end up with is what I said earlier, which is you get to the end and you feel what you're supposed to feel instead of simply understanding what it is you're supposed to feel. And a good percentage of the jobs I did as rewrites on films that were already shot,

we're fixing the fact that they'd cut out everything that mattered in the first part of the film in service of pace. And so, and again, people want things faster. again, I think that's an attention thing too. People have so much, there's so much distraction now, and people are able to do, I watch people walk into a restaurant, watch them.

The first thing they do is out comes their phone, not looking around, looking at the place, taking it in. Out comes their phone when they sit down, you know? Everyone on the train is just looking at their phone here, and everyone is, we're distracted, it's not just the phone, it's you have all sorts of things to watch that compete for your attention.

you have YouTube, you have TikTok, you have television, you have movies, you have, do you go to the theater, do you stay home? Sometimes I spend two hours at home just trying to figure out what to watch. I go to bed and that's the movie. That's basically the thing and I mark things to watch later and do I look at those things I've marked to watch later on Criterion or Netflix or whatever? Sure, do I watch them sometimes? But it's like you're just, so the distraction changes the way people approach it too. You know, if you're going to go to the movies now, you need a real reason to go to the movies or have a certain kind of life where you're going all the time where it's part of the rhythm of your life.

So that's really what I think I meant. You found a really nice home in television at the moment making these series that we love and we're eager to see more of. What is your personal feeling about where movies might be going or might be coming back to versus where TV is going and might be coming back to? And again, I appreciate earlier on. You made it about, you know, you focus more. on what you can control and your experience in it, which is relatively unique at this moment. But, you know, from an era when,

even when you talk to you for Queen's Gambit, there was the sense that, well, all filmmakers are pouring into television because you can finally tell story and have character to a moment when everyone, you know, people I'm talking to are like, we can't get anything made in TV anymore. I think I'll just write a feature

and see if we can get Netflix to give me $15 million to make it or whatever. Do you sense that movement? Do you have optimism on either side of the ball? I don't know if it's optimistic. It's more just like the reality is Hollywood moves like a school of fish where they all turn and do everything at the same time. And they learn every lesson to a fault. And so right now it's, you know, no period pieces. Of course, then Shogun comes out and is wonderful. You know, no, you know, know this, know that. No more limited series. Now we're not buying limited series. Now over the years I've heard so many things. You know, know this, know that. Only this. We're looking for that. And by the time you generate what they're looking for they've moved on. They've changed their minds. The school of fish has turned the other way. Right now, it's like, you know, they're, they want shows like suits or procedural or sets like network

television. You know, they actually are, it's looking a lot more like network television. And when network television was eating the movies lunch in terms of audiences, movies became more interesting because a television was green acres and whatever it was in that period that brought the 70s, great films of the 70s. Right now, if streaming and television and TikTok all becomes the same kind of thing, going for the same algorithm, you know, there's going to be no difference. It's the snake that eats its own tail. Movies are going to become interesting again. And now people were saying, oh, reason to be a movie, it has to be a huge spectacle or superhero or something.

Well, that's now been proven wrong. And people will go see an interesting movie. They'll go see. What are the economics of that, though? So I would say it's probably good for movies, and I desperately want to make laughter in the dark as my next thing. I really want to make that movie. I don't know if anyone will let me because it's tricky. But I would love to make movies, too. I miss them. But the economics of it are going to be, you know, going to determine whether or not what kind of story you get to make. And I do think that there are a lot of films, certain genre films in particular, that people will go see. in the theater. And so I don't think movies will ever go away. I just think it's going to be, it's going to contract. That business is just going to seriously contract. And through, and by the way, it's the studio's fault. It's the audience's fault because nobody wants to go see

anything that might be a little different. They, they're all supporting audiences are like a school of fish as well, because nobody wants to be left out. I count myself in that, you know, oh, I should go see Dune part two in the theater. I should really go. I shouldn't see that. I should go see Civil War in the theater, you know. And so there are certain times where I'm motivated by that, both in good ways and bad ways.

And so it'll all get smaller. TV is going to continue. They haven't figured out how to simplify that nobody could watch Mr. Spade. The AMC folks were so lovely to make the show with, but nobody could find it. Nobody knew how to watch it without commercials. And I made it to stream not to be interrupted with commercials. And I kind of naively thought, well, maybe they'll drop them all at once

because it would have been better to watch that show two at a time. But I didn't, you know, there's too many places to go right now. And so it needs to contract. There are too many shows and too many channels, both. And so it will, that doesn't mean it's going away if it's adjusting. That's the thing. that's the big thing. One thing that we love about any chance we have to talk with you is that you, at least with us and maybe even with Patrick, you use these forums like The Secret, like you put things out into the world, and then hopefully they'll come back.

When we talked to you about Queen's Gambit, you told us about Monsieur Spade. And it and we got to see it and we got to enjoy it. We get to talk to you again about it. Wanted to save a little time at the end of our talk for a rundown of your excitement levels. Is there a potential, we'll start here. Is there a potential for more spade? Is that something you'd like to do? Is that something? I would love to do it. I think that USC.

AMC is in the process of sort of rethinking a lot of things. And they would love to have another season. I think there's some behind the scenes business deals going on that I think might be great for the company and might enable us to do it again. And I would love to see Sam Spade in 1968, San Francisco, have come back because Teresa's run away to go see what her, you know, where her mother was from. And she's now 22 and joins the People's Temple and Jim Joan. He has to come get her. There it is. You have Vietnam.

You have the Black Panthers. You have the FBI. You have Hayd Ashbury. You have all of this stuff. And he's more a fish out of water at where he came from at home than he is. France. I don't know if I can do Sam Spade at a dead show. It's just, it's just like, I think the bigger obstacle is, you know, we got to the chance to talk to Clive, who is so wonderful, and he made it clear he would do this forever as long as he could go to France

forever. So Sam, the Bay Area is lovely. Yeah. You're in a great house in France. He was very, clythe, Clive knows that I'll live. But, but, um, I could do that. I have an idea for France. I have an idea for all sorts of things. But yeah, I mean, I would love to do if people watch department queue. I've had such a good time. I would love to do another one of those. I don't know. I want to do laughter in the dark, and I have a few other feature ideas that I would also love to do. We'll see. I have to finish my Killers opera. We didn't even talk to you about that. That's, that's an amazing. Talk about Venn diagrams. I think you and Brendan have now been on this podcast equal number of times. So we have to get you both on this podcast.

you're writing an opera with the killers. Yeah, yeah, based on their whole catalog. And Tommy Kale, who... Hamilton and... Yeah, I mean, who's the best. And talk about enthusiastic. I'm, you know, like comatose compared to Tommy. He got the rights to their whole catalog.

And I think... thought, what a great writing exercise to pull out 20 or 30 songs and see if they tell a story. What story could they tell? So it doesn't feel like a jukebox musical. It feels like Tommy, like a concept, like you're reconforming or configuring some songs and maybe changing a little bit here and there with the lyrics, maybe writing a few new songs like Brandon's been writing a couple new songs, and maybe you could tell a different sort of story. and Tommy Cale said maybe it should be like an opera and I'd never

you know I don't go I don't even know how to do any of that so I thought that's the best reason to do it to just try it and not feel old and try something new and I did it all on spec in case it's terrible and we've kind of put it up parts of it the music on its feet to see how it would sound

and I have to finish that and I got sidetracked on apartment queue, and I need to finish that. And Megan Abbott and I need to finish the script for laughter in the dark. Right. And I'm going to do Red Harvest with A24. It's just getting right squared away. We're going to do it as limited, though, because otherwise it'll be all plot. And so I'd like to kind of find what's going on in between the pages there. Yeah. Just as a free idea, Sam Spade can be in the Killers Opera and just call it Samstown. Right? You could.

Oh, that's good. That's good. I also am loving the fact that we could just have the Scott Frank multiverse kind of like... No, but this is what I was going to say. The Scott Frank Multiverse is in our podcast continuity because it's not just D. MacDonald and John D. MacDonald and John Updike all at the same time. It's also Brandon Flowers and our friend Megan Abbott. And like, this is all happening together.

We feel very invested. And Megan Abbott and I are doing Red Harvets together. So, and she got her Ph.D. in film noir, I think. And she's so much fun. And we had a ball on laughter in the dark, a ball. And did it like the way Tom and I did it, you know, just sort of back and forth and just kind of, and we'll do Red Harvest. And they're just this right stuff that we have to, we have to sort. And I also have a face in the crowd, my Elvis Costello musical, that, you know, do you remember the singing detective?

Yeah. I've always wanted to do something like that. And so we're going to do it as, with Ryan Johnson, we're going to do it as a limited kind of series like the singing detective, but only a face in the crowd. And the Bud Schilbert novel is so good. It's actually a novella. It's so good.

And I love the movie, too. I mean, the movie's amazing. But so, and Elvis has already written all the songs. That was good of them. I mean, I feel like, Scott, you're giving us both great information, great perspective, but also just great modeling, because I think the secret, hopefully, to a happy life is to always have a chance to be surprised and to say yes to things.

And you are living this truth in a way that is... I definitely, at the end of these pods, when you list off what you're working on, it feels like someone shot cold brew into my eyeball. So it's just like... This is our version of Kevin Feigey standing up at Comic-Con being like it in 2026. Guess what's coming?

You know what will happen. People will print this. I remember last time I thought, oh my God, I read after we did this, all the stuff I was working, I thought, oh, my God, what happens when I don't do that? Because often, you know, I'll think about doing something or I'll start to do it or I'll talk about it and it's out there in the world because in the days of the internet, everything is instantly, you know, made visible. So it's it's pressure. I realize before I came on, I go, man, I better not tell them everything. You did. Wait, last one.

Because this is... Anytime I have a chance to talk to, I have to do a Travis McGee check. Is that Jim Mangold still... Is that still a thing maybe one day? Are you... Not for me. I mean, I love the script we did and we were going to do with Christian Bale and I think that would have been a really fun thing.

It was... I'm not sure that... I don't know. I'm curious to see how they do that one. I'm curious to see it because it's so of its time. And if you do it in its... time, if you do it in period, it just feels kitschy now. It won't feel, I don't know that you can do it in a way that means it. And the idea of that guy, the idea of a guy with that philosophy is interesting,

but I'm not sure, I'm not sure I, I'm not sure I cracked it. I like the script. I'm not sure how much it was a real Travis McGee script. It's interesting. Yeah, because I think the thing, maybe we said this last time, but the thing that's so special about that character to me is that he was a man in time when the book started and then gradually fell out of time over the 20 books until in the 80s there's drug violence and he's like none of this makes sense we're destroying the planet but even that now is a period piece even that now is a period piece so I don't I'm not sure you know inherent vice kind of did it in its own way I feel like that stuff becomes becomes harder and you all you're doing it's like what I was saying about wanting spade to be different is you're doing that character now

I need to find a reason why I want to use that character to explore something instead of just update it, you know. And I feel that way about Red Harvest too. Instead of just sort of doing it, what else can it be about that I connect to? I cannot wait for all of those things. Or none of them. Whatever you choose to do instead. This is a safe, supportive place. The next time we talk, it may be so.

You've had all these years. Scott, what happened? Scott, how does it feel? Logan, too, was a weird pivot. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't, you never struck me as a Deadpool guy, but well done. And yet. Scott Frank, thank you so much for joining us.

We'll let you go. It's always just such an amazing honor to get to hear, hear about the world of screenwriting and the world of storytelling from music. Thanks so much for spending your time and being so generous. You're welcome. It's an honor to be here and always a lot of fun. Come back again.