His time to call the shots

“JUST wanting to be a screenwriter is like just wanting to be a co-pilot.” Attributed to the late John Gregory Dunne, this maxim summarizes not only the institutional bias most working film scribes must overcome but also the toxic peril of shame, humiliation and worthlessness that is the default state of most writers. It’s what dean of screenwriters William Goldman manifested as the “Slough of Despond” in his original script for “The Princess Bride.” So when A-list screenwriter Scott Frank had such a charge leveled at him across the table at a friendly lunch -- by Lawrence Kasdan, he of “The Big Chill,” and “Grand Canyon,” no less -- it had roughly the same effect as the angel with a flaming sword in the Delacroix painting who expels Adam and Eve from paradise.

“He asked me what I was doing, and I said I was working on a rewrite and thinking about doing this or that,” Frank recalls. “And he really let me have it: ‘That’s what you said to me a year ago! When are you going to direct?’ And I went home after lunch nauseous. I was haunted by that: ‘Why haven’t I done it?’ ‘What am I waiting for?’ I hadn’t directed up to that point for the simple reason that my kids were very small and I didn’t want to be away from home for that long. And then my wife said to me, ‘You have to quit hiding behind us.’ ”

The result -- in a circuitous, perhaps overly plotted fashion -- is “The Lookout,” Frank’s directorial debut after nearly two decades in the service of other people’s visions. It is the story of a night watchman at a small-town Kansas bank engorged with USDA money -- a high school football star (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) with future to burn who is suddenly reduced to a brain trauma casualty in the blink of a head-on collision on graduation night -- and the ex-con and his stripper moll (Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher) who target him as their inside man. But as a design problem of how someone with diminished mental faculties can outsmart his far more cunning predators, it’s an elegant a demonstration of the screenwriter’s axiom “character is plot,” as well as of what a promising director stands to gain from a textbook script.

“Many writers want to direct because they feel they’ve been ill served by a director,” says Frank. “I’ve been incredibly well served by the directors I’ve worked with. I’m probably the least bitter writer out there. But for the past 20 years, I’ve always felt inadequate or that I don’t deserve success or that I’m a fraud ... Every writer feels this way. But my way of dealing with it was organized around pleasing people. “But I was increasingly unable to locate myself in my own stories. I know they were well written and well constructed, but myself -- my personal self -- was not there. What was missing were my personal tastes and wants and my aesthetic -- just a little small dollop of myself.”

A boyish 47 despite a day job that has broken most of the great writers of the American Century (see Fitzgerald, Scott: Act 2), Frank sports an easy affability that would seem at odds with his chosen profession -- at least as it is portrayed to us in the movies. Married (his wife, Jennifer, is the sister of director Phil Joanou) with three children and living in Pasadena, the screenwriter’s new suburbia he might be said to resemble Clark Kent, if not exactly Superman.

Frank grew up in Los Gatos, Calif., the son of an airline pilot, and enrolled in UC Santa Barbara during the Iranian hostage crisis of the early ‘80s, where he envisioned a column for the student newspaper written by a precocious (and fictional) child genius who could explain the unraveling world. That character eventually became the eponymous 1991 film “Little Man Tate,” which established Frank as one of the premier purveyors of character in an industry that too often cuts just that corner when mass-assembling its product.

And yet, Frank almost immediately found his way into scripting these whirling clockworks of plot at apparent odds with his designated talent: “Dead Again,” “Malice” (written under the watchful eye of Goldman, and on which he shared a credit with Aaron Sorkin) -- even “Minority Report,” one of two scripts he worked on for Steven Spielberg (the other is “Saving Private Ryan,” for which he did not receive credit). Also among these are the two best adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s pulp novels (and yes, that includes “Jackie Brown” and Jim McBride’s Showtime-only “Pronto”): “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight,” for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

And if adapting Leonard seems little more than transcription, consider “Be Cool,” the dead-on-arrival “Get Shorty” sequel, or the upcoming “Killshot,” which just completed six weeks of reshoots. In “Out of Sight” alone, Frank relocated the point of view from FBI agent Jennifer Lopez to bank robber and hapless dreamer George Clooney (significantly raising their profiles in the process), introduced the Albert Brooks character at the center of the caper and invented the film’s most memorable lines: On having saved his bacon back in prison, Clooney tells rich guy Brooks, “You were ice cream for freaks!”

“There’s some indefinable quality that a fully realized story has,” says “The Lookout” producer Walter Parkes, also a screenwriter, “and it has to do with merging satisfying story structure and an intimate character dynamic. And those two things rarely co-exist in the same writer or the same script ... There is also a very positive quality Scott has when he sits down and talks about a script. He’s able not only to communicate his fixes but to communicate his confidence in succeeding. And this is not a small talent, given the dollars and egos that are being tossed about.”

“Character is everything -- for me,” says Frank of the plot-character debate, one he occasionally carries on with fellow screenwriter Gary Ross (“Seabiscuit”). “Gary and I get in this argument, where he thinks that’s crap. But there is a specificity that comes with knowing character. I define a character by what they want. Because then, if you’re reading or watching the story, you’re going to want what they want -- or at least understand or empathize with it. I couldn’t write ‘Minority Report’ until I came up with the notion that [Tom Cruise’s character] is two people in one, because I kept asking myself, ‘What kind of fascist would ever support this system?’ But when I hit upon the notion of a person being deluded by grief, there was an interesting contradiction, so that by day he could be this operative of a police state, and at night he’s jogging into the inner city to buy drugs, to better communicate with his dead son. There’s a contradiction there that you can write to -- and it suggests plot.

“If he’s just a cop, there’s nowhere for me to go -- it’s hardpan; I’ve got nothing I can excavate ... In ‘The Lookout,’ what’s really interesting is this guy wrestling with an identity he didn’t choose. He’s a guy who has had this new life foisted upon him, so he resists that and tries to be who he was, even though he knows that’s impossible. And that’s what is most interesting in painting his sadness.”

The script had legs

FRANK first pitched “The Lookout” in 1997, immediately after “Out of Sight” had wrapped, to Parkes and his wife, Laurie MacDonald, Spielberg’s in-house production executives at DreamWorks at the time. There it came close to being made twice -- the first time with director Sam Mendes, after his success with “American Beauty,” also at DreamWorks, and the second with David Fincher, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Meanwhile, in the decade it went unmade, “The Lookout” acquired a reputation as one of the great unproduced screenplays. Faced with the prospect of rewriting it yet again, Frank decided to look a little closer to home and declared himself the director. DreamWorks promptly put the film in turnaround -- a process that Frank maintains they made painless for him -- and producers Roger Birnbaum and Gary Barber picked up the slack.

“You know, it just sometimes happens that a project nearly gets made at a studio two or three different times, and as a result they become a bit gun-shy,” says Parkes.

And yet one need look no further than the director’s commentary track on “Out of Sight,” the film experience that Scott considers his most satisfying, to sense the residual frustration that must be the screenwriter’s perpetual lot or to find the seeds of his decision to direct.

In a good-natured but spiky exchange, Frank and director Steven Soderbergh relive what sound like old wounds that haven’t quite healed over. “You’re describing that in a way that’s a lot less heated than when you saw the dailies,” says Soderbergh. “I remember you called me and said I was turning the movie into a sitcom,” he says.

Goldman -- whom Frank calls his rabbi -- is also one of the few top screenwriters to resist the siren call to become a director. “When you read enough screenplays, talent just jumps out at you,” says Goldman of his one-time protege. “Tony Gilroy, Scott Frank, Aaron Sorkin -- you can tell: If God smiles on him, this kid can do it. I never saw a screenplay till I was 33 years old. Now there are kids who are retired at 33. I think it’s all about power and control. A lot of screenwriters get so fed up with the stuff they have to take.

“Scott will direct other movies, if this one works. Once they taste it, it’s very hard to go back to no power.”

As it turns out, Frank has a flair for directing. Taking pains to stay out of the way of the script, his debut is a streamlined exercise in dramatic economy (shot in 30-below weather in rural Kansas): sophisticated but not showy, proceeding at a headlong clip -- in the manner of, say, Jonathan Demme, or of George Roy Hill or Peter Yates when they directed scripts by Goldman, and going all the way back to the William Wyler of “Detective Story” and “The Desperate Hours.” “You’re naming a lot of directors I love,” says Frank. “William Wyler is my hero.”

And the payoff -- the logarithmic extrapolation of Frank’s own compound character -- is that he rediscovered the very thing that had gone missing in his writing.

“I was worried that I wouldn’t relate to the material, because I had written it so many years earlier,” he says. “But I learned very early on, as actors came in, that I could learn so much about my script through hearing people read it. Like the writing, the movie is built on happy accidents, and actors are very much instruments of that.”

He plans to direct again, if someone will let him, and is fine-tuning scripts accordingly: A western called “Godless,” and “44,” which he calls “my midlife crisis movie, set in the world of automotive design” -- “Monster Garage” meets “Save the Tiger.”

“I always say that writing is like having the flu for a year -- you feel sick and miserable,” says Frank. “But I couldn’t imagine not doing it. I really think of myself not as a writer or a director, but as a storyteller. So, yes, I’m going to keep my day job, because I love to write. But having done both jobs, I think writing is a lot harder than directing.”