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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

Yeah 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?

He was doing it for the money (at least at the end)! That and the psychological safety of not doing his own things.

Honestly, I don't really know what point I'm trying to make or if I'm trying to make one at all. Sorry.

“Up to”

True. So, in the worst case, there was a single week where he earned that.

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?

The 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 and 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!

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