Producer
He pitched a friend’s screenplay on a chairlift above Sundance. It became the highest-grossing comedy of 1998 — and it was not even the only film he had at the festival that year.
“Almost 30 years ago I was on a chairlift with Dylan Sellers, then an executive at Fox, ascending the slopes overlooking the Sundance Film Festival. I started telling Dylan about a screenplay written by my friends, John Strauss and Ed Decter. It was a comedy about a man who hires a private investigator to find his high school dream girl and it was absolutely hysterical. When we got off the lift Dylan said, ‘Let’s make this movie.’”
Two Films, Two Genres, One Producer
That screenplay became the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary, with Frank as producer. It opened in July 1998, made bigger stars of Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller, and finished the year as the highest-grossing comedy in release. It has since generated over $370 million worldwide. In January 1999 an American public polled by Gallup voted it one of the three favorite comedies of the year.
Wicked, the thriller he produced the same year, came out of Sundance with reviews that Frank still describes as rave. The film helped launch its sixteen-year-old lead: Julia Stiles. It’s hard to imagine two more different films, or a better year for the man who produced them both.
Automatic Pictures
On the strength of those two films he formed Automatic Pictures — in his own description, “a nexus of creative minds that develops projects across multiple platforms and mediums—film, publishing, games, audio, and television.”
The point of the word platforms is that the company was never only a film company. The slate it develops now runs from film and TV to theatre and games — there is something for everyone.
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