The movie Jack Black will always regret not making: “I wish it would fucking happen”
There’s nothing wrong with being an actor for hire, with Jack Black just one of the countless stars in Hollywood who’ve enjoyed a successful career without feeling the need to steer a constant stream of passion projects towards the screen.
Of course, the rule usually has exceptions, and Black has a few. Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny was the realisation of a decades-long dream to give his band a feature-length showcase, and it doubled as the first – and still only – time he’s been credited as a screenwriter, as well as his first producing credit.
Since then, Black has only served as a producer on the family comedy Nacho Libre and little-seen comedies The D Train and The Polka King, so he’s definitely not the kind of actor who’ll develop multiple projects from the ground up and shepherd them through the system.
The actor and musician has a persona, and it’s one he largely sticks to. He’s been sticking to it a little too much in recent years, though, with his Golden Globe-nominated performance in Richard Linklater’s Bernie an indication that there’s a genuinely talented dramatic performer in there who deserves to be let out more often than they have been for the last quarter of a century.
Uniting with an idiosyncratic talent like Charlie Kaufman would have been the perfect showcase for Black’s untapped potential, only for Frank and Francis to fall into the depths of development hell. Naturally, it was a musical satire set in Hollywood that Steve Carell and Nicolas Cage attached to co-star.
The two title characters were a filmmaker called Frank and a movie blogger called Francis, who fell into a heated feud with each other. Kaufman described the story as being about “cultural, societal, and individual anger” told through the lens of “people in the world wanting to be seen.”
Frank and Francis was officially announced in 2011, which is about as far as it got. It was a particular source of disappointment for Black, who admitted to Vulture that it was something he desperately wanted to be a part of.
“I wish that it would fucking happen, but I think it is a little too expensive for how ambitious it is,” he said. “It is a very surreal and dark look at Hollywood. I fucking love it. We are just about $10 million shy of the cost to make it, so if anyone out there can scrape together a cool ten-mil, this thing can happen.”
Obviously, nobody took it upon themselves to step in with an eight-figure cash injection, leaving Frank and Francis on the scrap heap. Black, Kaufman, and Cage had the potential to be a pairing for the ages, but industry politics and penny-pinching ultimately robbed audiences of the opportunity.
