Frank was born to a Jewish family in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on March 10, 1960. His family moved to Los Gatos, California where he went to high school. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts in film studies. Frank earned a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from the AFI Conservatory in 1984.
While a student at the University of California, Frank first had the idea for what would become the script for Little Man Tate in 1981, thinking that, in the aftermath of the Iran hostage crisis that there was "a slight petulance to world events at the time" and envisioning "an eight year old who was making more sense of the world than Ted Koppel." After graduation he worked as a bartender while attempting to sell the script, which eventually led to him getting an agent, and subsequently being hired by Paramount Pictures in 1984. It would take several years before the script was made, with Frank's first produced screenwriting work in the meantime being the 1987 film Plain Clothes, which he would later describe as "terrible." Little Man Tate was ultimately made in 1991 as the directorial debut of actress Jodie Foster.
In the years to follow, Frank's filmography included scripts for Dead Again, Malice, Heaven's Prisoners, and Get Shorty. The latter earned him his first award nominations with both the Writers Guild and the Golden Globes. He credited the success of Get Shorty with reviving his interest in the job after a bad experience on Malice, and was particularly pleased as a longtime fan of Elmore Leonard's novels that he felt had not received satisfactory film adaptations previously. This success led to his being asked to work on another Elmore Leonard adaptation, Steven Soderbergh's 1998 film Out of Sight starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. The film was not a commercial success, but earned enormous critical plaudits. Frank won both the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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