Steve Franke

Although the videography of writer, producer, and director Steve Franks may be a bit small, it does include a pair of sizable hits. Hailing from Southern California, Franks began doing stand-up comedy in the early 1990s. While attending Loyola Marymount University as a graduate student in the film department, Franks experienced a major dose of beginner's luck when his first-ever screenplay, "Big Daddy," was purchased by Columbia Pictures. Released in 1999 as part of a string of hugely successful Adam Sandler comedies, the film was an enormous hit, earning a domestic gross of over $160,000,000 by 2010, despite getting the same generally negative reviews that most of Sandler's broad comedies receive. In 2006, Franks went on to create the popular television series "Psych," a comic-tinged crime drama on the USA Network that stars James Roday as a charlatan psychic and Dulé Hill as his straitlaced policeman partner. Franks has written numerous episodes of the series, as well as serving as its executive producer and director.