David Harold Franzoni (born March 4, 1947) is an American screenwriter and film producer.
[10] Franzoni's script for Gladiator was a revival of the sword-and-sandal genre,[11] using characters very different from the original and drawing upon available historic and archaeological sources.
[12] He started to write the story in the 1970s, after reading the 1958 non-fiction book Those About to Die by Daniel P. Mannix, which detailed the Roman gladiatorial games.
[13] For Amistad, Franzoni decided not to use a standard narrative, explaining, "the typical slant in this sort of film is to have the poor, chained black man arrive in the presence of the white guy, who has a good soul and fights the good faith to liberate the black man.
[11] Franzoni stated that the screenplay of King Arthur "aims more for history than myth,"[15] and again relied upon archaeological evidence in an attempt to create a more realistic human and political interpretation of the character.