Frances Doel is a British writer and story editor, notable for her long association with Roger Corman. Doel was head of the script department at New World Pictures; Jon Davison said that at one stage Doel "wrote just about every first draft of every picture" at New World.[1]
Joe Dante said there was a theory that the two people most responsible for Corman's success were Charles B. Griffith and Doel. Filmink magazine stated "Doel’s actual script credits don’t do justice to her career – she surpasses Griffith as the most influential writer in Corman’s career."[2]
Corman met Doel when looking for an assistant in the mid-1960s. He contacted a tutor at Oxford University and asked him who his finest student was; the tutor suggested Doel.[3]
Corman liked to recruit writers from the world of novels and short stories rather than movies and TV, and relied on Doel to make recommendations. She helped discover John Sayles, being impressed by the latter's short stories and arranging for him to rewrite Piranha.[4][5] Sayles observed, " I always thought of Frances as the opposite of the kid who’s supposed to be reading Chaucer, but inside the book he’s got a comic book. She had the comic book on the outside and was actually reading the Atlantic.”[6]
In the early 1980s, Doel worked at Orion Pictures as an executive.
She was married to Clint Kimbrough.