Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride

Hollywood's Dark Knight Returns:
Shane Black
by J. Rentilly

For a long time, no one knew where Shane Black had gone. He was here, a 20-something Pittsburgh transplant - broke, nihilistic, studying acting at UCLA - who became an industry wunderkind, writing screenplays like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout that redefined genres and sold for record-breaking amounts of money. But after the fizzled 1996 release of The Long Kiss Goodnight, which Black sold for a jaw-dropping 4-million dollars, the screenwriter - renowned for his vulgar, acidic banter, edgy characters, brisk storytelling, and eye-popping action sequences - vanished without a trace. For almost a decade, it was one of Hollywood's great mysteries: What the hell happened to Shane Black, anyway? Today, the Black sightings have moved from the realm of myth and speculation into hard fact: Shane Black is back and, for the record, better than ever.

This month, Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which also marks his directorial debut, is released. It is devilishly dark, convulsively funny, acidly melancholic - completely uncut, uncompromised Shane Black. Kiss Kiss sings with the vintage Black energy, but resonates with a winsomely broken heart. In conversation, Black pats down his midnight black hair contemplatively and frequently, squints his eyes with an Eastwood-ian flare, a baritone voice issuing ideas with the scratchy intensity and urgent halting of a dull razor on an old beard. Black also hunches a lot, as if the inner torment of his most memorable characters - Mel Gibson's suicidal cop in Lethal, Bruce Willis's sardonic private eye in Boy Scout, Robert Downey Jr.'s sadsack ne'er do well in Kiss Kiss - has somehow hung itself on his gigantic frame and the weight is just a little too Atlas-like to endure. He gesticulates like a slow motion gunslinger - feral, focused, deliberate, and not just a little dangerous. Sometimes, physically and verbally, you can't be sure if Black's going to throw a long pass down the gridiron or if he's about to introduce you to a bullet screaming your name. It's this volcanic intensity and grizzled resolve that fuels Black's greatest work. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is that work. Some call it a cross between Chinatown and As Good As It Gets. We call it the very welcome return of Hollywood's dark knight.

J. RENTILLY: Your disappearance after the box office failure of Long Kiss Goodnight is the stuff of Hollywood lore. What the hell really happened to you?

SHANE BLACK: I'm not really sure myself what happened. As you get older, time does the opposite of telescoping; it actually gets narrower and narrower. A week is lived in a day, and before you know it a month has gone by. I'd go on these long, lost tours of the Hollywood Hills every weekend and go to parties and go driving around like the guys in Swingers, really. I remember watching that movie, and going, "Shit, that's me." But mostly, it was a lot of wasted time. I could have done a lot more with that time than what I've just described to you.

JR: What did writing mean to you during this time?

SB: There was this sense that going through the torture of writing, wanting to write a good script, maybe succeeding or maybe not, and then sending it off into the ether so anyone could do to it what they wanted, that just wasn't anything I felt I could do again. I'd done that before and then someone would make a movie and I'd have to take a deep breath at the mess they made and go back to the same hateful process of writing another screenplay. And I'm a lucky writer in Hollywood; I actually like up to 75% of the any movie made from one of my scripts.

JR: How were your screenplays altered by Hollywood? Why was this such a "hateful process" for you?

SB: Look, I think there were improvements, in some cases. In other cases, and sometimes in the same film, there is every justification of why I now want to direct. There were, to my thinking, certain discrepancies between what I'd write and what would be in the movies, and sometimes that was painful. Why did they leave that out? Why did they put this in? Most of the errors win sins of omission, not sins of commission. They'd read the scripts and want to keep the funny stuff and then throw out all the serious stuff, not realizing you can't really have one without the other and have the movie be any good. Look what they did with the last couple Lethal Weapon movies; they turned Mel Gibson's character into a clown and an asshole. That's not the character I created. So the result is: I like half of one movie, three-quarters of another.

JR: And now you're directing your own work.

SB: At some point in the last few years I realized I wanted to be pleased with all of my movie, and if I couldn't be, well, then at least it was my own fucking fault. It didn't occur to me back then to direct. Now, in retrospect, it's so obvious: Directing is the reward for having written the script. But without any reward, I'd do all this heavy lifting and never get any reward. Directing is the fun part. Directing Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was the best time I ever had, creatively. It was the first time that the movie I wrote is the move on the screen. For better or worse.

JR: Robert Downey and Val Kilmer are so good in this movie, but they come to the project with a lot of baggage. Downey is the drug guy who wakes up in peoples' houses and Kilmer is the guy who bit John Frankenheimer in the face. What's the real story with these guys? Were you guys sacrificing virgins on set?

SB: It's weird. If there is this sense that these guys are whacked out to the point of being unprofessional or disrupting a set, it was not evident to me on my movie. But they were actually very aware of the reputations they had. I don't think they were at all eager to propagate those reputations. Here's why they were so good for this movie: they're two comic geniuses, who also have this insane knowledge of the dark side. I think that works perfectly in a movie that is half a romantic thriller and half really violent and disturbing at points. What better than funny guys with this really dark strain? Maybe if they get 15-million dollars, or whatever, for their next film they'll freak out. I don't know. But right now, I think they're just trying to straighten up, fly right, and do everything they can to stay on track to their careers. There was no problem on the set.

JR: You write movies about unconventional heroes. That started when you were a kid, writing a comic book called Super Pooper. Tell me what heroes meant to you as a kid.

SB: When you're a kid, you try to imagine what it might be like to have a little bit of power over things, to say or do the right thing and have it matter at all. I know what that's about. I did as a kid, and I do now. But something odd about the "Super Pooper" comic in general: I was 8 or 9 years old writing this thing about a guy who survives a nuclear meltdown and, consequently, has all this burgeoning energy inside of him that's going to kill him unless he can get rid of it. So with these two phallic antenna things on his head shooting destructive bolts of lighting that he just can't release fast enough, he bumbles through his life. (Laughs) I don't think I knew anything about sex when I was 9 years old, but maybe something crept in there I wasn't aware of.

JR: Each one of your films features a moment when the hero is knocked down and there's no way in the world he's going to get back up, but somehow he does and he's even more alive. What does that mean to you?

SB: Well, there is something very powerful about that isn't there? I guess for me, someone who his whole life has watched movies and wished he was maybe a little bit larger than life or capable of something true and great, I've always had the fear that there would come a time when I'd get knocked down and I wouldn't get back up, that I'd be too weak. The constant fantasy of overwhelming that urge to stay down, to get back up despite the knockout punch, like Rocky, that drives us, that's so appealing to me. People take a lot of blows in this life. Some of them never get back up. But they always wish they could.

JR: You've called L.A. the most cynical, backbiting place on Earth. L.A. is never nice to your characters, especially the ones in Kiss Kiss.

SB: What's the draw? Look at the babe going by the window right this minute. She looks typically, I don't know, unavailable. Right? It's perfect. L.A. is the loveliest train wreck I've ever stopped to watch for 15, 20 years. It's a town that engenders this sort of love-hate relationship. I know all the shortcuts, the nuances, the flavors. I just can't imagine starting over someplace else, even if it wrecks me - and everyone else - 99% of the time. When it's right, it sure feels great.

JR: Back in the '90s, you and Joe Eszterhas were paid wild, unprecedented amounts of money for your screenplays. Eszterhas recently suggested that those giant paychecks really broke the Hollywood system - that directors didn't want to be upstaged by writers and studios didn't want to be controlled by writers, and so they stopped paying the big money to writers. Now we're looking at a slumping industry and a release slate of by-committee movies like Bewitched.

SB: I think Joe has given this way too much thought. (Laughs) Any screenwriter who assumes he has an affect on anything is, I don't know, probably wrong. You go to a party, the screenwriter's standing in the corner, griping about something. The director walks in the door, he's got a girl on his arm, a drink in his hand. They look happy. They look great. Look in the corner. There's the screenwriter. There's no girl with him. He's griping about how he got screwed on his residuals. Writers are always whining. To me, the idea of a screenwriter being responsible for any vast sea change in the Hollywood milieu is just absolutely ridiculous.

JR: That said, when Lethal Weapon was released, you were credited with inventing a new kind of genre picture - this giant, action-packed, buddy movie.

SB: I always knew that was shit. I didn't invent anything.

JR: But Lethal Weapon did spawn a legion of imitators.

SB: That's true.

JR: That's having some kind of influence in Hollywood, isn't it?

SB: I'm not sure I agree with that.

JR: You certainly influenced the way that screenwriters were paid in the early '90s. With every script you wrote, a new sales record was forged.

SB: I didn't do that. Those were business deals. What I did, it was very honest work and it may not have merited the kind of money that was being thrown at me. I've struggled with that. But I'd have been foolish not to take the money.

JR: Is any story worth 4-million dollars?

SB: What a script is worth to me is how compelling the story is. If a story is good, then it's worth some money. I don't know if it's as simple as that. But if someone pays 4-million dollars for the Harry Potter script, then I think everybody would agree it was worth it.

JR: You were 23 when you sold Lethal Weapon for $250,000. What was that sudden rush of success like for you?

SB: I stopped worrying about ordering food. I used to not order food because, you know, it cost money and then you've gotta tip the guy, and… So now I order food. But aside from that, none of that Lethal Weapon success did very much to me, other than make me really nauseous that somehow I was going to have to write another script. You ask a lot of writers, even very famous ones, and they'll say that after they've finished writing a script, they forget how to write. "That's the last funny line I'll ever write." Or, "That's the last script I'll ever write." There is this amnesia that kicks in for writers after they've just finished something, like: That thing I just did, I don't know how I did it or if I'll ever be able to do it again. It's total dread.

JR: With Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in theaters now, everyone's wondering what Shane Black will do next. Who's winning the staring contest - you or the blank piece of paper?

SB: Oh, yeah. I'm already feeling horrible. I've got some crude notes about what to do next. I've been trying to write something for three months. And it's going terribly. (Laughs) You just keep plugging away at it. This is how it always goes. It's miserable. I don't recommend it.

- J. Rentilly

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