Shane Black

Screenwriter and director

• Born: December 16, 1961
• Place of Birth: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Contribution: Shane Black is a screenwriter and director best known for his pioneering approach to the action-comedy genre.

Background

Shane Black was born on December 16, 1961, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Paul and Patricia Ann Black. His father worked in the printing business and later owned his own company. Black has a brother, Terry, who also became a screenwriter. His family lived in the Pittsburgh suburbs of Lower Burrell and Mount Lebanon before moving to Fullerton, California, when Black was a sophomore in high school.

In Fullerton, Black attended Sunny Hills High School. He was an avid reader in his youth, which he says made him a loner. His favorite books included the Hardy Boys mysteries and pulp novels from writers such as Raymond Chandler.

He attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he majored first in theater before shifting to writing. His classmates at UCLA included actors Tim Robbins and Paul Townsend.

While living in West Los Angeles, Black shared a house with future screenwriters Fred Dekker (The Monster Squad, 1987) and Ed Solomon (Men in Black, 1997). The three considered themselves a fraternity for movie buffs and would stay up late dissecting the fight scenes of Chinese director John Woo.

Career

At age twenty-two, Black wrote the screenplay for Lethal Weapon (1987) in six weeks. It sold for $250,000 and made $65 million at the box office. The movie, a cop story about two veteran officers (played by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover) begrudgingly partnered together, established Black as one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood and a pioneer of the action genre. Even in this early screenplay, Black laid the foundations for his trademark style, which includes melancholy characters, witty dialogue, and a combination of black comedy, action, and noir conventions.

In 1987, Black also made his film acting debut in the science-fiction thriller Predator, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. Black played Hawkins, a wisecracking helicopter pilot who is the first to fall prey to the alien. The following year, he appeared as a police officer in the zombie film Dead Heat (1988), which was written by his brother Terry.

Black was asked to write the screenplay for Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), but his original draft was rejected. Black wanted one of the main characters to die at the end, but the studio wanted to leave it open for more sequels. There were, in fact, two more sequels, but Black refused to have anything to do with them. For his next script, The Last Boy Scout (1991), Black was paid the then-unprecedented amount of $1.75 million. The film stars Bruce Willis as a private detective who partners with a professional football player (Damon Wayans). The film received mixed reviews and was a box-office failure.

Despite The Last Boy Scout’s disappointing performance, Black maintained himself as an in-demand writer. He was paid $1 million for script rewrites on the action comedy The Last Action Hero (1993) and $4 million for his script The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), which at the time was the most money ever paid for a script. The big-budget action film was a box-office failure and received polarizing reviews. The poor box office and negative reactions to the film made Black worry that people regarded him as a formulaic writer.

Although he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the film industry, Black went on hiatus after The Long Kiss Goodnight. He returned in 2005 with the action comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The film was Black’s directorial debut and stars Robert Downey Jr. as a thief who teams up with a gay private detective (Val Kilmer). Black’s script plays with the clichés and genre conventions of the action-comedy genre he helped revitalize with Lethal Weapon. The film was commercially unsuccessful but critically praised; it marked a comeback for Black and won him the 2005 award for Best Original Screenplay from the San Diego Film Critics Association. In 2006, he received the Distinguished Screenwriter Award from the Austin Film Festival.

Downey went on to star in the successful Iron Man film franchise, and when the director of the third installment backed out, he suggested that Black be brought in instead. Black was hired to direct the film and cowrite the script with Drew Pearce. Iron Man 3 was released on May 3, 2013, to high accolades. The film was a huge success and soon became the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time.

After Iron Man 3, Black began developing a film adaptation of the Doc Savage series of pulp stories from the 1930s and 1940s, which he read avidly as a child. In the meantime, he took on further projects for which he both served as director and contributed to the screenplay. In addition to helming the film as director, he cowrote, along with Anthony Bagarozzi, the screenplay for the action-comedy The Nice Guys (2016). Starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, the film, set in California in the 1970s, follows a private investigator and a hired enforcer as they attempt to solve a mystery. In 2018, he directed the newest installment in the science-fiction Predator franchise. He shared the duty of writing the screenplay for The Predator with Fred Dekker. However, the film received mixed reviews, especially in comparison to the original.

Black and other scriptwriters were alarmed at the increasing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in evaluating screenplays. He, Jim Herzfeld, and more than twenty others in the entertainment industry worked together to develop Gauntlet, a tech platform to thwart AI script assessment. Screenwriters could pay a fee to have professional story analysts evaluate their writing.

Impact

At a young age, Black established himself as a pioneer screenwriter of the action genre and became the highest-paid screenwriter in the business. He is credited with revitalizing the buddy-cop genre, and through his various scripts, he has developed his own remarkable style. Despite his success, he still tries to become a better writer with each new film.

Personal Life

Black lives in California.

Bibliography

Black, Shane. Interview by Nathan Rabin. AV Club. Onion, 9 Nov. 2005. Web. 15 July 2013.

Connelly, Brendon. “Shane Black on His Death Note and Doc Savage Movies.” Bleeding Cool. Avatar, 24 Apr. 2013. Web. 15 July 2013.

Hanson, Peter, and Paul Robert Herman, eds. Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories. New York: Harper, 2010. Print.

Godfrey, Alex. “Iron Man 3 Marks a Marvel-lous Return for Shane Black.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 19 Apr. 2013. Web. 15 July 2013.

Pappademas, Alex. “Shane Black Solves His Third-Act Problem.” Grantland. ESPN Internet Ventures, 3 May 2013. Web. 15 July 2013.

"Shane Black." IMDb, 2021, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000948/?ref‗=tt‗ov‗wr. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

Siegel, Tatiana. "Shane Black, Jim Herzfeld and More Top Writers Fight AI with Gauntlet Script Analysis Team (Exclusive)." Variety, 27 Feb. 2024, variety.com/2024/film/news/hollywood-ai-writers-gauntlet-1235923921/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

Taylor, Drew. “5 Scripts That Made Shane Black Hollywood’s Hottest Writer in the 1990s.” Playlist. Indiewire, 3 May 2013. Web. 15 July 2013.