By Pauline Adamek & Billy Baxter
On a warm summer afternoon at The Viceroy Hotel in Los Angeles in 2005, writer/director, Shane Black, and producer, Joel Silver, came together to discuss their film, the wildly entertaining Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It was, happily, a meeting of old friends.
In the mid ‘80s, Pittsburgh-born Shane Black was a 22-year-old UCLA graduate. He had talent, but more importantly, he had a script called Lethal Weapon. Producer Joel Silver, then an emerging Tinseltown powerbroker, purchased Black’s script and made the movie. It was more than a hit. It was a franchise. Black’s fortunes rose again when he penned the cult action adventure, The Last Boy Scout, again for his friend Joel, and picked up $US1.75 million, the highest payout for a spec script in the history of cinema to that point. “A lot of the evolution of my career was because of Shane,” says Joel. “Lethal Weapon was a very important picture for me and it really helped me get attention and notoriety. I always felt that Shane was responsible for that.”
But between the time it took Black to mature from a talented college kid with a hit on his hands to a pro in his early 30s, he had really only written two successful films – in ten years. “There were periods where I just couldn’t think what the hell to write,” says Shane. “I was so afraid of sitting back at the typewriter that I would just drive around with my friends and hang out like the guys in Swingers. That ate up years. It was fun, but I didn’t really get anything produced or done.”
That changed in the mid ‘90s when he released his next script – The Long Kiss Goodnight – onto the Hollywood market. A bidding war started. By the time it ended, Black had scored $US4 million, a new record fee. The 1996 action film, directed by Renny Harlin and starring Geena Davis, subsequently bombed. Shane’s professional identity was dragged along for the ride. “All anyone wanted to talk about was the price that had been paid for these scripts,” says Shane. “They weren’t even reading the words any more. That became dispiriting. I would turn my back and people were very resentful of the fact that I had quote/unquote ‘won the lottery’, as though there was no actual work involved.”
Silver tried repeatedly to work with Black again, offering him the chance to write the next Lethal Weapon sequel, but after passing on the second and third installments, Black could not take on the fourth. Perhaps to avoid the dreaded typewriter, he instead opted to executive produce an original screenplay that he had previously written. It was called A.W.O.L. It was never released. Five years of inactivity followed. Black’s career flailed like a horse brought to the whip too early, falling short in the final furlong. “I always felt that someday, in some way, he would come back to me,” says Joel. “One day Shane called me up and he said ‘I wrote this script that I’m going to direct and would you read it?’ I said, ‘Look, I’ll help you make the movie and we’re going to have to do it cheaply, but if you really want to do it, I’ll help you do it.’”
The script was Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and those words, from a man like Joel Silver, meant that it was a go, even though Black had never directed a picture before. Silver displayed the ultimate faith in his old friend’s abilities. “Producing movies is a skill,” says Joel. “If you produce enough movies, you’re going to learn the skill. But having talent…well, you either have it or you don’t… and Shane has tremendous talent. He was committed to do this and we put him around some fantastic people and he was able to go in there every day with support.”
Two of those “fantastic people” were Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, the actors cast as Harry Lockhart (an out of town thief) and Gay Perry (a homosexual, hard-boiled LA private detective). The unlikely duo, infamous for their off-screen antics, have lived and re-lived their lives in the tabloids, but casting Downey is a lot safer, and easier, than it used to be. “We just had everyone on the set smoke crack,” jokes Shane.
Silver tells it differently. He works these kinds of issues like a veteran spin-doctor. “Gothika took care of it,” he explains, mentioning Downey’s previous film, which he also produced. “It was hard for Robert because he had insurance issues. He had to pretty much put up his entire salary on Gothika as an insurance premium. The studio really wouldn’t do it unless we agreed to pay an enormous amount of money – and we didn’t have that money. But he got through it. At the conclusion of the picture he got his salary back and everybody was fine and when we did this picture there was no issue.”
In what would be a series of eventual comebacks, one-time-burnout-and-he-who-would-be-Iron-Man, Robert Downey Jr., rekindled some of his mojo with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, while Kilmer temporarily forced his critics to reassess all the gossip that had swirled around the actor. “Val was aware of two things,” says Shane. “This was his big shot to stop all that rumour and get past it. The other thing was this guy [Black points to Silver]. You can’t fuck up in front of Joel. Once you piss off one of the biggest producers in Hollywood, your career is over.”
Knowing that, and playing the role of the director in the middle of it all, was not a daunting task for Black. He knows where the power in Hollywood resides. “I wasn’t going to start throwing hissy fits and try to be all David O. Russell about it,” says Black. “But at the same time, if someone threatened the work, I’d say to Joel, ‘I’m going to fire this guy’, and he would say, ‘No, you’re not’, and I’d go, ‘Well, okay’.”
This dynamic made for a smooth production. “It’s because everyone cared so much,” says Shane. “I would have slept in a sleeping bag if I had to. I don’t need a fucking trailer. I wouldn’t tell anyone that, by the way…but the only time I got mad was when I’d be running and I’d see someone walking and I’d say ‘Hey, catch up asshole, I’m running. Why the fuck are you walking? Because if I’m the director and I can run, then so can you.’ All the actors caught on. They weren’t pulling any shit.”
The end result was something spectacular: an intelligent blend of film noir, murder mystery, action flick, and comedic romp, all wrapped up in a twisted homage to the LA detective genre, peppered with Black’s signature style: a combination of wicked dialogue and black humour. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang remains a rusted-on cult favourite. “I’m proud of the movie,” Silver said back in 2005. “I sat there at The Cannes Film Festival and it was a wild night. It was the first time we screened the movie, and it’s a midnight screening in front of a thousand people, and there was an excitement of discovery. You don’t feel that unless it’s real. They can’t manufacture that.”
Walking the tight line between commercial viability and an independent voice, Silver realised that marketing this wild collision of genres would still be difficult, and the film got rave notices without crushing the box office. “This is an LA detective picture, but it’s also aware that it’s a movie,” Silver said. “It celebrates movies, so people will sit down in a festival atmosphere and appreciate it, but we have to let the rest of the world know that they have to go in there with the same point of view. We packed the thing full and kept the intellectual level on par with what you would normally consider an independent film. I’m just an audience member myself, really, and I want to see this. I know what’s exciting and what I enjoy, so you’ll like it, trust me.” Joel Silver didn’t lie…
The Nice Guys is available now on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is available now on DVD and Blu-ray. Make sure to check out FilmInk’s interviews with The Nice Guys stars, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer and Angourie Rice, and director, Shane Black.
