Shane Black: The success guru of Hollywood
In a traditional Hollywood summer night of 2002, a 41-year-old, once highest paid Hollywood screenwriter, who has seen both sides of the life and the industry resisted himself from having the third glass of drink and waited with a fake smile for the party to finish which he arranged in his château, crowded with sizzling hot Hollywood celebs. Once they had done doing what they do in most other parties, they left leaving behind a mess and a 41-year-old screenwriter who was by then labeled by the aspiring Hollywood journalists as “an overpaid party boy”.
With a pounding headache, he rose from his comfortable couch and walked pass the wine shelf and the bedroom to the secret small reading room with shelves loaded with vintage paperback pulp novels. There was a world inside those hard-boiled detective novels that he understood and somehow that world provided him the energy, motivation and more importantly courage to fight with the problems he was dealing at that moment.
Shane Black, the man who changed the action genre forever at the age of only 24 with the brilliant script of Lethal Weapon (1987), who astonished the industry by making $1.75 million from the spec script of “The last boy scout” and who broke the record board again by making $4 million from the script of “The long kiss goodnight” (1996) was silent for almost half a decade then.
“The long kiss goodnight” was a massive flop and no one wanted to take the responsibility for that leaving only the 4-million-dollar story to blame.
Suddenly, from the most talented scriptwriter, he turned into the riskiest scriptwriter to work with. Thanks to his unduly lucky, spoiled playboy image, he was denied his application for the membership in the academy. Finding him defenseless, Hollywood’s cruel reporters and critics who live on failed careers were making sure that the “Overpaid party boy” could never rise from the ashes of his destruction. But there he was, resisting himself from drinking over the limit, reading with a pounding headache and preparing to fight back the negativity of life.
Today, after 15 years from that summer night, we know he has not only written but also directed and crafted one of the three great movies of this millennium. One of the trio is ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ (2005) in which unintentionally he helped RDJ (Robert Downey Jr.) reviving his career as it handed RDJ the ticket for Iron man and he in returns helped Shane to get back in limelight by arranging him to direct ‘Iron man 3’ (2013) which allowed Shane to find funding for ‘The Nice guys’ (2016) that was collecting dust on its script for almost a decade because he was unable to find a producer and a studio.
Like that, his life is layered with episodes of trauma and recovery. He knew the hardship, opportunity, luck and instant reflexes required to fight back in life and he never missed a chance of portraying the formula in his movies. That made his movies an inspirational message to anyone like me who is feeling low and expecting zero from the future.
I was watching these three movies back to back last week and when I finished I was pumped up with some alien black energy and in a long-time life isn’t felt like an old, cruel ugly witch swearing an unforgivable curse all the time. I wondered how a bunch of neo noir action comedies and a superhero movie stirred so much within me. After all, it were movies apparently focused towards entertaining its viewers and when that is the primal concern it left almost no space for anything else like sub- texting the movies with motivational messages or questioning our usual perception towards life. It’s one of the weird paradoxes in every art form. One has to choose between popularity and quality and often ended up doing something else than what he intended to.
Shane broke the Paradox. In a mask of action, comedy, a romance he presented an inspirational narrative, a guidance for life hidden under the veil of entertainment. Recapping the moments, the styles and characterizations I identified three major elements that Shane offered in those three movies straight from his life lessons and struggles.
Life will take you down — getting up against it is not an event but a process
One may say it’s for the sake of reversal or creating a contrast in the narrative, but I believe the reason Shane’s protagonists fail miserably at some point of the story is his personal journey to the downside of life. Whether you are a failed detective or a metal suited superhero, if you are a hero in Shane’s movie you must lose your race with life and for a moment you have to feel powerless like an inert, meaningless object floating with the tide.
Unlike cheap entertaining movies, Shane never provides his protagonists an instant relief from these conflicts. Rather he makes them take the harder way that will test their deepest fears, slay their internal demons and put them as the controller of their life.
When Iron man found himself alone in an unknown apparently barren land with his charge less suit there was no instant relief like the secret SHIELD aircraft or another fancy drone suit coming to rescue him. For a period, he was powerless, alone reminiscing his life and finding the right course for it.
Whatever we are dealing with at this moment will not fade away easily or immediately. No one is coming to rescue us miraculously. We, like Iron man, must take the hard way, alone and powerless. Moving forward with a stubborn attitude and learning from our past mistakes slowly boost us with energy. When sufficient, we can punch life right in the face and make it bow down to us.
Moving on is the secret formula
Last month I was stuck at a point in one of those infatuating silly android campaign games believing I do not have enough credit (In this case it was Golden eggs :D) to move forward and I will not be able to face complex challenges that are lying ahead of that point without it. I started to travel back to collect unused credits (Golden eggs) and after half an hour of drifting backward I still didn’t have enough. I turned impetuous and hard pressed the forward button only to find a vault of credits just a few steps ahead of the point where I stuck and started to move backward from.
Every now and then in our lives, moving forward is the only thing that matters. If no one knows it, protagonists of Shane’s movies do. Each of them only found a resolution because they move forward ignoring the situation. Sometimes they were externally forced to move on like March (Ryan Gosling) in ‘The Nice Guys’ by money and threats and Harry (RDJ) in ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ by destiny and failure, sometimes they chose to move on like Stark (again RDJ) in Iron man 3. Whatever the reason, it’s moving forward that brought them the ultimate resolution.
At some point in ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’, Harry found himself as a symbol of failure. He came to know that he was being used as a decoy by his employers and people whom he trusted, he lost his part as a movie lead he was dreaming to play, he lied to his teenage crush, got exposed and was forced by the situation to leave the city forever. And then he decided to stay (although it was stimulated by some factors) and move on with the bizarre case he unintentionally got involved.
I’m in the case if I F***ing die
Harry declared and his journey from an existence with no potential to a content, happy fulfilling human being started. Harry didn’t change himself overnight. He seems the same ‘Idiot’ from the earlier parts of the movie, but in later parts he had the courage to move on, try something new and that courage brought luck, destiny, help, and the finally he victory.
Shane Black is very fond of this ‘Just do it’ theory. You can find that on the snap from his interview below.
‘Just write’ he suggests to young bubbling writers because that’s how he reborn as a better man and a better artist.
Everyone needs help — Even the superheroes
Einstein once said
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead
We often consider human’s inability to function alone as a drawback. But it is one of the most empowering drawbacks. It forced humans to cooperate and create wonders around the world. We interact with countless peoples in our daily life and exchange innumerable favors with them. Our miniature of help & favor exchange system accumulates to build the human cooperation system on which the fate & future of humans depends.
Shane seems to understand very well how the course of our life depends on support and help. His heroes are not a lone ranger crushing through every obstacle as Hercules. Rather they are raw, naïve, full of flaws, blunt, insecure. Instead of a ‘Man of steel,’ he offers us a ‘Man of clay’, prepare to be molded with life.
He believes movie characters should be like us because only then we will be able to correlate with them and take message and motivation from their actions.
Iron man, despite being a part of the most advance team, survives with the help of Herley Keener (a teenager) in Iron man 3. Holland, the troubled detective was saved multiple times by his lovely bright teenage daughter Holly (Angourie Rice). May be there are some cinematic element here, but it teaches us how help may lay hidden in places from where we expect the least. It encourages us to keep our flag of hope risen and above, because who knows, help, in any of its form, may lay just ahead of our journey.
Shane found himself in a rotating basket for the most part of his life. It lifted him up and thrashed him down and for a period it seemed he had no control over either of the results. But with patience, stubbornly moving on and a little help he settled as the controller of his life.
As the world is going nuts about a whimsy president from a self-declared savior nation and people are becoming more and more confiscated by luminous rectangular screens, Shane is directing two new movies (Doc Savages & The Predators) and it seems that his seasons will never run dry again.
Shane, with his life and his stories, is a posting example of ‘How to deal with life in a cliché’ type success guru. But his is a more factual, bold, fresh, accurate, electrifying, bubbling scream that can only be heard if our true senses are open in a real way.
