SHANE BLACK
If Shane Black now looks out on an overheated, youth-obsessed screenwriting market where age 37 looks a little long in the tooth, he has partly himself to thank. After selling his "Lethal Weapon" script to Warner Bros. for a quarter-million dollars before his 25th birthday, Black inadvertently entered the spec script derby of the 1990s, with screenwriters earning unprecedented sums and Black reaping a record $4 million for "The Long Kiss Goodnight" in 1994 (an amount eclipsed last month when Disney reportedly paid writer-director M. Night Shyamalan almost $5 million for a script, "Unbreakable"). Black has not written a screenplay since. "I'm still sweating away and trying to find out what I want to say," he says. The "Lethal Weapon" sequel machine has continued to grind out fresh schnitzel, with Black's participation limited to cashing the occasional royalty check. He is now co-producing a friend's screenplay, "Tin Man."
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Every time someone speculates about the balance of power shifting toward the writer, it turns out it isn't happening. They said writers would get all this new respect because the prices of scripts were rising. I don't see anything coming from that.
It's all about glamour. Writers don't get any appreciation because they're in no way glamorous. When the director shows up at a party, or he's at the Cannes Film Festival, he's got a woman on his arm. He's tall. He's in a nice suit. He looks good. He seems very vivacious. The writer's always the one in the corner. They're always the ones whining about something or other that's been inflicted on them this week. If there's anything writers could do to improve their lot, it's to stop acting like victims. Of course the studio can do anything with your script after they buy it! Does that mean they have to? No, you can argue persuasively. You can be firm and resilient. Choose your battles and persevere as a human being. You don't give up.
If anything, Hollywood is getting younger. I have heard about ageism among screenwriters. I'm just deciding about whether I should lie about my age; I hope my own work speaks for itself, and that they'll understand that I'm still a kid at heart. It's the treasure hunter syndrome. Executives want to stand out now. They want to rise through the ranks. So it's not enough that you hire a director for a movie--they have to find someone. So they'd rather hire a guy who's never directed before on the chance that they'll have discovered the new Spielberg, even if he might botch it up completely.
There is no way around it. The best of what is in a script will never make it to the finished product unless the writer acquires some kind of respect and contractual obligation. The biggest movies of all time, if you look at the scripts--"Jaws," "Star Wars," "The Godfather"--if you erase them from existence and then, in 1999, you walk into an office with these scripts that nobody has ever seen and plunk them on a desk and say, "What do you think?" they'd say, "We'll buy them. Now let's go rewrite them." The shooting script of any movie that's made $100 million would be rewritten again and again and again. The studio executives will flag things that they think will offend people, or limit its commercial appeal. If a character makes a choice that's not heroic, they get nervous. Or if it's a gay character, they get nervous. In my original notes for "Lethal Weapon 2," I killed off Martin Riggs. I basically sent away the bread truck that earned them another half a billion dollars. If they had followed my instructions, they would have lost that money. [Black didn't write the screenplay.] I just look at a time in the '70s where films, even if they were successful, they didn't run out and make a sequel, just because it made someone money. Now, you can't have the hero die in a $100-million movie.
Some writers say, "I saw this TV show, it was awful. Why is that on TV when my work isn't? I could write something at least as good as that." But what they're saying is that it would be OK to them to be only slightly less awful than someone else. In other words, Hollywood owes them a career because they may write something horrible but it's slightly less horrible than someone else's? The goal should not be to just fool people and get over the hump. It's still people painting themselves as victims instead of saying, "I'm going to write something good and blow everyone away."
RAY STARK, PRODUCER
