After his family relocated to Fullerton and Black had a shot at playing varsity football, the opportunity literally drove him nuts. "I just realized I was going to blow it," he said. "I developed this weird religious thing where ... I had to pray obsessively for six, seven hours a day."
By 17, he said, he was checked into the psychiatric unit of a local hospital and diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Six months of family therapy later, the symptoms disappeared, but they might be seen as the beginnings of his perfectionism. Joel Silver, who produced several Black films, including the "Lethal Weapon" franchise, said it's a trait that affects Black as a screenwriter today. "Rolling something through a typewriter just isn't Black's style," Silver said. "He's extremely cautious about what he writes and how it's perceived."
In the early '80s, Black studied playwriting at UCLA. But upon graduation, he came across several scripts that he said changed his life: William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" and "Marathon Man," and Walter Hill's original script for "Alien." Reading them, "I understood that you could write novelistically within the screenplay format and create these wonderful little shapes that make you turn the page," he said. "You could really pick up the pace with this....The form was whatever you wanted it to be."
Within a year he'd written "Lethal Weapon," and within a week of completing it, he'd sold the script.
"I walked into my colleague's office and said, 'You have to read this right now,' " said David Greenblatt of Key Creatives, Black's representative for more than 20 years.. " 'It's the greatest thing I've ever read.' "
On the outside, Black said, life didn't change radically. But inside was another matter: "I was horrified by the prospect of having to live up to the success," he said.
What also changed, as time went on, were other people's perceptions of him. Black had arrived on the scene when screenwriters were becoming celebrities in their own right because of the money they were making, and he was uncomfortable being the gold rush's poster boy. "No one ever said, 'Hey, interesting script,' " he recalled.
Black also found himself in the uncomfortable position of a being a bit of a genius in an unrespected genre: "trash" action.
