“Let me get this straight, you made a porno where the plot is the point?”
Four times right around the middle of the decade, some studio allowed writer Shane Black to gives us one of these gifts – Lethal Weapon, Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and this – a buddy cop neo-noir with a strange fascination for language and a sense of humor that often involves people accidentally injuring themselves or others. (There’s a moment here where a guy blindly fires out a window and we see the bullet strike a woman who was just watering her plants.)
My time in Los Angeles has crossed paths with Shane Black twice. Early on, I was staying at the house of a Development Executive who had one day to read two possible Shane Black projects. One was a movie and the other was a TV Movie that could be a Pilot for a series. I chose to read the movie, which became Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and he read the Pilot. I didn’t want him to ruin the twists, but he told me there’s a lot of moments involving people falling and landing in unexpected places that would be funny to see.
A few years later, I’m working on the television series “Medium”, and we’re filming at an estate in Hancock Park. It’s an unusual place with a lot of rooms that only contain shelves of paperback books. They all appear to be crime stories, paperbacks with Noir titles. Locations tells me the owner collects them and claims to have read every one. “This is Shane Black’s house.” Locations confirms that’s the name of the owner. I now felt like I was looking at the mind of Shane Black, all laid out on bookshelves.
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