Shane Black

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Shane Black (born December 16, 1961) is an American actor, screenwriter and film director. He is responsible for the some of the biggest blockbuster action films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout.

He graduated with a film degree from UCLA in 1983. At age 23 he sold the screenplay to Lethal Weapon. The film would become a successful franchise and help Mel Gibson become a superstar celebrity.

He acted in the film Predator.

At the height of his career he was the highest paid screenwriter in the Hollywood movie industry. He received US$1.75 million for his screenplay The Last Boy Scout and US$4 million for penning The Long Kiss Goodnight. Black also made a cameo appearance in the movie As Good As It Gets.

Shane Black made his directorial debut with 2005's Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, for which he also wrote the screenplay.

Black recived the Distinguished Screenwriter Award from the Austin Film Festival Oct 21, 2006.

[edit] Career

Black has admitted on numerous occasions that many of the scripts he had written for other directors, although commanding a hefty sum, were rewritten to a point where they hardly resembled his product.

From an interview in Empire magazine:

The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight

But the two scripts—The Last Boy Scout, which at that time sold for more money than any other script, and The Long Kiss Goodnight which sold for much more money at that time than any other script—were both extensively rewritten.

Lethal Weapon 2

The problem was that with Lethal Weapon 2 they did a lot of comedy. My draft had one scene with Joe Pesci's guy. He had a few lines. In their version, they had essentially the same character but throughout the entire script. It’s all about edge to me.