Inspiring a Romantic Action Movie

Behind every moment of Shane Black's new film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang lurks the specter of Johnny Gossamer. He is a character for a world of characters, the gritty hero of pulp novels, whose intrigues, at once trivial and momentous, inspire new lives and rekindle the long-snuffed flames of romance. He is imagination, and, in more ways than one, he is behind Black's return to the big screen.
His disappearance was probably intentional (though that's always a dubious claim to make about anyone working under Hollywood's fickle auspices). Black got his break fresh out of UCLA's theater program, selling the screenplay for Lethal Weapon at age 22 in 1987. By 1996, he had established himself as Hollywood's highest-paid scribe, shattering records with The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. Then, in the midst of success most writers would have trouble even imagining, Black took a step back. "I tried to pretend I wasn't under a spotlight," he explains, "but I was getting a lot of attention, the wrong kind of attention. On the money, all this money ... and ... I subtracted myself from the spotlight."
So what exactly was he doing fumbling around in the dark? "Hunting for gold," Black says. Many credited Black with revolutionizing the action genre, or creating the "buddy action movie," but he sees his films in the same vein as 48 Hours, Dirty Harry, and The Dirty Dozen. "Hopefully, I was trying to put a spin on it," Black insists, "or just do a good version, in fact, that harkens back to the type of more character-driven adventure picture you'd see in the '60's." Black just decided to do something different. "I tried to write a romantic comedy first," he remembers, "and I blew it. I couldn't do it. I read the pages and they sucked. I said well, let's put a murder mystery in here and see what happens. Truthfully. And then all the pieces sort of fell into place."
Those pieces, by a strange mix of Black's affinity for genre classics and his difficulty coping with their wooden cliches, became Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Of course, the whole production owed a lot to luck. "When I set out to make this movie," Black remembers, "no one liked it, no one liked the script. They didn't want to make the movie. Joel Silver is the only one who was brave enough to do this and to trust me with that $15 million." It was the low budget, though, that let him take risks. Black describes his first time in the director's chair as "a snap," a relief from the labors of writing. He was also lucky enough to find actors with a respect for what he was trying to achieve, never mind two of the best around. Robert Downey, Jr., who starred as Harry Lockhart, was the perfect vision of his movie's protagonist. Black noted: "When he read the lines for the first time, it felt like I typed them into his mouth." And, Val Kilmer, the tough-guy Gay Perry, professed his own love for noir, remembering, "I've spent quite a few years watching them. ... This has a lot of tributes to it out of the detective genre as well and Pulp Fiction. It's part of the fun of the story."
Yet Black's attempts to deal with the commercialism of the films he reveres results in a good deal of self-deprecating humor and some not-so-subtle exaggeration of the usual formulas, which makes Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a hard film to pigeonhole. "It's not so much a parody, I think," Black explains, "because the movie is a celebration, to me, of the kinds of things I love about childhood, which is believing in nonsense, whether it's believing you're 35-years old and you're still going to act, or whether it's believing in a fictional private eye named Johnny Gossamer, even when the author says the whole [thing] is crap, he did it for the money. It's about finding purity and believing in something that's absolutely nonsensical and making it true." Not much older than 35 himself, Black's hope is that, even if Hollywood outgrew him long ago, America is still looking for a Johnny Gossamer.