Since it's the 33rd day of a 35-day shoot, Black also looks beat. Stepping into his trailer, he makes a beeline for a college-dorm-size fridge stocked with enough Red Bull to stun an elephant. He pounds one down, grabs a second, and plops down on a sofa. He says that about a year ago, after he finished writing ''Kiss Kiss'' and it had been sent out by his agent, he got a call from a junior executive at one of the studios. ''He basically said, 'We read the script and we should meet. You've got a promising style.''' Black starts laughing at the idea that the same studios who once paid him millions were now filled with kids who'd never heard of him. Thought he showed promise like some wannabe with a day job serving lattes. ''I actually think it's kind of funny,'' he admits. ''It's only NOT funny when you're confronting insufficiencies in yourself.'' Unfortunately, Shane Black had spent the better part of the past decade doing just that.
Power in Hollywood seems to shift every decade or so. In the '70s, maverick directors in tune with the counterculture like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were handed the keys to the asylum. In the '80s, power passed to bigger-than-life producers with populist tastes like Don Simpson, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Joel Silver. By the '90s, it was a handful of bankable actors -- Jim Carrey, Mel Gibson, and Tom Cruise -- who were sticking up the studios for $20 million paydays and hefty percentages of their films' profits. But for a brief window in the late '80s and early '90s, it was screenwriters who turned from schmucks with Underwoods into rock stars.
During that time, writers with original ideas -- and some not-so-original ideas -- cleaned up with spec scripts that sold for insane amounts of money. ''Any script that came out that was reasonably good sold for a million dollars,'' recalls Joel Silver. ''And if it was really good, he could sell it for $2 million or $3 million. There was no end in sight.'' At the peak of this mania, Joe Eszterhas sold a four-page story treatment it took him four hours to write for $4 million. Shane Black was in the right place at the right time.
While studying theater at UCLA, Black began hanging around with a group of movie geeks who lived together in a one-story house in West L.A. Located at 2310 Parnell, it was known as the ''Pad o' Guys.'' Like a frat house whose pledges dissected John Woo choreography instead of funneling beers, the Pad o' Guys would become a Who's Who of young screenwriters: Ed Solomon (''Men in Black''), Chris Matheson (''Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure''), Ryan Rowe (''Charlie's Angels''), Gregory Widen (''Backdraft''), and Fred Dekker (''Night of the Creeps''). ''You could come by at three in the morning and see light stands up and three guys would be having fake fights on the front lawn,'' recalls Dekker.
Black had never written a screenplay before. He'd never even read a how-to book. But inspired after one of the Guys landed a job writing for ''Laverne & Shirley'' (and sick of cleaning swimming pools), he wrote a script of his own called ''Shadow Company.'' Half Vietnam War epic and half zombie splatter flick, ''Shadow Company'' traced a platoon that's killed in battle, buried in a Cambodian temple, and then shipped home to the States, where they wake up and start killing everybody thinking they're still in the jungle. Universal optioned it, but for obvious reasons of sensitivity, it was never made.
