Arms and the Man

How Not to Write an Action Movie

If the images from the James Webb Space Telescope have taught us anything, it’s this: if you look deep into the darkness of the universe and consider what we estimate to be its two trillion galaxies and the trillions of solar systems they contain, it is statistically unthinkable that an uncountable number of these solar systems don’t harbor planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone, planets on which organic life flourishes, creatures of untold variety and splendor, creatures with one thing in common: they all have connections in Hollywood.

Here on Earth, everyone’s uncle’s brother’s barber’s kid’s girlfriend’s depressed cousin’s psychic’s personal trainer’s family friend is a gaffer or key grip in Hollywood, one who might be able to get your script to some factotum rowing in a minor production company’s development galley—the number of young people in Hollywood “working in development” exceeding the population of the great state of Maine—one of whom could (it was possible!) land you a meeting that could lead to a deal. These things happen! So of course I had a connection, mine turning out to be a little different, for as decades dragged on, my attempted exploitation of said person may be understood as the most humiliating face-plant in the history of nepotism.

When I was a kid, I was pen pals with the daughter of my New York parents’ closest California friends. Said pen pal’s older brother, was—I discovered on visits to Woodland Hills, California—cool. I tucked my Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirts into my pants. Said pen pal’s older brother modeled. He drove a BMW. Coolest of all, he was also nice! Said cool/nice person went into the film business, bulldozing forward from intern to assistant to script reader to development drone—one who, thanks to bootstrap industry and perfect judgment, found a script in the slush that became a huge movie. One thing led to another until he was the huge thing, so much so that, at this writing, he’s arguably the most powerful person in film.

After my third year of college, in 1990, and after I’d taken a fiction workshop confirming my soul’s improvident hope that I Was a Writer, the nice but not yet absurdly powerful person, after I’d expressed an interest in writing movies, sent me a box of scripts. Like, twenty. Some were classic examples (Citizen Kane, Ordinary People, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but most were movies in some stage of production, spanning various genres, all generated by talented young writers: Regarding Henry, by J. J. Abrams; Seven, by Andrew Kevin Walker; Quiz Show, by Paul Attanasio; The Last Boy Scout, by Shane Black. All the scripts were entertaining and instructive: having metabolized their methods and modes, the motivated student would need no further guide to the form. It was a four-ream-thick MFA.

Of that stack, Shane Black’s was the stick of dynamite in the box of Cohibas. Black was the only member of the bunch with a produced movie, Lethal Weapon (1987). A subsequent script, The Last Boy Scout, the expediter of the box explained, had sold for $1.75 million, more than any before it. It almost doesn’t pain me to say that reading it was one of the most exhilarating reading experiences I’ve ever had, up there with finishing William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Ben Metcalf’s Against the Country, and—wait for it—Moby-Dick. You’ll have noted my qualificatory “almost.” My hesitation isn’t out of snobbery or shame; rather, a fear, in part, that you’ll recall the actual movie it became: an abominable R-rated travesty starring Bruce Willis, one which lacked, totally, the qualities of Black’s script.

If you read the thing now, the film’s failure to capture the narcotic thrill of the original makes perfect sense. As much as Black was a master of pacing, a fine crafter of set pieces, and delightfully de trop as a writer of snappy, manly dialogue, the most galvanic features manifested themselves in stage directions, interstitial material steering the reader through the gleeful nonsense. No context for this bonbon because who cares:

int. dingy dressing room—night

Cory and Jimmy are engaged in very hot sex. This is not a love scene; this is a sex scene.

Sigh. I’m not even going to attempt to write this quote-unquote “steamy” scene here, for several good reasons:

A) The things that I find steamy are none of your damn business, Jack, in addition to which—

B) The two actors involved will no doubt have wonderful, highly athletic ideas which manage to elude most fat-assed writers anyhow, and finally—

C) My mother reads this shit. So there.

(P.S.: I think we lost her back at the Jacuzzi blowjob scene.)

That’s the tenor of what keeps Black’s scenes taped together. Not that this idea—breaking the fourth wall of the script—was new. William Goldman, one of the greatest modern screenwriters, wrote charming, cajoling stage directions, addressing the reader directly, if passingly, with light touches of confederacy. Black cites Goldman as an influence, but Black’s version of the Goldmanic mode is on steroids. The reader is not cajoled so much as strong-armed into having the most delightful time: pigs in blankets appear just as the tummy grumbles; cheap champagne is sloppily topped off; cocaine, likely cut with creatine, is spooned into nostrils so that attention never lags. A reader of a Black script—first and foremost a reader-buyer—would feel giardia-level sick not to love it, so hospitable is it to the reader’s fat ass.

In the first ten pages of Boy Scout, a running back, heading upfield in a pro-football game, pulls a gun from under his jersey and, before sixty thousand witnesses, shoots the opposing players in his way. (“Pumps three shots into the free safety’s head. The bullets go straight through. On the back of his helmet. A mixture of blood and fiberglass.”) He makes it to the end zone, where he utters an appropriate witticism (“I’m going to Disneyland”), then blows his own head off. In the next scene, the drunk middle-aged hero (Willis) threatens to shoot a child with a .38 (a dead squirrel is involved), not long after which the reader reaches the “Jacuzzi blowjob scene” that Black’s mom probably didn’t like, wherein a jacked pro-baller repeatedly plunges a woman’s head underwater so that she might, against her will, perform aquatic fellatio. The script’s other hero saves the day by grabbing a football and throwing a sixty-mile-per-hour spiral at the attempted rapist’s face. But it was none of these particular instances of crudity that registered most with me on a sinking-feeling reread. Rather, it was the way that Black was, through his Virgilian shepherding of the reader through the carnage, ironizing the shit out of what has always been central to cinema: violence.

by Wyatt Mason, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Chloe Niclas