Not so long ago I did a post on action sequences highlighting Tarantino. If we’re doing rule breakers there’s no way I’m leaving out Shane Black. If you’re a Shane Black fan, stick around. If you think he’s THE most arrogant and over-rated motherfucker in the history of the written screenplay word…pass onward, Good Horseman!
For me, it’s kinda the same deal as Tarantino. His screenplays > his movies. Check out his IMDB profile and you can see he’s doing just fine these days, the Iron Man tentpole is part of the Marvel Universe. He’s writing and directing Doc Savage and Predator.
What am I supposed to say about Lethal Weapon? It’s just OK. It’s not sniffing my own Top 100 any time soon(and I’m sure Shane gives a &^% about that.) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? C’mon. Don’t think I ever saw The Last Boy Scout but if I did I don’t remember it. So what makes this guy so essential?
His voice.
Nobody writes like him. It’s a style…and it’s been so copied, it’s now a cliche. So don’t try to steal it because it’s owned and you’ll get called out. So why study him? To try to figure out the alchemy of it–what makes him so good writing an action sequence?
- THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT
Hey William R. Pace, you beat me to the study of this. This script was sold for four million dollars. That was another era entirely. You can look over William’s breakdown of page 1 of this four million dollar script. I’m more interested in pure voice, and how it infiltrates action lines.
The goal here, Good Reader, is for you not to infuse your own action lines and sequences with Shane Black’s voice, but with your own. It can be something small, like this…
INT. MOTEL ROOM – AKRON, OHIO – NIGHT
A NUDE COUPLE on the bed. They look up, startled — as three
men burst through the door. The LEADER: a haggard-looking
man sporting a soup-stain on his tie, whoops, that’s the
design, sorry. MITCH HENESSEY, private investigator and con
man extraordinaire. He flashes a phony badge…
“whoops, that’s the design, sorry…” He just broke the 4th wall, talking to the reader in a direct aside. That is the Shane Black style. Sounds like no big deal but you have to be really good to get away with it. If you’re not, it blows up in your face, too cute for school, your script discarded in five pages or less. Because it’s fucking annoying! Black also viscerally drives right into the character’s head with pitch black humor, like here:
UNDER THE WATER – HELL – SAME
Here we are again, in the world of silence and blinding PAIN.
Despair and madness but now there’s something else — Now
there’s RAGE.
It takes losing most of the FLESH from her right wrist…
But she frees the hand. WRENCHES it loose. The water turns
soupy red around it. GROPES, blindly. Fingers NUMB, so fucking
cold — Breath, running out. No air. NO TIME.
She darts her right hand forward. Toward the obscenely bobbing
CORPSE of Nathan. Does something grotesque, jams her hand
DOWN THE CORPSE’S PANTS —
Hideaway gun, it’s right where he said, right beside Mr.
Wally. PSP-25. Semi-auto, steel jackets. She waits. Rage
inside her. Death in her hands.
MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE SURFACE
The wheel CREAKS. Groans. The terrorist in the western boots
watches her emerge, face first — She comes up firing.
The first slug takes him in the knee. Blows it to scraps. He
collapses, howling. She shifts aim. THE RED BUTTON. No
hesitation. BLAM-! Hits it DEAD ON. Stops the wheel.
Incredible.
Doesn’t blink. Unties her captive hand. BLOWS TO SPLINTERS
the wood surrounding her feet. Leaps to solid ground, as
ANOTHER ANGLE
Daedalus looks up from his prone position. In agony. A vision
from Hell approaches: A fiendish blue-skinned woman in a
sodden nightgown. Blood leaking from one wrist. She has risen,
REBORN, from the icy waters.
DAEDALUS
Samantha… Please…!
CHARLY
Who’s Samantha?
She shoots him in the other knee. He HOWLS. Gun, empty. She
tosses it aside. In a nearby crate: ASSAULT RIFLES. Snatches
up a Kalashnikov and clip. Kneels and says:
CHARLY
You see in the movies, badguy says,
“Talk to me and I’ll let you live.”
We’re gonna run a variation, it goes
like this: Talk to me…? I’ll let
you die.
She fires again.
CHARLY
Where’s Henessey…?
His stuff grabs you and doesn’t let you go. It ain’t Shakespeare, sure. But it’s effective genre writing. More than effective because here I am on another 10 degree February day writing about the guy. If there is a God and justice, Lethal Weapon won’t have the shelf life that Hamlet does, but look at this passage and tell me there isn’t screenwriting poetry in it:
FADE IN:
CITY OF ANGELS
lies spread out beneath us in all its splendor, like a
bargain basement Promised Land.
CAMERA SOARS, DIPS, WINDS its way SLOWLY DOWN, DOWN,
bringing us IN OVER the city as we:
SUPER MAIN TITLES.
TITLES END, as we —
SPIRAL DOWN TOWARD a lush, high-rise apartment complex.
The moon reflected in glass.
CAMERA CONTINUES TO MOVE IN THROUGH billowing curtains,
INTO the inner sanctum of a penthouse apartment, and
here, boys and girls, is where we lose our breath,
because —
spread-eagled on a sumptuous designer sofa lies the
single most beautiful GIRL in the city.
Blonde hair. A satin nightgown that positively glows.
Sam Cooke MUSIC, crooning from five hundred dollar
SPEAKERS.
PASTEL colors. Window walls. New wave furniture tor-
tured into weird shapes. It looks like robots live here.
On the table next to the sleeping Venus lies an open
bottle of pills … next to that, a mirror dusted with
cocaine.
She rouses herself to smear some powder on her gums.
As she does, we see from her eyes that she is thoroughly,
completely whacked out of her mind…
She stands, stumbles across the room, pausing to glance
at a photograph on the wall:
Two men. Soldiers. Young, rough-hewn, arms around each
other.
The Girl throws open the glass doors … steps out onto a
balcony, and there, beneath her, lies all of nighttime
L.A. Panoramic splendor. Her hair flies, her expression.
rapt, as she stands against this sea of technology. She
is beautiful.
On the balcony railing beside her stand three potted
plants.
The Girl sees them, picks one up. Looks over the balcony
railing … It is ten stories down to the parking lot.
she squints, holds the plant over the edge.
GIRL
Red car.
Drops the plant. Down it goes, spiralling end over end
— until, finally … BAM — ! SHATTERS. Dirt flies. A
red Chevy is now minus a WINDSHIELD. The Girl takes
another plant.
GIRL
Green car.
She drops it. Green Dodge. Ten stories below, BAM
Impact city. Scratch one paint job. Grabs the final
plant and holds it out, saying:
GIRL
Blue car.
POW. GLASS SHATTERS. Dirt sprays. A blue BMW this
time. The Girl loves this game … her expression is
slightly crazed. She reaches for another plant —
There aren’t any. Her smile fades — And for a moment,
just a moment, the dullness leaves her eyes and she is
suddenly, incredibly sober. And tears fill her eyes as
she looks over the edge —
GIRL
Yellow car.
And jumps the railing. Plummets, head over heels like a
rag doll. Hits the yellow car spot on. She lies, dead,
like an extinguished dream. Still beautiful.
You tease. You titillate. You present a mystery. You beckon the reader the turn the page. Then you do the same thing on page 2. Force the eye down the page with savage and beautiful description. Don’t over-think it. Screenplays are mostly the writing of dialogue and action lines. If it’s a genre piece you’ll need to know how to write an action sequence that feels like it’s happening now, right before our eyes, what to include or exclude, use of action verbs, spacing words on the page. It’s an art indeed and Shane Black is a rule-breaking Master. Check out Last Action Hero or Last Boy Scout lately?
Maybe you should.
