CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 12/18/09

Black Christmas:

BY PETER CLINES

If you're even a casual reader of CS Weekly or our parent, Creative Screenwriting Magazine, you already know who Shane Black is.  For those who came in late, he's one of the legends behind the million-dollar spec-script boom 20 years ago, writer of films like The Monster Squad, Lethal Weapon, and The Long Kiss Goodnight.  More recently he returned to Hollywood as the writer-director of the award-winning Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which propelled Robert Downey Jr. back into the public eye.
 
With so many of his films set during the holiday season, we thought it would be fun to speak with Black about how Christmas became such a key part of his storytelling.  So, without further ado, here is Shane Black, talking about Santa, Christmas, and Frankenstein in the Wild West.
 
What were some of your favorite Christmas specials and movies growing up?
Well, it's interesting.  I watch all the old Christmas movies and I like them for odd reasons.  Like It's A Wonderful Life.  It's a Christmas movie, but within it they have a lot of bizarre, Capra-esque touches that are more indicative of life.  The scene where the gym starts to open—the floor starts to pull back and there's a swimming pool underneath.  Someone falls in and then everyone just jumps in the pool.  That moment is as fresh today as it was back then.  That kind of crazy improv moment where everyone starts laughing and jumping in. Even as a kid I was struck by that.
 
My favorite Christmas film is probably this Spanish Santa Claus movie.  It's called Santa Claus, and I even used a bit of it in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.  Basically, Santa Claus fights the Devil.  The Devil tries to stop Christmas.  There's this one scene where he just runs around the room doing gymnastics.  The Devil's this really athletic, slightly gay-looking guy who can blow flames through a phone line.  If he calls you on the phone, flames come out the receiver and they singe your ear.  That's probably my favorite.  Santa's really lame and the effects are terrible. You've got to see it.
 
My other favorite is called Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.  It was filmed in Florida in broad daylight.  Santa's sled is stuck because there's no snow, and they're all waiting for the Ice Cream Bunny.  While they're waiting Santa tells all the kids the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which takes roughly 50 -75 minutes.  At the end of which the Ice Cream Bunny shows up and everyone says, "Now we're safe."  I can't believe some of the frauds—even as a child—that were perpetrated on me. [chuckles] 
 
About half your films have been set at Christmas.  I know your first script, Shadow Company, was originally set at Halloween, and then you rewrote it as Christmas in a later draft.  Why?
Yeah.  Christmas for some reason...  Even though it's a worldwide phenomenon, I always associate it with a certain kind of American way of life.  It's also sort of a hushed period, during which, for a period of time, we agree to suspend hostility.  I'm always fascinated by the almost palpable sense in the air that something's different at Christmas.
 
If you look at a tipping-point scenario—how many people does it take to start a standing ovation?  Just one.  And then in five seconds two other people, then three, then four, then 75,000 are clapping.  Because the tipping point is as simple as one person pushing in that direction.  And it can go ugly just as easily.  One person starts to get out of hand and then everyone's out of hand. 
 
So, Christmas to me represented the best we have in terms of keeping things on that side of the dial.  A period in which, for whatever reason, [you're] more likely to bump into someone on the street and have them say, "Oh, hey man, my bad," than to have him say, "Fuck you, buddy!  Watch where you're going!"  That was remarkable to me.
 
Also, if you look at it as a substance—as a thing more than an idea—Christmas exists out here in California but in these indescribably beautiful ways to me.  It's not a 40-foot Christmas tree on the White House lawn, it's a little broken, plastic Madonna with a bulb inside hanging off a Mexican lunch wagon.  It's a little strand of colored light in some cheap trailer in the blinding sunlight, but it's still protesting its Christmas-ness.  I adore little touches of Christmas.  It's like talismans.  You walk around and these are the magic.  Little bits of Christmas that remind us this doesn't have to be a blinded, blighted, sun-washed, hostile place to live.  Christmas has always had that magic ability to me, to exist almost like a magic substance that you find little bit of if you dig carefully enough for it.  I know that sounds kind of crazy.

No, I'm actually intrigued.  When did you develop this view?  Was Lethal Weapon set at Christmas because of this or did the philosophy of Christmas develop along the way?
Along the way.  Well, Lethal Weapon is a Frankenstein story to me.  It's a guy who's a monster of sorts, who sits in his trailer and watches TV.  People despise him, they revile him.  It's like a Western.  They think the West is tame.  They think they're safe and secure in this sedentary little suburbia.  This sort of lulling effect that whatever violence and terror are in the world, we've managed to secure ourselves from it.  But Frankenstein in his trailer, he's been with violence, he's lived violence.  He knows that it's still there.  The West is not tame, it is not gentrified.  When violence, in Lethal Weapon, comes to the suburbs and takes this guy's daughter and kills cops, they go to Frankenstein and say, "Look, we hate you for what you do.  We think you're an anomaly at best and a monster at worst, but now we need you because you're the only one who understands this.  We forgot that violence is still there, and you're the one who can deal with that, so now we need to let you out of your cage."  That was the idea.  Christmas, it seemed to me, was the most pleasant, lulling, hypnotizing atmosphere in which to forget that violence can be so sudden and swift and just invade our private lives.
 
How do you generally write?  Do you use outlines or notecards or just start cranking it out from page one?
I don't really use notecards.  What I do is I try to figure out what the piece is about and link that to the story arc or the character arc.  I always think there's two things going on in any script—there's the story and then there's the plot.  The plot is the events.  If it's a heist film, it's how they get in and out.  But the story is why we're there, why we're watching the events.  It's what's going on with the characters.  And theme above that.  Once I get those things, once I know what the theme is and what it's about, I can start trying on story beats and plot beats to see if they feel like they're moving, but they have to relate to the overall theme. 
 
If you look at The Dark Knight, you'll find before those guys wrote a word of script, they knew exactly what their movie was about.  All the themes were in place.  Sometimes they had to bend the scenes in The Dark Knight to fit the theme they were trying to get across.  It's clear they didn't write the scenes and then look for what they were about, they clearly knew where they were headed. 
 
Did you actually study screenwriting?
Nah.  I took theater classes at UCLA.  I was studying stagecraft and acting.  It was a Mickey Mouse major.  My finals often were painting sets, y'know?  It was kind of a cakewalk though college.  I liked theater, I liked movies, but I'd never seen a screenplay, and I thought they were impossibly difficult.  Coming from back East, I just assumed  movies were something that floated through the ether and appeared on your TV screen and some magician wrote them, but there was certainly no way I could.  Then I read a script and it was so easy.  I read another one and said, "I can do this.  This is really rather simple."  So I never took classes, I just read scripts I loved.
 
My style, such as it is, that sometime people comment on, is really cribbed from two sources.  One is William Goldman, who has a kind of chummy, folksy storytelling style.  It's almost as though a guy in a bar is talking to you from his bar stool.  And then Walter Hill, who is just completely terse and sparing and has this real Spartan prose that has this wonderful effect of just gut-punching you.  I took those two and I slammed them together, and that's what I use.  People say it's interesting.  Mostly it's a rip-off.  It's Goldman meets Walter Hill.
 
Did you always write like this or are there some older, clumsier Shane Black scripts that will never see the light of day?
No, the first scripts I wrote were written after I decided to go out and see what they look like.  So I picked up William Goldman,  I picked up Walter Hill, and then I wrote Shadow Company, which even on the page, the '84 version, looks exactly like a Goldman script.  Lethal Weapon, it's pretty much in the style of those two writers.  Material is different, I'm talking solely about the style on the page and learning the logistics of how to do it.  Those two were my mentors.  Later mentors were people like James L. Brooks, who taught me an amazing amount, and Joel Silver, of all people, qualifies as a mentor.
 
Now, you took some time off and came back with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.  Did planning to direct it change how you approached writing it?
No, I thought about that.  That was when I was dealing with Jim Brooks.  He basically said, "You don't need to worry because you direct on paper.  You don't call shots, but you call mood and you call progression and pace and emphasis and just about everything else."  So, I may have even done a little more of that on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.
 
Now that you've sat in the director's chair, has it changed how you approach a script?
No, except I'm even more conscious of what will later be shoe leather.  The greatest shoemakers in the world supposedly can make a pair of shoes and leave no [extra] leather.  They don't waste any.  I'm very conscious now as a director.  If you've got two scenes, like a newscaster and a scene before that of a conversation, can't you have the conversation with the newscaster in the background and do it in one?  It's just shoe leather.  No shoe leather.
 
A lot of people have offbeat movies they watch this time of year, and it's probably safe to say a bunch of them are your movies.  Is there anything unusual you like to watch at the holidays?
Oddly enough, every year about this time, for no reason I can fathom, I watch The Exorcist, my favorite movie [chuckles].  Every year I'm reminded of how it doesn't age, not one single day. It's as riveting as it ever has been.

Peter Clines looks forward to his annual viewing of The Long Kiss Goodnight with spiked eggnog and good friends.  He can often be found ranting on his cleverly named blog, Writer on Writing.  His first novel, Ex-Heroes, will be released in fall 2009



Shane Black courtesy Warner Bros.

Lethal Weapon courtesy Warner Home Video

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