Shane Black on spec scripts
Just gone live Deadline article:
Warner Bros has hired Shane Black to direct a live action adaptation of the Japanese manga series Death Note. Black will oversee a script that’s being written by Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry, his accomplices on Doc Savage, a drama he’ll direct for Sony Pictures Entertainment. Dan Lin, Roy Lee, Doug Davison and Brian Witten are producing Death Note.
And then further into the article some background on Black and his thoughts about spec scripts:
Death Note was the favorite manga of Black, who made his directing debut on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the 2005 cult favorite that helped re-launched Robert Downey Jr.’s star. I’ve been covering Hollywood long enough to recall those heady 1990s days when Black became Hollywood’s spec script king. After landing $250,000 for Lethal Weapon, a script he sold right out of UCLA, Black’s subsequent scripts sent studios into a frenzy. Black was paid $1.75 million for The Last Boy Scout and then set a record with the $4 million New Line paid for The Long Kiss Goodnight. He and Basic Instinct scribe Joe Eszterhas played a game of can-you-top-this that made for late nights for this journalist, and an excitement that just doesn’t exist in the business that rarely gets competitive enough for studios to bid up anything. One of the reasons Chris Nolan got so much industry respect for Inception was because he gambled on himself and wrote that film on spec.
“I remember how it used to feel, like the entire agency lit up over at Endeavor,” Black told me. “My agent, David Greenblatt, would say, let’s get to work on this, and more and more agents gravitated toward the room and soon the negotiations became like watching a football game.”
It’s hard to imagine any writer in his twenties not being impacted by the money and stature, but it became a stigma. Black became blocked as a writer for several years, getting away from the typewriter to travel, and have a life. “You can imagine people reading that stuff, and getting on the bus to LA with scripts, ready to hit the jackpot, but the idea that specs were lottery tickets wasn’t true then and it’s not true now. The money was terrific, but I never thought about that. Do you think Chris Nolan was writing Inception and thinking, this will be a good paycheck? To me, it was about, do you care about this enough to carry the ball all the way through, writing alone in the attic and saying, my mom will love this, because that was all you could count on.”
That last line is the best takeaway. If your prime motivation in writing a story is a big paycheck, probably a good idea to reassess the situation. (A) The odds of selling a spec script are extremely long. (B) While the money from selling a spec can be great, it’s inconsistent. © Better to learn the skills of what it takes to be a professional screenwriter, one who can go from project to project, knowing what they can write well and with passion, and doing your work on a daily basis. (D) All of which is to say choose to write a spec script about a story you absolutely love. Indeed, like Black says, something your mom will love, that is if she’s a tough-ass critic and not a sycophant.
It’s terrific to see Black in a good place in his personal and creative life nowadays. For better or worse, he was the poster boy for aspiring screenwriters for many years. That’s a lot of pressure, direct or indirect. He went off, had a life, and now he’s back to doing something he loves: writing and directing movies, including his favorite manga “Death Note.”
It’s all good in Shane Black world. Happy for him.
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