Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon) Lethal Weapon (1987)

Richard Donner was fifty-six years old in March 1987, eight years past Superman: The Movie (1978) and two years past The Goonies (1985), when Lethal Weapon opened and made him — at an age when many directors of the New Hollywood generation were starting to slow — the principal architect of the modern Hollywood action film. He directed all four Lethal Weapon pictures, six films across his next decade with Joel Silver, and produced the sequels through Donner-Shuler/Donner Productions.

From Bronx live TV to Superman

Donner was born Richard Schwartzberg in the Bronx in April 1930. He worked his way through New York University, did a stint in the Marine Corps, and entered television in the 1950s as an actor and assistant on live productions before turning to directing. The 1960s and 70s output was prolific television (The Twilight Zone, Gilligan's Island, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Kojak) plus a feature debut with X-15 (1961) and the cult horror picture The Omen (1976) that made his name in features.

Superman: The Movie (1978) was the breakthrough. Donner's reading of the material — verisimilitude, the word he taped to his director's chair — produced the first comic-book adaptation that the audience took seriously as a film. He shot most of Superman II in parallel and was famously fired by the Salkind producers before completing it; the Donner Cut was finally released in 2006. Inside Moves (1980), The Toy (1982), Ladyhawke (1985), and The Goonies (1985) preceded Lethal Weapon; Scrooged (1988) followed.

"Dick was the one director of his generation who never got cynical. He read every script as if it might be the best one. Lethal Weapon came in and he treated it the way he had treated Superman." — Joel Silver, Vulture oral history (2017)

How Lethal Weapon came to him

Shane Black's spec script — an unsolicited submission from a USC film-school graduate represented by ICM agent Bobbi Thompson — went out to studios in late 1985 and was acquired by Warner Bros. for $250,000, an unprecedented sale for a first-time screenwriter. Joel Silver attached as producer; Donner read the script on a weekend and signed within a week.

"I read it on a Saturday and committed on Monday. The thing the script had that nothing else did was the trailer scene. The hollow point. I had not seen a studio script that was willing to put a real suicide attempt on the page. I called Joel and said yes." — Richard Donner, The Hollywood Reporter (2017)

Donner's contributions to the shooting script — over Black's objections — softened several elements: a subplot involving Riggs's drug-using grief was cut, the body count of incidental criminals was reduced, the ending was made less ambiguous. Black later said the cuts produced a better commercial film than the script he had written. Donner brought in Jeffrey Boam (uncredited on Lethal Weapon, credited on the sequels) to do polish.

What Donner brought to the film

Donner's craft register on Lethal Weapon was the same one he had used on Superman — straight 1.85:1, eye-line shooting, performance-first. He resisted the trend of late-80s action cinema toward what he called jacking the cut. The lawn fight at beats 35-36 is shot in long takes and master-and-singles coverage; the helicopter beat at the memorial is staged as a continuous walk-and-talk with one cut.b21 b35a Cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt gave the picture a soft golden-hour palette that read against the genre's prevailing black-and-blue.

"Donner shoots an action scene the way he shoots a dialogue scene. You see who is hitting whom and why. The lawn fight in Lethal Weapon is a master class in spatial coherence. There are no impossible angles." — David Bordwell, Observations on Film Art (2005)

The Donner stock company

Lethal Weapon established the working ensemble Donner used through the 1990s: producer Joel Silver, screenwriter Jeffrey Boam (sequels), composer Michael Kamen, cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, editor Stuart Baird, stunt coordinator Bobby Bass, casting director Marion Dougherty, AD Willie Simmons. Steve Kahan, who plays Captain Murphy, was Donner's cousin and appeared in every Donner film of the period.

After Lethal Weapon

Scrooged (1988), Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Radio Flyer (1992), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), Maverick (1994), Assassins (1995), Conspiracy Theory (1997), Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Timeline (2003), and 16 Blocks (2006) were the directing credits. Free Willy (1993) and the X-Men franchise (as producer through The Donners' Company with his wife Lauren Shuler Donner) were the production credits. Donner died in July 2021 at ninety-one.

Cross-Film Connections

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