Shane Black Lethal Weapon (1987)
Shane Black was twenty-four years old in 1986 when Warner Bros. paid $250,000 for his unsolicited screenplay Lethal Weapon — the largest spec-script sale to a first-time writer Hollywood had ever made and the transaction that, more than any other, redefined the screenwriting marketplace of the late 1980s. He went on to write The Monster Squad (1987), The Last Boy Scout (1991, $1.75 million spec sale), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996, $4 million), and to direct Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), Iron Man 3 (2013), The Nice Guys (2016), and The Predator (2018).
Pittsburgh to USC
Black was born in Pittsburgh in December 1961 and raised in Fullerton, California. He studied at UCLA briefly, transferred to USC's School of Cinematic Arts, and graduated in 1983. The post-college years were spent in apartments shared with fellow writers Fred Dekker and Ed Solomon. He wrote Lethal Weapon on speculation in 1985 — the script's working title was Lethal Weapon from the first draft — and his agent, Bobbi Thompson at ICM, sent it out in the fall of 1985.
"Shane wrote the script while we were sharing a place in Hollywood. He would sit at the kitchen table at midnight and type. The first draft I read had everything that ended up in the movie — the trailer, the bullet, the lawn. He had it all on the first try." — Fred Dekker, Vanity Fair (2017)
The sale
The script was on circulation in Hollywood for two weeks. Warner Bros. paid $250,000 against $50,000 — at the time, a record for a first-time writer with no produced credits. The previous record had been $200,000 for Tom Schulman's Dead Poets Society (which sat on the shelf for two more years before getting made). Joel Silver attached as producer; Richard Donner (in Lethal Weapon) signed on to direct.
"Twenty-four years old, no agent for most of his life, no credits. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The town did not know what to do with that number. Every working spec writer in Los Angeles raised his asking price the next week." — Bobbi Thompson, ICM Partners, paraphrased in Variety (2017)
The cultural shockwave of the sale — that a film-school graduate could earn six figures for a script before a frame had been shot — is the foundational event of what was later called the spec-script boom of 1987-1995. See Shane Black and the Spec-Script Boom.
What Black's voice put into Lethal Weapon
Black's screenplay style — short paragraphs, second-person address to the reader, embedded jokes in the action lines, characters who deliver banter under fire — became one of the most-imitated writing voices of the next decade. The Lethal Weapon spec contains all of it. The trailer scene at beat 13 is on the page in roughly the form it appears in the film. The "I'm too old for this shit" tag is in the spec, repeated four times. The Christmas-season Los Angeles setting — a Black trademark across his career, recurring in The Last Boy Scout, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and The Nice Guys — was on the page from the first draft.b1 b13
"The script was the funniest thing I had read in years. Most action scripts were dour. Shane had banter, jokes about the cliches of the genre, characters who knew they were in a movie. The genre needed it badly." — Richard Donner, The Hollywood Reporter (2017)
Two screenplay drafts survive in the wiki's reference folder: an earlier spec draft and the 7/26/86 shooting script with Pink/Blue/Yellow revisions. Comparing them shows the changes Donner negotiated during preproduction — see Production History (Lethal Weapon).
What Donner cut
The most-cited cuts from spec to shooting were a longer version of Riggs's grief (which had drug use beyond alcohol on the page), a darker ending in which Riggs's recovery was less complete, and a more explicit body count for incidental criminals. Black has been mostly diplomatic about the cuts in interviews; Donner has said the cuts produced a better commercial film than the spec.
"The script Shane wrote was a forty-million-dollar art film. The film I made was a fifteen-million-dollar action picture. He gave me the freedom to make the second one and I owe him for it. Some of what I cut was very good and would have made a different movie." — Richard Donner, Vulture oral history (2017)
After Lethal Weapon
Black was paid $1.75 million for The Last Boy Scout (Tony Scott, 1991), $1.75 million for The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996, then revised upward to $4 million), and lower fees for The Monster Squad (Fred Dekker, 1987). He had a writer's-block period in the late 1990s and re-emerged as a writer-director with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), which is his single most-praised film. Iron Man 3 (2013) is his largest commercial success.