Tagline: Sex. Murder. Mystery. Welcome to the party.
A petty thief (Robert Downey Jr.) posing as an actor is brought to Los Angeles for an unlikely audition and finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation along with his high school dream girl (Michelle Monaghan) and a detective (Val Kilmer) who’s been training him for his upcoming role.
“Go to hell, Jonny Gossamer,” she told me. She’d poured herself into a seamless dress. From the look of it she’d spilled some. – You’ll Never Die In This Town Again.
A Jonny Gossamer Thriller
Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is basically a decent guy. Sure, he’s a petty thief who skates through life on a shaky cocktail of dog-eared charm and cockeyed optimism, but he wants to do the right thing. He just doesn’t know how, exactly.
Harry’s perpetual bad luck takes a turn for the better when he and his partner are doing some after-hours Christmas “shopping” at a New York City toy store and the security alarm breaks up the party. (Yeah, it sounds like trouble, but keep reading.) In making his frantic getaway from the cops, Harry inadvertently stumbles into an audition for a Hollywood detective movie, and faster than you can say Jack Robinson, the producer flies him to Los Angeles for a screen test.
Thrust into the cutthroat world of L.A.’s pros, cons, losers and wannabes, Harry is teamed with tough-guy private eye Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer), AKA “Gay Perry,” to prepare him for his screen test. Gay Perry is ruthless, relentlessly tough and – you guessed it – gay. He also has little patience for Harry, who tries out his acting skills by passing himself off as a detective.
It seems like nothing short of destiny when the thief-trying-to-be-an-actor-impersonating-a-detective crosses paths with Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), an aspiring actress who needs his help.
Inspired by her hero Jonny Gossamer, a fictitious hard-boiled private eye featured in a series of pulp detective novels, Harmony moved to Hollywood to pursue her dreams… but a few years and a lot of rejections later, she’s facing the harsh reality that her best days may be behind her.
When the mysterious suicide of Harmony’s sister intersects with a seemingly unrelated case that Harry and Gay Perry are investigating, they suddenly find themselves embroiled in a real-life murder mystery. Bodies surface and re-surface…long-buried family secrets erupt in present-day mayhem… and what began as a free trip to L.A. may result in Harry’s one-way ticket to the city morgue.
If he’s going to stay alive and become the hero that Harmony needs him to be, Harry will have to convince a reluctant Gay Perry to help him solve the case. He’ll need to channel Jonny Gossamer’s tough-as-nails swagger. And a little dose of luck — or is it fate? — wouldn’t hurt, either.
A Taste for Violence
There had never been a story like it before. In 1986, a 23 year-old recent UCLA graduate named Shane Black finished writing a draft of his first screenplay. Within a week, producer Joel Silver optioned it, and together with director Richard Donner they ushered in a new era of filmmaking with Lethal Weapon, a character-driven hybrid of comedy and the adrenaline-fueled action genre emerging under the auspices of Silver, producer of the seminal action films Commando and Predator.
Starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as mismatched cops battling a drug-smuggling ring, Lethal Weapon established Black’s his flair for creating characters as explosive as his frenetic action sequences and dialogue to match. Its blockbuster success spawned three Lethal Weapon sequels, influenced a generation of filmmakers and set the bar for countless imitations.
“Shane has a unique voice that comes through in everything he writes,” says Silver, who helped to reinvent action filmmking in 1988 with Die Hard and again in 1999 as the producer of The Matrix. “Whether he’s honoring the conventions of the genre or deliberately defying them, he always brands his films with original characters, innovative action and memorable dialogue. His writing style is as entertaining as the movies that wind up on the screen.”
“The films that interest me tend to be those that combine two elements in a way that we haven’t seen before,” says Black, whose Lethal Weapon screenplay paired a a veteran detective with a suicidal younger cop whose unorthodox behavior sets off a surprising mix of comedy and suspense.
Black first visited the detective myth in Silver’s 1991 production The Last Boy Scout, a buddy / action picture starring Bruce Willis as a down-and-out private eye looking for redemption when he teams up with a disgraced ex-quarterback, played by Damon Wayans, to investigate corruption in the high-stakes world of professional football. His forceful 1996 script, The Long Kiss Goodnight, features a fourth-rate P.I. played by Samuel L. Jackson who discovers that Geena Davis’ amnesiac schoolteacher is actually a deadly secret agent working to overthrow the government.
Black’s drive to explore the action / crime milieu was greatly influenced by his boyhood obsession with detective novels – cheap paperbacks populated with hard boiled private eyes and dames in distress; risque stories where two seemingly unrelated cases intersect in a confluence of scandal and murder, and bittersweet justice always prevails.
“I read The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators, the suspense fiction intended for kids, but my childhood heroes tended to be in the adult section of the library,” Black says. “I loved detective stories, and I devoured them. I’ve literally read hundreds of them. I wasn’t allowed to read them when I was a kid because they were racy, so I would sneak them. I’d save my lunch money – I wouldn’t eat for three days so I could buy the new Mike Shayne book, or the new Shell Scott, or Chester Drum. The racy scenes were great but I loved the mystery. There was a real kind of masculine, rough-hewn rhythm to those caper novels, and I acquired an even deeper sense of them that was emotional and powerful. If I hadn’t read those stories, I wouldn’t be writing movies.
“My fascination with the myth of the private eye and my obsession with those pulp novels needed an outlet when I became an adult,” he elaborates. “To some extent I explored it in Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. But I’d never attempted a private eye piece that summed up all the different things I felt about those books and always wanted to try. This film pays homage to the detective stories I read when I was a kid.”
The setting for Black’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a tarnished promised land called contemporary Los Angeles, a sprawling shark tank where damaged but decent characters collide with destiny much in the same way the fated fiction unfolds in the pages of Black’s beloved private eye novels. Swimming with the sharks are petty criminal Harry Lockhart and sometime actress Harmony Faith Lane, recently reunited childhood friends who share a love of the long-forgotten pulp hero Jonny Gossamer, a tough guy private eye in the tradition of Black’s fictional heroes.
Though the fictional Jonny Gossamer only briefly appears in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang in a scene from a movie playing within the story, he is an important point of reference for the characters and his presence is felt throughout the film.
“There’s a sense of destiny about Jonny Gossamer, a sense of spitting in the eye of death,” says Black of his fictional P.I. “He’s an obscure, trashy dime-store paperback phenomenon who has come to represent so much more than that in the eyes of these characters. He’s really a metaphor for a kind of youthful enthusiasm, a belief in something beyond where you are, a belief in the hero that you can someday be.”
As the story unfolds and Black’s characters seize the opportunity to rise above their past imperfections and maybe make good for once, their reality begins to take on the qualities of Jonny Gossamer’s fictional world, where randomness gives way to fate, truth is stranger than fiction, and everyone has the chance to be great for one shining moment.
“It’s important to believe in and savor something that’s shopworn and soiled and which most people would dismiss as not being literature,” Black believes. “There have been very few contemporary interpretations of the great L.A. private eye tradition; what I strived for was a movie that walks the line between something that takes itself seriously enough to be suspenseful but is playful enough to be entertaining and fresh.”
After honing this sly blend of his signature buddy movie and classic film noir, Black sent his Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang screenplay to Silver. “It seemed logical to do this project with Joel because I thought that more than anyone I’ve worked with in the past, he would be drawn to it; he would understand the material, not just in general, but in the way that I specifically intended,” Black says.
“I thought Shane’s script was funny, romantic, suspenseful and full of fresh, unexpected moments,” Silver says. “It’s a sophisticated blend of genres and ideas. It pays homage to noir films and the pulp detective stories, but the tone is utterly contemporary. The passion he has for the private eye tradition really comes through. It might be the most romantic story Shane’s ever written. It’s definitely his most original.”
“With Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Shane does for the private eye genre what he did for the action movie,” says executive producer Susan Levin, who also serves as Silver Pictures’ Executive Vice President of Production. “He brings together original, engaging characters in a story infused with clever dialogue and a rapid-fire tempo that calls back to classic screwball comedies. It was one of the best pieces of material I’d read in some time. With great material, you will attract great actors.”
These production notes provided by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Joel Michaely, Ariel Winter
Directed by: Shane Black
Screenplay by: Shane Black
Release Date: November 11, 2005
MPAA Rating: R for language, violence and sexuality / nudity.
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $4,243,756 (26.9%)
Foreign: $11,541,392 (73.1%)
Total: $15,785,148 (Worldwide)