'Nice Guys' director worked his way up from two other nice gigs

Shane Black's The Nice Guys, set in a smog-cloaked '70s Los Angeles and starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe as a mismatched duo of stumblebum sleuths, can't help but evoke other, classic, movies.

Robert Altman's version of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, shot just a few years before the time The Nice Guys is supposed to have taken place, is one. The Big Sleep another. Chinatown. L.A. Confidential. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even.

It's L.A., after all. It's private eyes. It's murder, double crosses, slimeballs, sex.

"I agree," says an agreeable Black, the 54-year-old former Pittsburgher best known for penning a couple of Lethal Weapon films and for directing what right now occupies the 10th slot on the list of all-time worldwide box office grossers, a little item called Iron Man 3.

"But the roots to me are not so much cinematic as literary," he adds. "Because even the greatest movies, the ones that I go back to, like Double Indemnity, movies like Night Moves with Gene Hackman, there's a literary tradition of the L.A. private eye that is extremely longstanding and, for me, powerful, almost sacrosanct.

"From the '40s through the '70s, there was this endless sea of pulp paperbacks, some of which are lying in tatters in used bookstores now, with the most wonderful cover art by Robert McGinnis. And, taken as a whole, they represent this entire noir spectrum - from the real sort of melancholy, austere private detective stories to the sort of swinging, jazzy '70s versions - and that's just the world I grew up reading."

And that he continues to read.

Black collects such pulp paperbacks, books by Evan Hunter, writing as Ed McBain (the 87th Precinct series); by Richard S. Prather (the Shell Scott series); by William Campbell Gault (his detectives: Brock Callahan, Joe Puma); the pseudonymous Ellery Queen; and on and on.

"The detective genre is something that I'm just so passionately in love with that, well, if you put me alone in the house for a year and locked the door, I'd say, 'Oh well, OK, detectives.' "

The detectives in The Nice Guys, opening Friday, have in fact been kicking around Hollywood in screenplay form for more than a dozen years now. Black and his writing partner, Anthony Bagarozzi, took their cues from mystery scribe Ralph Dennis and his books featuring Jim Hardman and Hump Evans, an unlicensed P.I. and his sidekick, a former pro-footballer.

"We said, 'OK, this guy has two wisecracking dudes, and I like that' - to have a foil, someone to talk to. I like the banter. It goes back to Butch and Sundance, basically, because all private-eye books are essentially westerns."

Because they were going the buddy-pic route, Black and Bagarozzi at first thought each would take one character.

As they sat down to start writing, in the early aughts, "I said I'd take Holland March, the character that Ryan plays, and he said he'd do the Jackson Healy character played by Russell," Black recalls.

"But it turns out it doesn't really work that way. . . . Eventually, between the wrangling and the finagling and the head-knocking that transpired between us, we got a script set in present-day L.A., and no one bought it."

Joel Silver, who had produced the Lethal Weapons (and the Die Hards and a hundred other megahits), was still on board. He and Black tried shopping the concept to CBS, to HBO. No takers.

"Now 10 years had gone by, and we've changed the script so it's in the '70s now, but still it's just lying around," Black says.

"And then I did a film, Iron Man 3."

Suddenly, everybody was interested.

"The success of that film, which was wildly more than anyone expected, afforded me the opportunity to sort of say what I wanted to do next. So I went back to The Nice Guys. And within 72 hours, we got Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe to both sign on.

"After 13 years of floating around Hollywood, this came together in less than three days."

It should be noted that Black's involvement in Iron Man 3 (he also co-wrote the script) came about in part because of an earlier film he wrote and directed, the 2005 cult fave Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a darkly comic hardboiled noir that has been credited with resurrecting Robert Downey Jr.'s career. Downey and Black hit it off then, and they hit it out of the park with the Marvel franchise.

Right now, Black is in preproduction for The Predator, a sequel to the '87 Schwarzenegger sci-fi action hit Predator and its spawn. He also has an adaptation of the Doc Savage pulp series on his docket, and an actor in mind for the role of the bronzed superhuman surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, musician: Dwayne Johnson.

"The problem is he's just very busy," Black says of the actor formerly known as The Rock. "Dwayne is excited about the idea, but he's got Baywatch, he's got potentially this thing Rampage, he's got Jumanji, so when are we going to get him? I would love to start that one after The Predator. . . . In a perfect world, we would just run right into it and use Dwayne Johnson."

And although Black has the monster hit Iron Man 3 on his CV, he says he doesn't see himself directing another Marvel Cinematic Universe entry anytime soon.

"I mean, they're so booked up that even if they were to talk to me, it would be about something happening in 2020, which I can't even commit to at this point. . . . They've got their dance card filled, and that's OK. I wish them well. They do it right over there. There's a reason they're on top."

That said, Black wouldn't mind if The Nice Guys established a little cinematic universe of its own.

"I'm trying to do everything I can in the midst of a summer full of branded superhero prospects to get this movie out there in the marketplace," he says. "The trick is to try to do something fresh that at least gets noticed enough to be talked about and generates some buzz.

"We don't need to conquer opening weekend. We just need to have people show up and tell their friends."

And if enough people show up, Black would be happy to stay on to bring Gosling's March and Crowe's Healy back for another spin around the block.

"The first one establishes a tone and a bunch of situations," Black pitches. "It showcases these guys in what amounts to a tasting menu of what this sort of movie could be like.

"And the next one, having introduced all that, would be just another case," he said. "That's the thing with detectives - they can always solve another case."

srea@phillynews.com
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