Writer: Shane Black

Shane Black sold Lethal Weapon at twenty-two and was briefly the highest-paid screenwriter in the industry, with The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight setting records.

The voice is unmistakable: characters who talk under pressure, narrators who admit to narrating, and structural jokes about the film’s own conventions. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang opens with a narrator complaining about the narration.

Almost everything he writes is set at Christmas, which began as a way to make a familiar setting slightly wrong and became a signature he now leans into deliberately.