Actor, film director and screenwriter and producer Shane black, was born on December 16, 1961 in the city of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), in the United States. The son of Paul and Patricia Ann Black, the family lived in the Pennsylvania suburbs of Lower Burrell and Mount Lebanon. His family later moved to Fullerton, California when Shane was in his second year of high school. He finished his studies at Sunny Hills High School.
After secondary school, Black He studied film at UCLA graduating in 1983 with the desire to become an actor. In search of income while struggling to find acting work, his friend Fred Dekker encouraged him to try his hand at screenwriting. Recalling what he had learned in a drama writing class he took in college, Shane borrowed a typewriter and began working on his first script. At 23, he wrote in six weeks, his second script, “Lethal WeaponHis agent David Greenblatt sold the script in three days. The film would become a successful franchise, helping Mel Gibson become a superstar.
Black got his first acting role in the movie “Predator“(1987); Since then, he has acted in other films and on television, although he never achieved important roles.
His main and most successful activity in the film industry was always based on writing scripts, of which almost a dozen have been produced. With the first one he sold, transformed into the feature film “Lethal weapon“(1987) he earned $ 250,000 and, two years later, he was paid half of that sum for being a co-writer of”Lethal Weapon 2“In 1991 he received $ 1,750,000 for his screenplay for”The last Boy Scout“and $ 1 million for”The last great hero“Released in 1993. At the height of his career he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the Hollywood film industry, earning $ 4 million for”Lethal memory” (nineteen ninety six).
Black he was also the writer and director of “Kiss kiss bang bang“(2005).
Black he has admitted that many of the scripts he wrote for other directors, although they brought him a considerable sum of money, were rewritten to such an extent that the original story was hardly recognized.
His last work, recently released, was the script for “iron Man 3“(2013), which he also directed.
Often Black uses the pseudonyms Harry Lime and Holly Martins, names of the two main characters in the movie “The Third Man.”