So I talked to my friend Pete Spiliakos about the action movie & the relationship between working class stories about injustice & the drama of American life post-60s, starting from the astonishing success of Lethal Weapon & the friendship between its writer, Shane Black, & the novelist Warren Murphy, author of the Destroyer novels, who provided the story for the even more successful sequel, Lethal Weapon 2.
It’s worth dwelling on the fact that it’s next to impossible to look at working class men as heroes in our storytelling a generation later; as well, that it’s become as difficult to dramatize the big social phenomena that bother most Americans—indeed, public discourse as much as storytelling is ruled by a strange silence, born perhaps of diffidence… For the sake of audiences & artists both, Pete & I did our best to explain how middlebrow storytelling could be daring & successful & produce cinematic heroes.