Black has described the resulting postmodern pile-up as 'the bastard child of James Brooks and Joel Silver'.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's self-consciously cine-literate title references both super-spy James Bond and scabrous critic Pauline Kael, for whom it encapsulated the alluring shallowness of modern cinema. Thrown together by farcically convoluted and frequently incomprehensible circumstances, the threesome flip casually between love and a 45, losing sisters, fingers and the plot along the way. The rap sheet comprises petty thief Harry Lockhart (Downey), who runs from the cops straight into an audition and winds up in Hollywood Perry van Shrike aka Gay Perry (Kilmer), the petulant PI-cum-studio-adviser hired to hone Harry's method-acting talents and Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), a struggling actress with a beer commercial (and little else) under her belt. Here, its fictional gumshoe Jonny Gossamer, whose self-penned dime-store novels (You'll Never Die in This Town Again Small Town Boy Makes Dead) provide the link between a trio of characters caught in the Get Shorty-style intersection between crime and cinema.
The last of these was the pseudonym under which writer Davis Dresser wrote a string of hard-boiled novels, one of which was the partial inspiration for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. At the height of his vulgar powers, Shane Black's deliciously heartless wit spawned caustic one-liners such as: 'It was an accident, right? You tripped, slipped on the floor, and accidentally stuck your dick in my wife.' Then, after a couple of high-profile flops (the Pirandelloesque Last Action Hero and the female-empowered Long Kiss Goodnight), he retreated to lick his wounds and, presumably, to immerse himself in the works of Chandler, Hammett and Brett Halliday.
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