Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are eyeing the long-gestating Shane Black noir The Nice Guys, reports The Wrap. The film will see director Black, screenwriter on early installments of the Lethal Weapon series, returning to the genre which served him well on 2005’s well-received Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
The Nice Guys, which Black will co-write with Anthony Bagarozzi, centres on two men charged with investigating the apparent suicide of a female porn star whose career was on the slide.
A log line released in 2011 for a reading of the script revealed: “In smoggy 1970s Los Angeles, Jackson Healy [muscle-for-hire, recovering alcoholic] and Holland March [private eye, practising alcoholic] are brought together by the suicide of a fading porn star. Problem is, the dead girl’s aunt is convinced she saw her niece alive and well, after the highly publicised incident. March needs money, takes the case, and within days, it’s blossomed into a far-reaching murder conspiracy, bizarrely rooted in smog and the US auto industry.”
Black wrote the screenplay for 1987’s Lethal Weapon, helping to spawn a hugely successful four-film franchise, but famously fell out with producers over his proposal to kill off Mel Gibson’s Riggs in the sequel. Almost two decades on, the success of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang saw him given a shot by Marvel Studios at superhero sequel Iron Man 3 last year. Both films starred Robert Downey Jr, with the latter going to make more than $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion) at the global box office.
The Nice Guys will see Black reuniting with Hollywood super-producer Joel Silver, with whom he worked on the Lethal Weapon films, and is being put together at studio Warner Bros.
