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It's your dime-a-dozen Hollywood story, really: The hotshot screenwriter whose scripts sell for absurd, record-setting money in the piles-of-blow-as-big-as-Richard-Donner 80s pens a couple of bombs, disappears for the better part of a decade to battle the demons of success and its attendant guilt (Why, Lord, must I be so gifted and successful and throw hooker-laden parties at my bitchin' mansion while others toil in obscurity and poverty? Why why why? Hey, Ernesto, there's a fucking leaf in the hottub that's not going to strain itself, OK?), and then reemerges for a big I'm-just-so-misunderstood newspaper profile on the eve of the premiere of his most undiluted creative work at an international film festival. Given the above, we knew exactly where yesterday's LAT profile of Lethal Weapon action-nihilist Shane Black was going. This passage, however, stood out:

A falling out with his best friend in the mid-'90s only added to his guilt. The man, whom he'd first met at UCLA, had decided he wanted to be a writer too, but his career never caught fire. Black said "he was very angered by my success," and several months after they stopped speaking Black received a letter. "[It] said, 'I still hate you, I don't want to see you anymore, but here's a bank account number. Wire as much as you think our friendship is worth into it.'"

Black, who sent the man a large sum, remains stunned. "I said, 'Is this what writing does? Does it make you lose your friends? Make people hate you?' "

No, Mr. Black, once you finally remove the scratchy shirt you've woven from wrinkly hundred-dollar bills, you may realize it's not the writing that makes people hate or resent you, the misundersttod genius that's inflicted a generation of quiplashing action heroes. It's the not inviting us to those hooker-laden parties at the bitchin' mansion. We love bitchin' mansions full of hookers.