In the early 90s, a pair of students wrote a spec script, Last Action Hero – and watched as it morphed into an infamous Hollywood flop. Screenwriter Zak Penn was still in his early 20s when he went to the glitzy premiere of Last Action Hero in 1993. He had every reason to be excited; ... Last Action Hero | The cop thriller parody we never got to see
In the early 90s, a pair of students wrote a spec script, Last Action Hero – and watched as it morphed into an infamous Hollywood flop.
Screenwriter Zak Penn was still in his early 20s when he went to the glitzy premiere of Last Action Hero in 1993. He had every reason to be excited; this was the end result of his debut script, which he’d co-written with his college friend Adam Leff. Sure, it had been rewritten (and rewritten, and rewritten…), but still – there it was on the big screen, featuring Hollywood’s biggest star, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Sitting down with his parents and a bunch of friends he’d invited, Penn watched as the lights went down – and a completely different film from what he expected unfolded on the cinema screen.
“I brought everybody I knew, because I didn’t know what I was getting into,” Penn told me in 2015. “And as we watched the movie, my parents were turning to me and saying, ‘Did you write all these fart jokes?’ I said, ‘I promise, I didn’t.’”
Penn described the premiere as “dreary,” and certainly, Last Action Hero’s box office numbers made for grim reading. Once expected to be that summer’s blockbuster, it was instead an infamous failure – marking the end of Schwarzenegger’s run as Hollywood’s most bankable name.
For Penn, the painful part wasn’t so much watching his screenplay change almost beyond recognition – it was the conversations he had afterwards. He described “That experience of explaining to somebody, ‘You don’t understand. I get that you don’t like this movie. But you have to understand – neither do I.’”
First draft
Two years earlier, there was Penn and Leff’s first draft script, dated September 1991. It was intended, as Penn later put it, as a “genuine love note” to the action movies they loved – an affectionate homage to the crowd-pleasing output of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and screenwriters like Walter Hill and Shane Black.
Its opening scene introduces one Arno Slater, a hulking, assault-rifle-wielding Los Angeles cop who guns down a bunch of goons in a busy shopping precinct. You can probably guess who the character’s based on. One wildly over-the-top set-piece later, and it’s revealed that what we’ve just experienced is a trailer for an action thriller unsubtly called Extremely Violent.
We then meet the film’s true protagonist: 15 year-old movie nerd Danny Goldman, a frequent visitor to the dwindling number of grindhouse movie theatres in Times Square’s downtown Manhattan. Danny lives a humdrum existence, sharing an apartment with his mother and surviving dreary English lessons by daydreaming that his screen hero, Arno Slater, is a more exciting version of Hamlet.
Everything changes for Danny when, alone in a run-down cinema, he’s sucked into the world of Arno Slater and the thriller plot of Extremely Violent.
If all this sounds familiar, that’s because many of these ideas made it into the finished film, directed by John McTiernan. But what began as a grittier parody of the era’s thrillers was soon made into something much bigger and more fantastical. The action became glossier and more overblown; there was more criss-crossing between the ‘real’ world and the fictional. The parodies were less focused on cop thrillers, and more broadly on Hollywood action films.
It was turned, Penn said, “into this giant superstar wank. It was actually pretty informative and interesting to watch.”
The original script uses Danny as a means of prodding affectionately at the cliches found in the typical ultra-violent cop thriller of the period: the detective who takes no prisoners and gets screamed at by his chief for his antics. As Arno violently pulverises customers in a strip club, trying to find the identities of two hoodlums, Danny gets the same information by just chatting to the barman. Back at Arno’s improbably large Mulholland Drive house, Danny observes the books on the cop’s shelves (“The Time Life Guide To Killing People”) and asks whether he’s ever arrested a criminal rather than shoot them to death.
Gradually, however, the two characters switch places. Arno comes to realise that his violent, macho antics are making the world worse rather than better; Danny, armed with an enchanted gun, turns into a power-crazed, murderous anti-hero. It’s all gently subversive, and, in its final moments – as Danny realises that his immersion in action movies is his way of dealing with his father’s death – unexpectedly emotional.
Little of this made it into the final film.
Greenlight
That Penn and Leff’s script even got a greenlight was an incredible stroke of luck. The pair were still at college at a time, but through a friend of a friend, managed to get their draft – then called Extremely Violent – onto the desk of Hollywood agent Chris Moore. He was impressed enough to show it to Shane Black, writer of Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. Black, perhaps recognising his pulpy style reflected back at him, liked it so much that he agreed to sign on as producer.
Almost right away, the screenplay – for better or worse – began to drift from its origins. Black began reworking the story with the intention of making the Arno Slater character more three-dimensional. According to Scriptshadow, Penn and Leff were irritated by the changes, and after a series of disagreements with Black, the younger writers were eventually removed from the project.
After Arnold Schwarzenegger got involved, a procession of other writers worked on the script – a 1992 ‘composite draft’ floating around online is credited to Penn, Leff, Shane Black and David Arnott, and adds that it was also ‘doctored’ by veteran screenwriter William Goldman (who shares a surname with the boy in the screenplay – Danny’s second name was later changed to Madigan). Other writers who’d made a pass included Carrie Fisher and Larry Ferguson, the latter something of a specialist in revising troubled scripts – he also worked on Alien 3 around the same period. In one of the multiple drafts and revisions, someone had the bright idea of adding a magical golden ticket which transports Danny into the film world. It was a plot point brutally mocked in an episode of The Simpsons.
“Ugh! I hated it,” Shane Black recalled in 2013 when I asked him about his memories of working on Last Action Hero. “We had fun writing the original script, and then I think they [Columbia’s executives] gave it to every writer in Hollywood for a rewrite. Carrie Fisher had a pass at one point. William Goldman did a bunch of drafts. We came back in and did a draft. That was when [producers] got paranoid about a big bunch of movies, so they just had someone run it through the typewriter, paid them a lot of money, and said, ‘There! It must be better now.’”
So it was that a comedy thriller written by a pair of outsiders grew into an over-the-top spectacle packed with Hollywood in-jokes and celebrity cameos. Alongside Schwarzenegger was an eclectic supporting cast, including Anthony Quinn and Charles Dance (as two villains who weren’t in the original script), F Murray Abraham, Art Carney, Tom Noonan and Mercedes Ruehl. The likes of Sharon Stone, Tina Turner, Sylvester Stalone, Danny DeVito and Ian McKellen were among the procession of famous faces crowded into the movie.
Columbia Pictures spent $85m on the production – a huge sum, though still less than Terminator 2’s reported $100m or so. It was in the marketing department where the early 90s excess really began to show. Knowing that it was up against Jurassic Park, the studio spent a huge sum on promoting Last Action Hero, beginning with an expensive teaser trailer, released the previous December (“The big ticket for 93!” it promised). There was a tie-in with Burger King; a colossal Schwarzenegger effigy was inflated and dumped on the Croisette during the Cannes Film Festival; a NASA rocket was decorated with the film’s title in huge red letters.
(In an ominous sign of things to come, the rocket failed to launch; instead, a delay left it sitting on the launchpad until months after Last Action Hero’s time in cinemas had come and gone.)
Aftermath
As Columbia tried to drum up interest in the movie, all the constant rewrites had left the production in a state of confusion. A dismal preview screening left executives in a panic, and John McTiernan was forced to go back and oversee a round of reshoots. By the time Last Action Hero appeared in cinemas that May, critics had sensed blood in the water, and the reviews were grim. So too was the box office: all told, Last Action Hero made just over $137m in cinemas – a fraction of Jurassic Park’s $914m.
With over a decade’s distance, Zak Penn was philosophical about the whole experience when I spoke to him in 2015.
“The fact that it got made into this legendary disaster of a movie was pretty surreal,” he said. “In some ways, it was the best and worst possibility, in that if you write something, you want to be involved with it and learn the process. You want to become a better writer for it. We were replaced almost instantly, so as writers, we were shown the door. But what was good about it was that it was such a good example of things going wrong as they were unfolding.”
As Penn noted, Last Action Hero was gradually reappraised as the years went by; these days, it has something of a cult following.
“Even the reaction to the film itself has changed over the years,” Penn said. “People feel about the film differently now than they did when it came out… Whenever someone says, ‘It must have been tough’, well, it’s better than writing something that just disappeared, you know? It had its moment, I was able to observe it, and I’m still proud. I remember pitching it to friends, and everybody saying, ‘That’s a dumb idea.’ I feel pretty good, actually. In some ways, they were right, but I still feel good about it.”
Penn has a good reason to be philosophical about his part in one of 1993’s most infamous movies. His career not only survived Last Action Hero, but flourished as the 90s gave way to the 2000s and a new era of superhero movies beckoned. A life-long comic book fan, he found himself in the middle of Marvel’s move to the big screen, with his credits including X2, The Incredible Hulk and The Avengers. In 2018, he got to work with Steven Spielberg on Ready Player One – another wish fulfilment fantasy about a pop culture-obsessed young man beamed into an alternate realm based on his pet subjects. Last Action Hero didn’t turn out how Penn hoped, but it still proved to be his golden ticket.
