When The Nice Guys opened in 2016, its $36 million domestic gross ensured there would not be a Nice Guys 2. Still, the ‘70s-era detective comedy from writer-director Shane Black and co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi has built a dedicated fanbase in the ensuing decade courtesy of its clever script and stellar star turns by Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe as private detectives Holland March and Jackson Healey, respectively.
Following a 10th anniversary screening in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, Black and Bagarozzi spoke about the movie’s legacy in front of a sold out theater. The duo were gratified by the turnout, which Black compared to the delayed appreciation that several of his past films — including The Monster Squad, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight — have retroactively received.
“It’s just so odd that these things are like, ‘Hey, let’s throw a stone. When’s it gonna hit? In about 15 years,’” Black joked, going on to share a heartbreaking experience that occurred after the movie’s opening day on May 20, 2016. “I went to the Cinerama Dome,” he said of the L.A. landmark, which is expected to re-open as an Alamo Drafthouse location. “It was me and, like, 20 other people. One thousand people can fit in that theater, so it was like, ‘This isn’t cool, man.’”
At the same time, the director argued that less popular films can often endure longer, using his own 2005 cult favorite — Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, starring Robert Downey Jr. — as an example. “When I did Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the producers came up to me and said: ‘Look, you made a good movie, but The Dukes of Hazzard was a more successful movie,’” Black shared. “They made so much more money than us, but is anyone watching The Dukes of Hazzard?”
Speaking of Downey, Black was happy to refute one longstanding internet rumor. The erstwhile Iron Man does not cameo as a dead body in The Nice Guys no matter what the IMDB trivia page says. “No, it’s not him,” Black insists. “Why would he do that? He’s a busy man.”
The Nice Guys had already stalled as a television series before it became a movie. “The stories never really mattered, because we have endless scenes of just these guys,” Black recalled. And at least one network had a very specific objection involving Holland’s daughter, Holly (played by Angourie Rice in the film). “The network’s like, ‘We’ll do the show as long as he doesn’t lock Holly in the trunk,'” Bagarozzi said.
Black confirmed that network was CBS and the executive was Les Moonves. His opposition to locking a child in a trunk gave Bagarozzi pause about another episode they’d planned. “One was about March dating a girl much younger than him,” Bagarozzi said. “She reveals to him that her parents had a surrogate, and he starts to add up the numbers and he’s like, ‘I could be her dad.’ So their whole plan is they’re going to break into this fertility clinic and figure out if he’s dating his daughter. If you can’t handle putting her in the trunk, that’s a whole episode.”
The characters continued to change when The Nice Guys became a film. After watching Gosling, the writers decided to make his role even more bumbling and hapless. “He goes to the table read and does things that aren’t in the script, including that scream when his arm gets broken,” Bagarozzi recalled. “Shane and I were just like, ‘God, we’ve got to write to Ryan a little bit more.’”
Another big change involved the time period; the previous iterations of the script had been set in the present day, but Black started to gravitate towards a story that was inspired by one of Davis Dresser’s bestselling crime novels, and that required an earlier era since a major plot point hinged on the detectives looking for a suspect who had appeared in a porn movie. The villains’ attempt to destroy that incriminating film would only work in the era before adult films were made on video. “Nowadays, it wouldn’t work because you can’t destroy a copy of a film and that’s that,” Black said. “The digital world would not accommodate us and that started us thinking, ‘Oh, what if it was period piece?’”
The version of 1977 seen in The Nice Guys is not strictly historically accurate, though. For example, Bagarazzo hoped people don’t scrutinize the music or Holly’s bedroom too closely. “The music is the wrong time, the stuff she has on her wall is like two years in the future,” he said. “Jaws 2 wasn’t made yet! We were just like, ‘Yeah, it’s ‘the ‘70s.’”
Even as The Nice Guys is increasingly embraced as a contemporary classic, the creators said that fans shouldn’t count on a revival due to the costs involved in getting Gosling and Crowe back together. But the film has definitely influenced everything that Black has made since.
“If I have an older character that’s arguing with a younger, impetuous character, the old guy’s sort of staid, it’s the two parts of my brain arguing,” Black said. “To find a compromise is actually my own mind doing a therapy where it argues with itself. This movie was not that because he’s Healy and I’m March. I’m a f***in’ idiotic coward and he’s a well-meaning, self-improving lummox.”
