Sonoma screenwriter Robert Kamen to be honored with film festival salute

Robert Mark Kamen says his successful screenwriting career - including "The Karate Kid" and "Taken" - is an accident. Don't believe him.|

'I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I've acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.'

– Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) in 'Taken'

It's one of the great threats of movie history, a chilling monologue delivered by Liam Neesen in a nearly dark room to a silent telephone caller in the 2008 film 'Taken.' Directed by French filmmaker Luc Besson, the movie was so successful it spawned two sequels – and the speech itself has hatched countless imitations as well.

Besson is himself a known quantity in the action movie genre, from 'The Professional' to last year's 'Lucy,' but what is less well-known is that the screenwriter of 'Taken' – and of many of Besson's most successful films – lives on a hill above the town of Sonoma, with a view of the Valley.

Robert Mark Kamen will be honored Wednesday, March 30 with an SIFF Salute Award on opening night of this year's Sonoma International Film Festival.

'I love this festival because it doesn't try to be something else,' said Kamen. 'It is very Sonoma.' Kamen, too, has become 'very Sonoma' as a resident for over 35 years, since he came to town to celebrate the sale of his first screenplay.

He's also become a winemaker, growing about 50 acres of cabernet sauvignon ('and a little sauvignon blanc and a little syrah') at his mountaintop vineyard overlooking Sonoma Valley. But the wines can't compare with the success he's found as a screenwriter, a success he calls 'an accident.' His produced first screenplay, about a military school revolt, was called 'Taps.' The 1981 film was wildly successfully, and while it starred Tim Hutton, it also helped launch the careers of two young actors named Sean Penn and Tom Cruise (in his pre-dental work days).

Shortly afterward his second screenplay also got picked up, and he was on his way. But Kamen proved it wasn't a lucky fluke when his third movie hit the theaters in 1984 – a little coming-of-age movie called 'The Karate Kid.' It came from a personal interest in martial arts for Kamen, mixed with the underdog-fighter genre popularized by the 'Rocky' series.

'I've been training in martial arts since I was 17, so for 50 years,' said Kamen. 'I mean I don't fight, I train in form. At my age I don't go out and spar with people. That would be ridiculous.' Part of his daily routine is still t'ai chi, which he practices barefoot padding around his mountaintop home – between bouts with his typewriter, imagination and conference calls with his producers and agent.

In fact Kamen sometimes draws a parallel between fighting and screenwriting, though not in the way you might think. He sees the development of a screenplay and a fight as following similar rules, a three-act sequence from identifying combatants and their issues to their confrontation, with knock-downs and recovery to a final battle, out of which a winner emerges.

That's a paraphrase: if you want to hear his theory on the art of fighting, or screenwriting, Kamen is also giving a Screenwriting Seminar in the SIFF Village Tent on Saturday, April 2. 'It'll be bunch of people asking me questions – how can I get an agent?' anticipated Kamen. 'Or 'I have this story, I have this great story!' Everybody has a great story.'

As Kamen has learned, turning that story into a screenplay is what matters, and making that screenplay successful may indeed be a matter of 'accident.' Still, if it happens twice it may be coincidence, if it happens three times – or a dozen – that's talent.

'The Karate Kid' was followed by two sequels, both with the same stars, Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita (and a couple remakes that he did not work on). But wait, that's not all: he's scored franchise success not just once but three times, with the Neesen-driven 'Taken' and the 'Transporter' series, starring Jason Stratham.

The last two have more than action and Robert Kamen in common: they are also produced by Luc Besson, the French filmmaker with whom Kamen has worked closely for over 20 years. Besson's first international hit was 'La Femme Nikita,' and when he turned it into the English-language knock-off 'Leon: The Professional,' starring Jean Reno and a 12-year-old Natalie Portman, he sought out Kamen for dialog help.

'Luc didn't speak a lot of English at the time,' said Kamen.

That led to a four-year struggle with a script of 'The Fifth Element,' starring Bruce Willis, which became yet another blockbuster. After that film's success, Besson approached the Sonoma screenwriter about a more permanent relationship:

'He decided he wanted to build a studio and brand. He came to me and said, let's write these movies. I can finance them, they're low-budget, and we can make them and I can build a studio, and then he became Luc Besson. So far we've made 15 of them.'

That extends through Besson's recent 'Lucy,' a psychedelic actioner with Scarlett Johansson that has become one of France's most successful international movies – and the unreleased 'Valerian,' as well as upcoming 'Warrior's Gate,' for which he does get screenwriter's credit.

Somewhere in the midst of all these action movies, Kaman adapted a small French film from the '40s into 1995's 'A Walk in the Clouds,' turning it into a gently, almost mythic romance about a winery in Northern California. It starred Anthony Quinn and Keanu Reeves, and brought Reeves some of his best notices to date.

Obviously, Kamen's own wine-making and grape-growing second life must have worked its way into the story, which culminates with a dramatic nighttime fire raging through the family vineyards, and Reeves rescuing the sole surviving 'original rootstock' to save the vineyard, a device that even Kamen admits is nonsense.

'We filmed the fire scene at Duckhorn in Napa. People were coming up to us saying, 'Vineyards don't burn.' I said I knew that, but I needed a third act.'

Two years later, in August 1996, half of Kamen's own vineyards burned to the ground, a troubling example of reality imitating art. He replanted – with the help of neighbor Phil Coturri, who built the original vineyard in the early 1980s – and in 1999 launched his own brand, Kamen Estate Wines.

The Kamen Estate Wines tasting room is just half-a-block off the Plaza on East Napa Street, and the robust reds routinely score in the 90s on the prestigious critics' lists.

This year the winery, open with a tasting room in downtown Sonoma, finally moved into the black – only 16 years after it started.

So we've almost come full circle: the martial arts, the movies, the wine.

'I came up here expecting to celebrate and I ended up buying 300 acres of land,' he said of his personal discovery of Sonoma. 'I celebrate every day that I wake up.'

As do the audiences worldwide who fill the theaters to watch the 'entertainments' that have brought Luc Besson, if not Robert Kamen, global recognition. It could be all be just an accident, as he says.

Or, maybe... it's that he has a very particular set of skills.

Email Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.

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