Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter who learned to direct so no one would change a line

The Lawrence Kasdan filmography is two filmographies in tension. There is the screenwriter, the one who handed George Lucas and Steven Spielberg the most quotable lines in their respective universes and then walked out when the second of those universes asked him to do it again. And there is the director, smaller and more stubborn, who shot his own scripts because he had decided early that he could not stand to watch someone else paraphrase his dialogue. The two men have spent a career pulling against each other, and the question of which one gets the last word is the part of his story that is still open.

He grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, the second son of a Jewish department-store clerk who had moved the family from Miami when Larry was an infant. He went north to the University of Michigan to read English, stayed for a master’s in education, and discovered along the way that he wanted to write films instead of teach them. The detour through advertising — five years drafting copy at W.B. Doner in Detroit and then in Los Angeles — is where the screenwriting habit got its working-class engine, and it explains a craft fluency in tension-building setups that has never quite left his prose.

Spielberg read an early version of Continental Divide and hired him to write Raiders of the Lost Ark; Lucas, days after Leigh Brackett delivered a final draft of The Empire Strikes Back and then died of cancer, asked him to finish it. By the time those two films were on screens, Kasdan was already shooting his own feature, Body Heat — a deliberate, almost archaeological homage to Double Indemnity, transposed to a heat-stroked Florida summer with a star turn from a then-unknown Kathleen Turner. The trajectory from anonymous Detroit copywriter to writer-director in a single calendar year remains one of the strangest acceleration curves in modern Hollywood.

What followed was the run that the canonised version of Kasdan has frozen into a shorthand. The Big Chill, the baby-boomer ensemble piece that became the model for every reunion film that followed. Silverado, a stubborn classical Western built with his brother Mark Kasdan when the genre was effectively closed. The Accidental Tourist, a quiet Anne Tyler adaptation that pulled four Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Grand Canyon, the Los Angeles mosaic he wrote with his wife Meg, which earned him a second Original Screenplay nomination. He had become, by then, a director studios could trust with adult stories on grown-up money, and a screenwriter who could give a star vehicle the rhythm of a 1940s programmer.

That reputation has been tested unevenly since. Wyatt Earp, the three-hour Kevin Costner Western he released in 1994, arrived six months after Tombstone had already eaten its audience, and the comparison has never been kind to him. Solo: A Star Wars Story, which he co-wrote with his son Jonathan in 2018, was the franchise instalment Disney needed to perform and the one it did not get; Kasdan said afterwards that Lucasfilm had blown it, then largely withdrew from the saga. The fault line in both cases is the same. He is a writer who refuses to let other people direct what he writes, with vanishingly few exceptions, and an industry that has wanted, over and over, to detach his scripts from his sensibility. The drawer of unmade Kasdan scripts is unusually deep for a writer of his standing, and the decision to keep them there is editorial as much as commercial.

This week he is back as a director for the first time in years. Marty, Life Is Short, the feature-length documentary about the comedian Martin Short that premieres on Netflix today, was shot and assembled by Kasdan as something close to a magazine profile — friend access, decades of archive, a long argument about what it costs to be funny for a living. Next week Criterion releases his 4K restoration of Body Heat, supervised by his longtime editor Carol Littleton and signed off by him personally, which arrives as a kind of accidental career retrospective. And last December the University of Michigan, his alma mater, took delivery of the 150-plus boxes of his papers — including audio tapes of his original Raiders story sessions with Spielberg and Lucas — that will be processed through the end of this year.

His wife Meg Kasdan, whom he married while both were still in Ann Arbor, has co-written several of his films and remains his most frequent creative collaborator. Their sons Jake and Jonathan run their own studio careers — Jake with the Jumanji series, Jonathan as the co-writer on Solo — which has the effect of turning a family conversation into an ongoing seminar on what a 21st-century Kasdan picture should look like.

What the next one is, no one outside that conversation seems to know. The archive is going home to Ann Arbor; the documentary is on Netflix; the early debut has been restored to look the way it did the first time. The career has not closed — but for the first time in a long time, it is being read all at once.