Hilary Henkin

Raised on the deliciously sour milk of film noir, screenwriter Hilary Henkin is one of the vaunted few female writers to break into the exclusively male world of hard-boiled but heady action-adventure and to venture fearlessly into the moral labyrinths of villainy and violence. A script for Warner Bros. called "Free Fall" ("a very violent piece"), about three astronauts who nearly die in space and return to find their previous lives have disappeared, didn't get filmed but made her a reputation. Early pictures "Fatal Beauty" (1987) and "Road House" (1989) met with little success, but Henkin created her first no-holds-barred female villain Mona Demarkov (played by Lena Olin) and scored big with "Romeo is Bleeding" (1993), previously dubbed one of the Ten Best Unproduced Scripts in Hollywood by AMERICAN FILM. Although she had adapted Larry Beinhart's novel "American Hero" for the screen, David Mamet followed her and was going to receive sole screenwriting credit for Barry Levinson's "Wag the Dog" (1997) until the Writers Guild of America intervened, deeming that Mamet had used the structure she had devised.