A Very Particular Set of Skills

The man who wrote Taken and The Karate Kid was also an international hash dealer—and that’s not even the craziest part of this story.

Before Robert Mark Kamen became the screenwriter behind some of the most beloved movies of the last forty years, he was living a life that would have been rejected from any studio pitch meeting as too implausible. A PhD student, martial artist, restless traveler, and world-class rationalizer of bad ideas, Kamen came of age in the anything-goes sixties, when a taste for adventure could become, with alarming speed, a career in contraband. What began with a little weed and LSD in New York turned into a globe-spanning, frequently absurd, often terrifying education in risk: Afghan hashish, false-bottom suitcases, Bombay gangsters, private jets packed with cash, federal prison, Thai drug lords, and one very well-behaved Old English sheepdog. This is not the memoir of a criminal mastermind. It is the confession of a man who kept walking toward the flame because the flame made him feel alive—and who somehow survived long enough to turn that appetite for danger into a legendary Hollywood career. Wild, funny, and almost impossible to believe, A Very Particular Set of Skills is a stranger-than-fiction true story about the thin line between adventure and disaster, reinvention and recklessness, and living to tell the tale.