In his early years as an off-Broadway playwright, John Patrick Shanley was celebrated for his intense dialogue and for his dysfunctional young New Yorkers in search of identity and love. His big-screen, romantic comedy version of his storytelling was the hit movie “Moonstruck” (1987), which earned the Irish-American an Academy Award for his script. He stayed in Hollywood for a number of years, where he wrote and directed the critically lambasted “Joe vs. the Volcano” (1990) and was subsequently pegged as an adventure writer, hired to do script adaptations like “Congo” (1993) and “Alive”
