A Very Particular Set of Skills: From Weed and Warlords to Creating the Karate Kid-a Screenwriter's Journey

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...