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

The man who wrote Taken and The Karate Kid was also an international hashish trafficker—and that’s not even the craziest part of this stranger-than-true memoir.

Before writing some of the most beloved movies of the last forty years, Robert Mark Kamen lived a life that would have been rejected from any Hollywood pitch meeting for being too implausible.

How did a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx end up with a thriving international career in contraband? The answer involves a compulsive appetite for adventure and a world-class talent for rationalizing bad ideas. What began as a little weed-dealing in 1960s New York City quickly escalated into a globe-spanning, frequently absurd, often terrifying education in risk. Before long, Kamen’s life was a whirlwind of Afghan hashish, Peruvian cocaine, false-bottom suitcases, Bombay gangsters, federal prison, and Thai drug lords. Plus one elaborate scheme involving a very well-behaved Old English sheepdog named Bumble.

Hilarious, profane, 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. By the end, you’ll be as surprised as Kamen is that he lived to tell the tale.