Prairie Village native strikes gold with ‘Black Mass’

Four years ago, “Black Mass” writer Mark Mallouk was toasting the completion of his screenplay. Agencies were sending this buzzworthy project to top Hollywood directors aspiring to tackle the true-life tale of fugitive mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.

“My phone began ringing, and my girlfriend at the time said, ‘Put your phone away. We’re celebrating,’ ” Mallouk recalls. “I go to put it in my room, and I look down and see a message that says, ‘Whitey got arrested in Santa Monica.’ ”

It was a surreal moment for the Prairie Village native — the lone twist in his arm’s-length relationship with Bulger that he never saw coming.

“I had gotten to know a lot of the FBI agents, the reporters, the police and some of the victims’ families, and there was not a single person who said, ‘We’ll find him eventually.’ The unanimous consensus was, ‘We’ll never see Bulger again. He’s either dead or living in Europe off the grid.’ And there he was basically living down the street from me,” says Mallouk, calling a few days ago from his home in L.A.

The phone hasn’t really stopped ringing for Mallouk. His first produced screenplay (for which he shares credit with Jez Butterworth, who later helped hone the endeavor) is garnering praise for corralling the twisty saga of Bulger and his tenuous alliance with the FBI — what he calls “the marriage made in darkness to birth evil” that prompted the film’s title.

[ Read The Star’s 3-star review ]

Having just returned from a “Black Mass” premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Mallouk planned to share his five-year passion project (which opened nationwide on Friday) with loved ones on a trip to his hometown this weekend.

“I’m excited it got into Venice, Telluride and Toronto,” he says of recent film festivals. “But I want to watch it with my friends, brothers, parents and their friends. When I’m inviting someone to come to Toronto, I feel like that jerk who planned a destination wedding.”

The 42-year-old screenwriter approached the saga of the longtime Boston mob kingpin with caution.

“ ‘Scarface’ ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Goodfellas’ — with all three, you want to be those guys to some degree. You want to be Henry Hill, Tony Montana and Don Corleone,” he says. “I don’t want people thinking they want to be Whitey Bulger. I don’t want to contribute to his myth, which is a lie. I didn’t want to make it romantic.

“He was a violent sociopath who destroyed everything around him. He didn’t care about Southie (in Boston). He didn’t care about his friends or family. He had no loyalty to anybody but himself.”

That tactic attracted Oscar veteran Johnny Depp, whose attachment fast-tracked the feature into production and enticed director Scott Cooper (“Out of the Furnace”) to come onboard. Mallouk says his dealings with Depp were “limited but positive,” describing the star as “an impossibly decent person.”

His initial encounter with Depp took place on the first day of shooting.

“Not only is he one of the most famous actors in the world, he’s also dressed like Whitey Bulger. I did a lot of looking at my feet when he was nearby, trying not to stare,” he says.

Mallouk, the son of Egyptian immigrants, attended Cure of Ars and Rockhurst High School before heading to KU in 1991. He was joined at the college by twin brother Ray (who now lives in Dallas) and older brother Pete (a Leawood resident).

The writer, whose last name is pronounced “mah-luke” (“like ‘Luke, I am your father,’ ” he quips), earned degrees in economics, psychology and human development. Upon graduation, he headed to Pepperdine University in Malibu to attain a master’s in business administration.

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. This wasn’t a plan, but I was starting to think I could write for something like ‘Letterman,’ ” Mallouk says.

His focus shifted after attending revivals of “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Natural” on consecutive nights.

“I was walking home thinking, ‘That’s what I want to do: write those kinds of movies.’ I got the paperwork to apply to film school the next day.”

He soon graduated from UCLA with a screenwriting degree. A crime drama called “Somerset Square” that he wrote while in film school got optioned — he describes it as a “modern-day ‘On the Waterfront’ that takes place in Kansas City.”

That deal led him to up-and-coming producer Brian Oliver, the head of Cross Creek Pictures. Oliver had already secured the rights to the book “Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal,” written by Boston Globe journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, who chronicled Bulger over the years.

“Mark is really good at knowing what characters are important and what are not. And he understands how to get rid of scenes that don’t drive the plot,” says Oliver, who received an Oscar nomination for producing “Black Swan.”

Mallouk’s association with Cross Creek triggered his first official credits as an executive producer on “Rush,” “A Walk Among the Tombstones” and “Everest,” which opened Friday opposite “Black Mass.”

“Sometimes I can do things that nudge a project across the finish line,” he says.

Next up for Mallouk is an untitled screenplay based on the Calabrese crime family of Chicago — aka the Outfit.

“In Toronto, I met Michael Mann (director of “Heat” and “Public Enemies”), who is one of my heroes,” Mallouk says. “During our conversation he’s like, ‘Aren’t you doing that Calabrese thing?’

“I couldn’t believe he knew about me. I almost fell down when he said that, and I was perfectly sober.”

This story was originally published September 18, 2015 at 5:32 AM with the headline "Prairie Village native strikes gold with ‘Black Mass’."