After seeing so many ads for Nicholas Cage’s new movie (I can’t be bothered to look up the title, or link to it, sorry), I have to ask: What’s the obsession with assassins all about?
Seriously, there have been so many movies about assassins over the years, that I’m beginning to worry about what Hollywood must be doing to screenwriters. I get a little upset when my coworkers borrow my chair while I’m away so that a visiting vendor has some place to sit — I can’t imagine how it must feel to gin up some plot for a movie, only to have it ripped from your hands and passed around from scribe to scribe while you helplessly watch.
Still, what is it about assassins that’s so facinating?
Perhaps it’s all the differences between screenwriting and murder-for-hire. For instance, assassins receive their instructions on little squares of paper folded into left-behind newspapers, or in manila envelopes taped to the undersides of bathroom sinks. Screenwriters get their instructions in four hour meetings with flavor-of-the-month weirdos, or guys whose suits are smarter than their occupants.
Assassins are expected to simply carry out their assignments — no explaination given or required. Screenwriters are told to make boring romantic comedies a little more “Farrelly-esque” with no further explaination given — or even possible, probably. Eventually, an assassin may get tired of the constant murder, the constant travel, and the phrase, “Make it look like an accident,” and he may try to quit the biz. A screenwriter can get sick of the constant phone calls, meetings, isolation, bad coffee, and the phrase, “Cut half the girl’s lines, make her ten years younger, and add a nude scene, but make it look tasteful.”
Then again, it’s possible this will pass. Back in the thirties, the movie houses were filled with private detectives, the sixties saw international super-spies, and, of course, cops have been almost eternally popular.
Basically, I think screenwriters like writing about people with interesting jobs.
