Not too many years ago, former Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh announced that he would beat arch-rival Ohio State or die trying.

People laughed at him. The Wolverines had been unable to beat the hated Buckeyes for many years. Until they reeled off four consecutive wins in The Game after Harbaugh’s war cry.

As an obsessive Michigan fan, I adopt Harbaugh’s do-or-die proposition. I’m not trying to win at ball. Instead, I’m a plucky writer trying to sell my latest screenplay, publish it as a novel or die trying.

In DIE TRYING, you will get an unvarnished look at a bitterly honest writer struggling to make it. No soft-focus glamour closeups. No name-dropping or phoniness. Just the hard-boiled truth on what the media landscape really is like behind the curtains.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we look at why Hollywood is obsessed with assassins (me included!) and the bodacious brevity of the protagonist’s backstory in Grosse Pointe Blank.

Hollywood is obsessed with assassins. 

Consider Richard Linklater’s 2024 Hit Man and David Fincher’s The Killer a year before. Or go back to classics like Don Siegel’s 1964 potboiler The Killers, starring an ice-cold Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan as a sadistic mob boss.

I am writing an existential assassin script called Going Perm and would like to continue the tradition.

But what explains Tinseltown’s fascination with professional killers?

In a CGI reality, fakers (actors) playing heroes battle artificial monsters who are really tennis balls set against the void of a greenscreen backdrop.

Nathaniel West nails the artificiality of The Dream Factory in his savage classic The Day of the Locust:

“Hollywood was not filled with dreams, but with people who had lost them. Their faces showed the sterility of a life given over to make-believe, where nothing could grow.”

If you read French philosopher Georges Bataille and his 1943 book Inner Experience, Hollywood is ripe for a sacred eruption of violence in the face of sterility:

“Violence is the revelation of the sacred in the world: in sacrifice, in festival, in death, the sterile continuity of profane life shattered.”

Your agent won’t return your call? Keep the stew simmering and load another bullet in the chamber.

As a screenwriter hawking an assassin script, I am a connoisseur of professional killer movies.

I recently watched Grosse Pointe Blank, where John Cusack plays a spiritually flat hitman who attends a high school reunion in the spot where I was raised.

I marveled at the screenwriters’ super-economic introduction of Cusack’s Martin Q. Blank’s backstory. It fills us in on his unhappy childhood and spiritual malaise in less than three minutes.

After finding that his childhood home is now a generic convenience store, he visits his mother in an asylum. She briefly remembers him before babbling to her caregiver and slipping into the delusions of mental illness. 

Next scene, Blank visits his father’s grave and empties a bottle of Scotch on the gravestone.

No dialog. Just 20 seconds of a son who bitterly salutes the dead memory of his absent father with an empty bottle.

No saccharine flashbacks to the character’s tormented childhood. No lengthy soliloquies on why his parents fucked him up.

We see it in three minutes with two short scenes that sketch the backstory with economy and flourish.

INT. MON’S POD, SENATE CHAMBER -- CORUSCANT -- DAY

The Chamber is weirdly quiet -- waiting for red meat -

MON

...I stand this morning with a difficult message.

I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said

and what is known to be true has become an abyss…
 

Dan Gilroy’s “Welcome to the Rebellion” script of Andor Episode #209, nominated for an Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series Emmy.

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