John Domini: Movieola!

Spring the news and cut, bang, to the Artist Going to Hell with an Inappropriate Girlfriend. And the first we screen these two, everyone out in the seats has to be kept guessing; our audience slams from sunshine to noir , from a couple they’ve come to know to another they can only wonder about. We have all this ready-made packaging, now terror now tits, we should use it. Shuffle and deal again, and let’s keep a clock in the frame too, one of those neon bar clocks on which all you can see are hands and shadow. Likewise our “artist,” our “girlfriend”—over the next few seconds they’re familiar only in the sense of a reiterated gesture, a hand in the shadow. A man of promise is getting led astray by some sex-o-lette. Her outfit shows plenty of skin, her lipstick’s good and bright but smeared a bit, and our virtuoso-in-collapse slouches on his stool, in a heap of black leather, a long black leather jacket mostly undone, with a belt, no zipper…

Now the audience catches on, even as the camera keeps the twosome off-center, the shot focused on the bar’s booze puddles and cellophane crumples, the glimmer of reflected neon. It’s a shipwreck. When the grr, grr, grrrl licks our hit man’s face, it’s like an oil fire on the roiled ocean surface. Yes, and now the closeup on the scars along the man’s jawline, the pocked and webbed leftovers of his compromises. Yes, and now too no one can fail to realize that they’ve seen the girl before. They recognize the décolletage, very scoop-&-strap; they see the tattoo rose between her boobs. If the blossom’s up there, then what kind of thorns are down below? Oh yeah, that’ll snag every eyeball out there. They love it when the madness returns, the triple-cross heebie-jeebies, the hook twisting to grab yet another long-familiar mindset. And our hit man had so much potential! He was no mere rock star, but a true artist, a shooter of unparalleled gifts. But now look at him. She’s got him talking too much.

Look , he says, the way it’s supposed to work…

That’s good, thataway—but look, what are we doing making trailers in the first place? What, if not to really drive them out of their minds in the last ten seconds? So we zap them with a departure from form. An experiment. The critics go crazy for that kind of thing, when the buzz starts among the tech people, and what we do is, we go to a kind of kiss. A larger-than-life kiss, extreme closeup: we put just the guy’s mouth up there . The way a mouth looks, up there surrounded by the dark, it’s very weird, it’s a great gimmick. Something fetal in its folds and balances. Then the man, his mouth, starts listing the ways his artistry is supposed to work. He mentions: By the Roadside in Long Island, with the Statue of Liberty in the distance and some Italian pastry on the seat. Afterwards you leave the murder weapon, but take the pastry. Take the cannoli , he says; that’s how the job’s supposed to be done. You begin with the most weary, stale, flat sort of cliché, the shadow of death, and then with the right kind of work in the kitchen you make it otherwise.

And those Lips Above, a prodigy you would never think could be contained in so flat a surface, bring up another one: Gunning Down the Rich and Amoral Sham who Stole Your Child Lover. For that you first make your victim read aloud a kind of love song, a poem you’ve composed about the difference between your own pedophilia and his. You need to get drunk, too, and not just on liquor, but on all the impossible promise in American hugs and kisses, highways and movies. That’s a lo-lo-lovely one. But there are lots of others, and this man knows them all.

It’s such a great gimmick, those lips, this list. It’s going to set off a wild buzz, maybe even give rise to a whole new generation of coming attractions—especially since everybody watching won’t have any idea what happens next. Does the hit go to hell? Does the other lovergirl appreciate the old switcheroo? There’s no way of knowing, and you can’t take your eyes from those vast human folds just up ahead, as they squeeze out yet another possibility (still perfectly audible, though a gospel choir has started to rise behind the dialogue): the one where You Pour Poison in the Ear of the Sleeping King. You have to choose a moment when the queen seems ripe for a fresh bedmate and the prince, always trouble, is away at school. God, the surprises in a great trailer! The twists and turns! We’ve nailed it now, we’ve changed the connections inside every cerebral cortex out there, and the choir hammers its rhythms home with ever more power, and there’s no longer any telling how the kill might go, in all its fertility…. Then the name.

What we have so far is, we begin with the down-to-earth, the romance angle, a girl who’s about to give up on finding a decent guy, she figures it’ll never get anywhere, the games never end. Begin where anyone can make the connection, that’s the whole first board, just another girl sick of the same-old, all the more of a drag because she knows what she’s got to offer, she’s old enough to know but she’s still good-looking, sure, hot when she wants to be, and she’s had a life, boyfriends, maybe girlfriends, maybe put a little edge on her, plus she’s got degrees on the wall and they say she’s some kind of doer of science, and she’s got a lab, that’s important. We could go as old as thirty-five. The point is, when she gets it going with this guy, our guy, that’s got to line up nice and natural with the romance, it’s got to feel like this is it, the boyfriend she’s been waiting for, and all we need to suggest the trouble, I mean our principal twist, the fact that he’s a highly trained secret government assassin—the only hint we need for that here at the start is the right shadows during the meet.

We’re thinking a bookstore meet, a place like that we kill two birds with one stone, we establish brains and a basis, I mean the basis between our guys, we were thinking maybe poetry, the stiff that dreams are made on. Oh, it’s stuff ? The stuff that dreams are made in, whatever, Google, the point is that’s what drives the meet, and our girl’s so taken by this sweet guy, he’s got the poetry and he’s got the abs, we’ll put him in a snug white T, and she’s so bowled over she doesn’t notice the shadows. For this we see some way-high old-time bookstore shelves so his face is all in shadow, our girl never sees him clearly, she never has a clue about how this great new guy spent a couple of years up at the Compound, Fatal Blows 101 through the Seminar in Body Disposal, and after that he did at least a couple more rotations out in the alleyway, the parking garage, the uppermost window of a little-used warehouse. Carrying a high-powered rifle with a laser scope. Carrying a short black Beretta with a long silver silencer, whatever, flashbacks, carrying a page of boxscores on which the ink conducts an electric charge that induces heart seizure. Carrying a condom lubricated with a penetrating toxic gel—but not for our girl, no, she’s not a target, it’s the real deal between these two and we can never lose sight of that, it’s our bottom-line arc. For the two of them every orgasm’s as distinct and gorgeous as a snowflake.

That’s why we can’t have her see him kill somebody, either, or not first thing, not for her first irrefutable clue of what her new perfect sweetie does for a living. First would be something like this next board here, she discovers this strange condom and she goes all horrified thinking maybe he’s cheating, but then she’s not the usual helpless woman wronged, I mean who might be wronged, remember the degrees, remember the lab, a roomful of white oblong apparatus each with its own blinking red light, and so she can stay late one night and establish scientifically whether this man who she believed was a true and immutable boyfriend was instead just more of the same-old. She’s got latex gloves and the latest technology in chemical analysis, plus the kind of heart you need to ride herd on all those knobs and buttons, but next thing you know it turns out this girl’s going to need the heart of a saber-toothed tiger, a mama saber-toothed tiger, because she’s sitting over a lethal condom, right there between the clips of her trace analyzer, and she’s learned the truth, science doesn’t lie, her guy might be highly trained but he’s no longer so secret. And with that she signals some kind of take-charge, snapping off the gloves or whipping out the ponytail, thirty-fucking-five and she’s ready to start all over. We can use the light here again, we see the lab with an entire wall of windows, sweatshop style with the iron frames, and at this moment practically white with sun in this glowing visual metaphor as what she must do burns through the boxes of her life to date and turns her into a total babe for a moment, showing cleavage under the smock while her eyelids flutter and lips go ajar, a woman in the middle of another snowflake, while she realizes this is the one and only real deal in her life and there’s just one way to keep it, and that’s to stand by her man, shoulder to shoulder, assassins together.