Week of March 24, 2005, Issue #492
COVER
The hunting of the president
By JOSEF BRAUN
In its attempt to reconstruct the psychological disintegration of Samuel Byck,
the little-known would-be presidential assassin who planned to fly a passenger
plane into the White House in 1974, The Assassination of Richard
Nixon runs the risk of trying to illuminate a mind that’s
either simply impenetrable or whose workings are so defiantly banal as to make
even the most rigorously analytical efforts fruitless. Byck (whose name is spelled
“Bicke” in the film) was a frustrated office furniture salesman
who wanted to run his own business; a father of two small children, he was going
through a divorce he didn’t want, and he had estranged himself from his
conservative Jewish family. But however genuinely despairing these problems
may have been, he began to inflate and distort them through a socio-political
lens that allowed him to christen himself a martyr for the fundamental falsity
of the American Dream.
As usual, Sean Penn gives an obsessively committed performance as Byck, one
as utterly cringe-inducing as Robert De Niro’s nutso turns in Taxi Driver,
Raging Bull or The King of Comedy. Raging in small, lonely, underlit rooms,
screaming at TVs in public, throwing drinks in strangers’ faces, making
infantile wee-hour calls to his ex, Penn’s performance so consumes the
picture that most of his co-stars are cornered into playing single notes. (I
liked Michael Atkinson’s summation of Don Cheadle’s supporting role
as Byck’s only friend as being one big “just take it easy.”)
Elements of The Assassination intrigued me and certainly shook me, while others
just left me cold. Still, I bought its argument that Sam Byck matters, that
he has something to teach us—but what, exactly? How do we extract insight
from his story? This is not an easy question to resolve for a historian, much
less a fiction filmmaker.
Yet even if I found the purpose of The Assassination to be at times elusive,
I have to say that that I found speaking with its director/co-writer, Niels
Mueller, totally engaging. Mueller’s directorial debut clearly emerged
from some very clear and deliberate artistic and sociological concerns and,
over five years in the making, was a true labour of love (one kept alive, in
part, by the persistence of its devoted star and the many distinguished filmmakers
who came on board as producers, such as Alfonso Cuarón, Leonardo DiCaprio
and Alexander Payne).
And, as if the contemporary relevance of Byck’s story needed any further
illustration, Mueller informed me of a shooting that had occurred the day before
our conversation outside his home town of Milwaukee during a church service
held in a hotel; the shooter killed eight people, including himself, and wounded
four. Mueller actually first started to consider filming a story like this after
a horrendous shooting at a McDonald’s outside San Diego back in the ’80s
when he first moved to California. Mueller was deeply disturbed by the shooting;
it bothered him long after the event had passed, and he took notes. “I
thought this guy had to belong to another species,” Mueller explained
to me. “He was shooting kids riding bicycles. Killed, like, 27 people,
this guy. Horrific. And I thought, ‘How could a human being do something
like this?’ It’s something I wanted to understand.” Mueller
spoke to me by phone from his home in Glendale, California.
Vue Weekly: How much did you know about the real Sam Byck before you began to
work on The Assassination of Richard Nixon?
Niels Mueller: The greatest resource for my writing partner Kevin Kennedy and
I were the transcripts of the tapes that Sam Byck sent to prominent Americans,
including Leonard Bernstein. In the film we simplified it down to just Bernstein.
The tapes, in which he describes his reasons for doing what he did, were really
this voice from the grave that allowed us to capture the spirit of this guy.
We also read newspaper articles from the time of the event, of course, and we
got the FBI file. But what initially was my source of having any knowledge of
this event happening in the first place was a slim chapter in a book I’d
taken out of the L.A. Public Library. I’d taken out 10 books on assassins
and only one had any mention of Byck; the rest ignored the story. He really
is this forgotten footnote in American history.
VW: Were you searching for a story like this?
NM: I’d started writing something called The Assassination of LBJ. I was
interested in writing about an assassin whose assassination attempt isn’t
noticed, not knowing at the time that such a story existed. I was also interested
in examining how someone like this goes from point A to point B, B being the
place where they’ve lost all empathy for the people right in front of
them.
VW: The names almost seem like too much of a coincidence: Sam Byck and Travis
Bickle from Taxi Driver, both lonely, would-be political assassins in the mid-’70s.
NM: Yeah. Sean asked Paul Schrader if he knew of Byck and he apparently didn’t.
VW: Were you inspired by that ’70s “lonely man” subgenre?
NM: There are some great ’70s films that I’m sure filter into my
consciousness—honestly, Taxi Driver less so than Raging Bull in terms
of Scorsese’s films. People ask me a lot about Willy Loman and Death of
a Salesman too. But I think Sam Byck and Travis Bickle and Willy Loman all spring
from, or owe a greater debt to, Georg Büchner’s early 19th-century
play Woyzeck. I’m sure Schrader’s a literary guy and Taxi Driver
seems to echo things in the play. I certainly stole from the film of Woyzeck
by Werner Herzog. So it goes back a long way, these sorts of thoughts and feelings.
VW: But there does seem to be something in the American movies of the ’70s
that facilitated the burbling up of these unsavoury, antisocial or socially
invisible characters into the popular consciousness. Sean Penn’s films
as a director seem to have gleaned something from that movement too.
NM: Well, I think that was probably a period when studios weren’t necessarily
run by the MBAs. Studios were making films like Shampoo and Chinatown. I think
they would reject scripts like that out of hand right now. I’m honestly
not a huge student of film—I studied international relations and literature—but
I’m sure it’s true that my film has some kinship to films from that
period and the points you make are apt. But what I was concerned with while
writing the film was how it related to things going on today, its relevance
to society rather than its placement in film. I mean, the thing in Milwaukee
yesterday, I don’t know enough about it yet to claim that there’s
another unfortunate cousin of Sam Byck’s, but it seems like we deal with
these things on a regular basis. Even the similarities between Byck’s
proposed mode of assassination and 9/11, those are the kinds of things I’ve
been more interested in than film references.
VW: It is interesting to consider a story like this right now because we’re
so inundated with analysis of acts of violence in other cultures where there’s
much more explicit political connections. With someone like Byck, he may have
his political convictions, but he’s not organized, he’s not affiliated
with any group.
NM: Yeah. Well, I guess he’s looking for association. He tries the Black
Panthers but doesn’t find a home there....
VW: That’s a very funny scene.
NM: Maybe if he’d found an association, he wouldn’t be dismissed
as a mentally disturbed person. Not to say he’s not a mentally disturbed
person, but then he’d be something else; he’d be a terrorist. That’s
an interesting question, and the kinds of films I’m interested in are
the ones that prompt those kinds of questions. You know, I think if you took
a good look at some of the people who do these politically charged violent acts
abroad and then look at these people like Sam Byck, you might find a shared
series of steps that lead them to where they finally go, regardless of the statement.
VW: I suppose this is the sort of story that may have more influence over a
larger public within a fictional framework. Otherwise the central figure just
remains marginalized and there’s little motivation for people to consider
the significance of his actions. You can get at different things. Even in the
case of an individual as endlessly scrutinized as Lee Harvey Oswald, I think
there were still so many things about his life and actions one could learn from
reading Don DeLillo’s Libra, for example.
NM: Exactly. That’s exactly why I did this the way I did. To try and get
inside the head of this marginalized figure and try to make some sense of what’s
in there. Sometimes you have to fictionalize history to get to a deeper truth.
V
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Directed by Niels Mueller • Written by Niels Mueller and Kevin Kennedy
• Starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle • Opens Fri, Mar
25