Death of a Salesman

In 1975, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme pointed a loaded handgun in the direction of President Gerald Ford while Ford was visiting Sacramento to address the California Legislature. She failed to fire the weapon before being apprehended by the Secret Service, but why Fromme, a member of the Manson family, chose Ford instead of Richard Nixon is one of history's great mysteries. It was Nixon who famously declared Charles Manson guilty, after all.

Ford actually survived two assassination attempts – one for each year he held office. Nixon, arguably the most polarizing and passionately hated president of the second half of the 20th century, remained relatively unscathed. But it's not for a lack of trying, as director Niels Mueller's film The Assassination of Richard Nixon points out.

Fortunately for Nixon, his lone, known would-be assassin was a failed Philadelphia tire salesman named Samuel Byck. Byck, who had been rejected for a government loan by the Small Business Administration, concocted an eerily prescient plot to kill the 37th president by hijacking an airliner and forcing the pilot to fly it into the White House. But Byck's plot, literally and figuratively, never got off the ground. On Feb. 22, 1974 he attempted to take control of an airplane; before it left the tarmac he was shot and wounded by police, and committed suicide. It was later discovered that he had sent a taped confession to Washington Post journalist Jack Anderson, and had sent a number of lunatic ramblings to celebrities, such as his idol Leonard Bernstein, over the years. Byck seemed fated to a bottom-dwelling position in the annals of presidential history.

He would have stayed had James Oliver Huberty not killed 21 people in a San Ysidro, Calif., McDonald's on July 18, 1984. Or rather, had Huberty's rampage not affected a UCLA film student waiting for his first screenplay idea to strike.

"I was in my earlier 20s and it was one of the first incidents of this kind that came to my attention as an adult," says Mueller in a phone interview from his Glendale home. "It just horrified me, and I was thinking this guy must be somebody that belongs to another species. I just didn't understand the human ability to lose all empathy."

Mueller began taking notes, starting a diary that was the genesis of a film that would be released nearly two decades later. "I started exploring a character. I wanted to understand; how does somebody go from point A to Point B, with Point B where they lash out in violence, indiscriminate violence?"

A character began to emerge: a man, separated from his wife and child, who takes a new job in sales to re-establish himself financially, and more importantly to re-establish himself in his wife's eyes. "I had him obsessing and talking about the American Dream, and I had him talking into a tape recorder, although I hadn't figured out why or how to justify the tape recorder."

Mueller's American dreamer formulates a plan to kill a sitting president, one not known as a target of assassination attempts. The working title of the film became "The Assassination of L.B.J." until Mueller, perusing the books at a Los Angeles library, found a book with a slim chapter on a real-life failed salesman, separated from his family, who tries to kill a sitting president by flying an airplane into the White House and talked into a tape recorder for the last several weeks of his life. Mueller moved the time of his script forward 10 years, named his character Samuel Bicke, moved the locale to Baltimore and changed the working title.

Mueller enlisted the aid of film-school friend Kevin Kennedy to write a formal draft, which they finished during the final years of the Clinton administration. Another UCLA grad, Sideways director Alexander Payne, helped get the film fast-tracked to production, with Y tu mamá también director Alfonso Cuaron and producer Jorge Vergara stepping in to secure financing and see the film through to the finish. Perhaps most importantly, Sean Penn took on the role of Bicke, creating a borderline personality whose adherence to absolute principles of liberal idealism blinds him to the realities of his life and leads to a psychotic breakdown.