Movie Mashup

I watched In the Line of Fire (1993) the other day, a cheesy nineties thriller starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent. It’s pretty campy, especially the Eastwood character’s “old-school” misogyny, which comes into play when he works with junior agent Rene Russo—a WOMAN—who turns out to be pretty good at her job (at least, no worse than Eastwood, who is unintentionally comically bad at it). It’s a fun movie, albeit a stupid one, and has a number of meme-worthy moments. Meme-worthiness might already be the standard for evaluating older media, since this movie has few other uses at this point.

In addition to a fun John Malkovich bad guy, the movie does one other fun thing, which is using Clint’s movie star history to give his character a visual backstory. His grumpy old man agent—Clint’s in his early sixties here—was at the Kennedy assassination, shown in doctored images from 1963 using images of Clint Eastwood from his Rawhide era. This was probably the first time I saw this trick used in a movie, though I’d love to know if there were earlier examples. Woody Allen inserted his character Zelig (1983) into historical images some ten years earlier, but didn’t use the younger version of himself from another work to do so. Steven Soderbergh would use the technique brilliantly in The Limey (1999), but that was six years later.

Got me thinking that it would be fun to make a mashup movie. I’ve always wanted to try editing together a movie that combines multiple movies with the same actors to create some kind of cracked continuity. In the Line of Fire offers a lot of stupid, cringey dialogue and Eastwood vamping—it also offers John Malkovich, so I could bring in Being John Malkovich (1999). What other movies of the era would offer useful clips?

Con Air (1997) seems immediately important—it has both Malkovich and John Cusack (from Being John Malkovich) and it brings in Nicholas Cage, which seems very worth doing; he’s also in Adaptation, which has a little Being John Malkovich crossover. Con Air has a bunch of other people in it, too. The Dead Pool and The Rookie might give Eastwood some good additional scenes. But then, there’s a whole history for him to explore.

It all sounds like an excellent way to waste time.