Build a movie plot around this: Who killed Senator Carroll? A lone gunman.
Answer:
TV newswoman Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) is one of many witnesses to the public assassination of presidential candidate Senator Charles Carroll (Bill Joyce) atop the Seattle Space Needle. A waiter armed with a revolver is chased but falls to his death. Meanwhile, a second waiter, also armed, leaves the crime scene unnoticed. A congressional special committee determines that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman.Three years later, Carter visits her former boyfriend and colleague, newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty). Lee tells Frady that she feels there is more to the assassination than was reported at the time. Six of the witnesses to Carroll's assassination have since died, so she fears she will be next. Frady does not take her seriously. Carter is soon found dead and her death is judged by the police to be either a voluntary or accidental drug overdose.Investigating Carter's leads, Frady goes to the small town of Salmontail, whose sheriff, L.D. Wicker (Kelly Thordsen), attempts to trap him below a dam while the floodgates are opening. Frady narrowly escapes but the sheriff drowns. Frady finds information about the Parallax Corporation in the sheriff's house and learns that its real business is recruiting political assassins.As Frady is interviewing Carroll's former aide Austin Tucker (William Daniels) aboard Tucker's boat, a bomb explodes. Frady survives but is believed dead. He decides to apply to Parallax under an assumed identity. Jack Younger (Walter McGinn), a Parallax official, assures Frady that he is the kind of man they are interested in. Frady is accepted for training in Los Angeles, where he watches a slide show that conflates positive images with negative actions.Frady recognizes a Parallax man from a photo Tucker showed him: the Parallax assassin was a waiter in the Space Needle restaurant the day that Senator Carroll was murdered. He watches the Parallax assassin retrieve a case from a car trunk, drive to an airport, and check it as stowed baggage on an airplane (a Globe...