Scoop is a 2006 American-British romantic comedy/murder mystery written and directed by Woody Allen and starring Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, Ian McShane and Allen himself. The film was released in the United States by Focus Features on July 28, 2006.
Following the memorial service for investigative reporter Joe Strombel (McShane), Strombel's spirit finds himself on the barge of death with several others, including a young woman who believes she was poisoned by her employer, Peter Lyman (Jackman). The woman tells Strombel she thinks Lyman, a handsome British aristocrat with political ambitions, may be the Tarot Card Killer, a notorious serial killer of prostitutes, and that he killed her when she stumbled onto his secret. The Tarot Card Killer left a card on each murder victim's body.
Sondra Pransky (Johansson) is a beautiful but awkward American journalism student on vacation in London. Pransky attends a performance given by magician Sid Waterman (Allen), aka "The Great Splendini", and agrees to participate on the stage. While in a booth known as The Dematerializer, Pransky encounters Strombel's ghost. The ghost has escaped the Grim Reaper himself to impart his suspicions of Lyman to a journalist who can investigate the story. Sondra decides to infiltrate Lyman's privileged world and find out if he truly is the dreaded criminal, enlisting Sid in the process and taking advantage of his powers of deception.
A new beginning, a fresh clean path
Yet slightly curved and striving to come back
The one you thought you were is gone
A loss of faith, all bridges burned
A strong commitment to return
and find the place where it all began to... burn!
A failure, a disgrace
You'll get yourself erased
An old replacement will not do
Only fresh young meat will satisfy you
The purist in you tells you to stay clean
Your conscience now removed with haste
The stench of death reveals the taste
So precisely portrayed within frames - then replaced...
...the stench of death reveals the taste...
...an empty shell is all that remains...