Rosetta stone & Cecil B. Demille

You know you're famous when you shoot with a camera that's bigger than your head.

Ben had the idea that there should be some kind of Rosetta stone, a key that enables his character to decode the secret messages. I thought that was a good idea. On a different topic I've been reading Cecil B. Demille's lecture on directing. I liked this bit...

Take a scene where a man comes in, sits down, and picks up the telephone. The first-class director has the man come in, sit down, and pick up the telephone. Your highest class director says, "How on earth can I make that interesting, so it will hold an audience for just a second, so that it is not just a man. coming in, sitting down and picking up a telephone? What twist can I give that to make a little smile come to the audience? If merely the cord of the telephone catches in the drawer that little incident means a lot because the audience thought they were going to be bored and then they say, Oh! That little exclamation, Oh! has a great psychological effect." That is the way every scene should be worked out in the mind of the director.

It made me think about the radio-sound-destroying-the-spinner sequence. It's just so damn boring. The camera pushes in to the spinner. Then pushes in to the radio. Then the spinner. Then the radio. CUs of things starting to shake. It's too predictable. It builds suspense but in an uninteresting way. The audience knows something dramatic is happening, but there's no shading, none of the quirks of real life. It's just uninteresting film technique life. That's how I felt about Jurassic Park. I literally could barely stay awake. Lots and lots of techniques.