Box office death!

I put the exposition video at the end of the current edit this morning. It's box office death! Interesting. I think it works fine by itself but when you juxtapose it with the other edit, it just sits there doing nothing. Plus it's a full three minutes out of a 12 minute film. Now I can see why they put those dreary reenactments and flashbacks into the da Vinci Code and other films. They were dumb, but dumb is better than box office death! So now what? The problem is that the audio is so garbled that you have to be able to read the text flashing by. So I can't do the standard cutaways of Ben looking at the video because you would miss some of the text. I guess I could do some kind of split screen thing, with the video on one side and Ben's face on the other side. That's SO been there-done-that but anything is better than box office death! Maybe I should do a Hitchcock-like thing to up the tension. Imagine this: split screen. Sometimes the exposition is on the left, sometimes on the right. Sometimes bigger, sometimes small. Sometimes cut off. On the other side of the split screen we see cutaways... Ben's face, his grotty finger. We see the camera sneaking up on him and then going underground to the gas pipes. And then the fire starting. That's not bad. Then we have to wait for Ben to grow his beard back. Or maybe we have to do a "Brando"—obscure Ben's face in the darkness like Brando's large body in Apocalypse Now. Whatever. Because anything's better than box office death!