Director Pollack knew a lot about every aspect of the filmmaking process, and some crew members became frustrated when they felt like their territory was being infringed upon. Director of photography Owen Roizman said he started to joke with Pollack when the director started reading the meter for light, something a director never normally did and usually left to the crew. "He used to read the meter all the time, and he checked the contrasts in his viewing glass the same as the cameraman would do," Roizman said. "I would take the meter out and read the light... I'd tell the assistant cameraman what f/stop I was using and I'd give him an f/stop that was totally unbelievable for the amount of light that was on the set. And Sydney would say, 'How can you see at that f/stop?' And I said: 'Don't worry about it, Syd, I have a special way of doing it, it'll be fine.' And just before we'd go, the assistant cameraman would open up the f/stop we were really gonna use. And we'd go to dailies and, of course, the stuff looked fine."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
