The first time the film crew shot on the water, it was for a scene in which Gottlieb and stars Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider go on the ocean in a small boat to look for the shark. (Gottlieb was later cut out of the scene when it was reshot.) The first night was a portent of things to come, Gottlieb said. First he fell off the boat into water that was between 48 and 52 degrees Fahrenheit. After he changed into dry clothes, they began shooting again. "As we're playing the next take, I hear the cameraman go 'Ooops!' as a wave almost sweeps him over the side," he wrote. "The swell crashes over the bow, dropping about a hundred gallons of seawater onto the sound recorder, who takes a wet earphone out of his head and comments, 'That's a wrap for sound.'... And that was our first day shooting on the ocean. One soaked principal [actor], one change of wardrobe, and a $2,500 Nagra recorder shot. Neptune was trying to tell us something."
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.
