Gottlieb described how script additions and revisions translated to delays or costly changes for the production. "The script is a bible, and on the set, when money is disappearing down the tubes at about $3,000 an hour, a twenty-minute wait for the prop man to go get some beer that was not indicated in his pages costs the company a grand," he wrote. "Nobody likes surprises. And surprises were emerging with every revision. 'No coast guard station, boys, we've cut that scene.' Out the window go weeks of getting permission to shoot, the rental of coast guard uniforms, and all the collateral work of preparing that scene. And, 'The scene on the beach will be with all the extras.' Out go the phone calls to eighty-five locals to show up at some corner of the island... a certain desperation began to creep into the production department as they received each set of pages, their bloodshot eyes feverishly dancing down the pages."
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.
