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CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley
The Truth Network Radio
April 1, 2018 11:10 am

CBS Sunday Morning

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley

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April 1, 2018 11:10 am

Are smartphones and other gadgets causing a brain drain?

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Our CBS Sunday morning podcast is sponsored by Edward Jones. College tours with your oldest daughter. Updating the kitchen to the appropriate decade.

Retiring on the coast. Life is full of moments that matter, and Edward Jones helps you make the most of them. That's why every Edward Jones financial advisor works with you to build personalized strategies for now and down the road. So when your next moment arrives, big or small, you're ready for it. Life is for living.

Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday morning. Many of us are celebrating Easter or Passover.

Ancient religious holidays that celebrate new beginnings. In our own time, the smartphone promised a new beginning in the way we communicate and share information with each other. But as recent news suggests, sharing that information on social media comes at a price, including what you might call a brain drain.

Ted Koppel will report our cover story. When Justin Rosenstein worked at Facebook, he invented the like button. When did you first come to realize that there were, I don't know if you want to describe them as problems, complications?

Yeah, it's been interesting to see how it's played out as this kind of double-edged sword. Ahead on the Sunday morning, the blessings of social media, thumbs up or thumbs down. True Colors is an Easter Sunday treat from Anna Werner, all about an old craft made new again. It's not your grandfather's stained glass. With new shapes, colors and patterns, stained glass is popping up in unexpected places. And in the more traditional setting, it's elevated to a higher power. Is this like the Super Bowl of stained glass? Your version of the Mona Lisa? Yeah, maybe it's our Sistine Chapel.

Ahead on Sunday morning, True Colors. Far from the peaceful realm of stained glass, two co-stars in film and in life are talking movie terror this morning with our Anthony Mason. You're not a horror movie fan.

Scaredy Cat, I think is the technical term. Jim Halpert. But John Krasinski, who made his name making us laugh in the office, has just directed his first horror film. The scary part? It co-stars his wife, Emily Blunt.

We honestly had so many people be like, you're going to be divorced by the end. In their frightening new film, A Quiet Place, Krasinski directs Blunt, later on Sunday morning. National Urban League President Mark Morial remembers Dr. Martin Luther King. Jim Axelrod shows us artifacts from the Holocaust trial of Adolf Eichmann. Brooks Silverbraga looks at a new Spielberg movie based on a book by a first time author. And more, all coming up when our Sunday morning podcast continues. Smartphones and other gadgets deliver a wealth of information, but are they also causing a brain drain?

Our cover story is reported by Sunday morning's senior contributor, Ted Koppel. 50, 60 years ago, television was the threat. It would, we feared, rot our children's minds, our minds, diminishing our attention span, addicting millions to mindless drivel.

And I think there are those who would say, and they were right. So what's different about today in the internet? I think every technology that changes the way people live inspires exaggerated hopes and fears. Technology critic Nicholas Carr has spent most of the past decade worrying and warning about the dangers of social media and the internet, posing the famous question, is Google making us stupid? We've never had a technology like a smartphone, where it's with us all the time.

So I think this is something new in human history. And I think we're starting to see the science, behavioral science, sociological science, that is pointing to how deeply this technology is affecting us because we're using it so intensely. That's the focus of Byron Reeves' research.

He's a professor, what they call a media psychologist at Stanford University. Professor Reeves developed a way to accurately track our digital lives. How do those two to three hours a day break down? To view that three hours of content, on average, I am turning that phone on and off 300 times a day. And that's just the average. There are a lot of people that are turning on and off five, six, seven, 800 times a day.

So it's going on, going off for an average of 10 seconds. You're making my brain hurt. What are you talking about? Take a news story in a Sunday morning television program.

What a brilliant idea. I don't know. How long does one last? Two minutes, 10 minutes? Oh, this one will probably last nine, 10 minutes. Okay. So it lasts 10 minutes.

I'll just talk about Stanford students for a second. If you put software on laptop computers and smartphones to measure how long they spent with any given segment of life that they attend to do, how long they wrote their paper, how long they watch the news story, it's about 10 to 20 seconds. But wait a second, I've got a nine-minute piece here. I want them to watch the whole damn thing.

Not going to do it, most likely. It's going to be atomized and fragmented. That sounds, Byron, like a formula for confusion. It could be, but oftentimes we find it's done with a progression of screens that at least kind of make sense to me. Because you might've said something that's really important to me in minute two.

And I want to get right to that. What becomes important to us is the next new thing that comes along in a matter of seconds. That's what grabs our attention.

And we begin to, not only do we begin to ignore the need to think deeply and quietly and contemplatively about things, but we begin to see that as a waste of time because it stops you from grabbing the next new bit of information. Facebook was the first among the social media companies to turn those short and shallow attention bites into a hugely profitable business model. They realized that advertisers could just be given what amounts to a one-click roadmap to our brains, showing them, as we flitted from one subject to another, what we liked and didn't like. Meet Justin Rosenstein. Is it fair to describe you as the creator of the link button? Co-inventor, yeah. Co-inventor. Tell me what you were thinking of when you first co-invented. The idea was, can we make it one click really easy for people to be able to share little bits of positivity and affirmation in the world?

And when did you first come to realize that there were, I don't know if you want to describe them as problems, complications? Yeah, it's been interesting to see how it's played out as this kind of double-edged sword. I think it's very dangerous right now to have a business model in which the way that these companies make money is by selling people's attention to advertisers. So regardless of whether they have good or bad intentions, the financial incentives just lean you more and more toward trying to get people to stare at their phones.

And as a result, we see that influencing the level of depth that we're able to think at. We see that influencing our politics. A BuzzFeed analysis of top election stories on Facebook during the final three months of the 2016 presidential campaign confirms Rosenstein's fears. Fake election news stories from phony sites, significantly outperformed stories from major news outlets like The New York Times, CBS News, and The Huffington Post. The notion that major news outlets see themselves as professional gatekeepers carries less and less weight. The gatekeepers, the editorial gatekeepers, the journalistic gatekeepers have been overthrown. And I think there was a general sense that that was liberating in the early days of the web and the internet. We can do this ourselves. It will democratize media. And we now know that those enemies, the people we thought were our enemies, the gatekeepers, actually played a very valuable role.

I wish I could tell you that we're going to be able to stop all interference, but that just wouldn't be realistic. While Facebook and Twitter are undertaking efforts to limit the spread of misinformation online, the fact remains that all these internet companies see themselves as distribution vehicles, without any clear editorial responsibility. And in 1996, Congress actually passed legislation to that effect, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They were simply a platform which information flowed on. So there was no responsibility to curate police or in any way review the information that appeared on your platform.

Senator Mark Warner is one of the tech industry's best informed and sternest critics. Candidly, your companies know more about Americans in many ways than the United States government does. What would happen if they began exercising real discipline over what goes out?

And we're talking what? Billions of items a day. Billions of items a day.

And these companies would fight against that regulation tooth and nail. The internet, Senator Warner reminds us, has been weaponized. Interference in our elections, threats to our infrastructure, undermining confidence in our institutions. My fear is that we may be investing in the best 20th century planes, tanks and guns, when much of the conflict in the 21st century will be in the realm of misinformation, disinformation and cyber warfare. And I'm not sure we're ready. I think ultimately, that's the question is whether as a public, we have the kind of sense of our democratic future to make hard choices about what we pay attention to, how we think about things, or whether we let the devices in the social media determine determine that for us. You don't seriously think that we have that kind of discipline, do you? I don't see any evidence of it. Justin Rosenstein left Facebook some years ago.

Today, he's the co-founder of Asana, a software company that enhances workplace productivity. There's a lot of concerns that I have about that technology will continue to erode our attention span, make it harder for us to focus on important social issues, make it harder for us to think clearly, which is critical to having a functioning democracy. At the same time, I think there's a huge opportunity for us to reimagine these tools and redesign them in order to be a huge boon to civilization. The opportunity there is for us to become the most informed, most compassionate populace of all times, and to be the most functioning democracy of all times. But it's a real fork in the road.

I worry that if we continue with business as usual, we run the risk of kind of walking off the cliff of civilization while staring at our phones. And now a page from our Sunday morning almanac, April 1st, 2018. Today, April Fools' Day. Formerly known as All Fools' Day, its origins are lost in time. It's been a long, long, long time since I've been here. It's been a long, long, long, long time since I've been here.

It's been a long, long, long, long time since I've been here. And now a page from our Sunday morning almanac, April Fools' Day, its origins are lost in time. Some date it to the ancient Roman springtime festivals known as Ilaria. Others date it to 1582, when the new Gregorian calendar moved New Year's Day from April 1st to January 1st, making anyone who still celebrated on the old date a fool. However foolish it may be to pinpoint the day's origins, it's even more foolish to try to catalog all the pranks it has inspired. The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer.

In 1957, the BBC ran a classic report on the Italian spaghetti harvest. These little fellows could do something no other penguins can. And followed up in 2008 with this April Fools' report on penguins.

It's just not amazing. By Terry Jones in Antarctica. Here at home, airline passengers landing in Los Angeles on April 1st, 1992 were greeted by a huge banner saying, welcome to Chicago. And in 1996, Taco Bell ran newspaper ads claiming it had purchased the Liberty Bell and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell. So which prank will make headlines this year? I, for one, have no idea.

No fooling. The true colors of this piece of stained glass were created by Judson Studios in California. The artists there are reshaping the ancient craft, as Anna Werner discovered. If you're coming to see Jesus, this might be the place. Welcome to the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, home to the largest Methodist congregation in the nation, and now one of the world's largest stained glass windows. Here, Jesus towers over the sanctuary with arms outstretched, surrounded by gardens and an assortment of religious and historical figures as broad as the window itself.

What's this equivalent to? Is this like the Super Bowl of stained glass? Your version of the Mona Lisa? Yeah, maybe it's our Sistine Chapel. It's the creative masterpiece of Judson Studios, with leader David Judson, the fifth generation in his family, to run the company.

You got a big job ahead of you here. Their stained glass studio in Pasadena, California, has been in constant operation for 120 years, with a reputation that echoes the spirit of legendary stained glass artists like John LaFarge in the 1800s and Louis Comfort Tiffany, which actually makes for some discomfort for Judson. We've been called the Tiffany of the West.

I say, no, no, no, no. You don't want to be called the Tiffany of the West? I don't want to be called the Tiffany of the West, no, because I think what Tiffany did was great, but he represents something that we're not. And so I hope that they will know us as Judson Studios and that we'll be able to carry our own legacy. Which is why Judson developed cutting edge techniques that are bringing designers to their door. People looking for pieces that are far more modern than the old Victorian style patterns.

That's what we're trying to move away from is that connotation. It's not your grandfather's stained glass. Like Roman Alonso with Los Angeles design firm Commune, who says of stained glass. There's a little bit of a bad rap that comes with it.

A bad rap. Yeah, because people do think of Victorian, people do think of Gothic, and people do think of heavy, and they think of old. But Alonso chose Judson Studios to help reimagine downtown LA's Ace Hotel. This is a historic building.

It was built in 1927. It's a mashup of Gothic and Spanish colonial architecture. So we wanted to bring different styles into the picture and create our own mashup. To add an up-to-date look while keeping to the hotel's Gothic tone, the studio created these modernist blue and gold panels. You get a lot more out of this than you would with, say, plain glass, traditional window. Absolutely. I mean, you want a separation from the street, but you still want transparency. And glass can give you that.

But why not add this beautiful element of color that plays with the light so well? But it's back at the Church of the Resurrection that David Judson really showed his devotion to his craft with this revelation in glass. The entire window was nearly 100 feet by 40 feet. 100 feet by 40 feet. That's a single window? Yeah, it's like the size of a basketball court. The window was so big, Judson built a second studio to take on the Kansas Project. So this is the new space. So this is the house that the Kansas Project built.

Yeah, that's right. Manufacturing the 160 panels that would make up one enormous mosaic took three years. Along the way, they developed new techniques, including the use of powdered glass, which they say creates a sense of movement.

The project wasn't quick or cheap. The window cost $3.4 million. But churchgoers say for them, the payoff has been profound. When you go in, you feel God's presence and the Holy Spirit. And I think it is mainly because of the stained glass window. It's awesome. It really is awesome. It tells the whole history of our Christian religion. In his creations, David Judson is giving new life to an ancient craft. The death knoll has been played several times for stained glass, and it's not going away.

It's something that I think people will always have a desire for. The testimony that convicted Adolf Eichmann of Holocaust atrocities more than half a century ago has lost none of its power to chill the heart. Jim Axelrod now on a silent artifact from the trial that speaks volumes. First count, nature of offense, crime against the Jewish people. April 1961, 16 years after the end of World War II, a Nazi colonel named Adolf Eichmann stood trial in Israel for his part in the Holocaust. During the period 1939 to 1945, caused the killing of millions of Jews. A master planner of what the Nazis called the final solution, their plan to eradicate Europe's Jews.

So far as this question is concerned, I can only say that I've never killed anyone. Eichmann would become the only Nazi prosecuted by the Jewish people, enclosed in a bulletproof glass booth that anchors a traveling exhibit currently at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg. Avner Avraham is the curator. Why did he sit in this booth? To defend him.

Defend him from people in the crowd that maybe can try to kill him. Eichmann would mount a defense he was just following orders, overseeing the logistics of murdering millions of Jews. An unknowing cog, he claimed, in the killing machine. But he was the machine. He was in charge of all the schedules, all the trains.

He sent the people to the camps. How far away from him were you sitting? 15 yards maybe? But you could see him.

Yeah, I could see him. The last time Jeff Kohn saw the glass booth, he was an 18-year-old American student visiting Israel when his group was given tickets to the Eichmann trial. What exactly does it bring back? It brings back the thoughtlessness of a human being who's taken it upon himself to make the final decision. A single trial was about to change the world's perspective on the most horrendous crime in human history.

The trial is only half the story told by the exhibit. How did Eichmann escape from Germany at the end of World War II? At the end of the war, Eichmann was in U.S. custody.

But the troops didn't know who they had. He escaped, making his way to Italy, then Argentina, setting up home in a poor neighborhood and living under an assumed name. Ricardo Clement. And he entered to Argentina in 1950 with this name, Ricardo Clement. At the end, he found a position as the head of the department in Mercedes. He worked for Mercedes-Benz.

Yes. All would have been fine for Eichmann had his son Nicholas, who didn't change his last name, not started dating a young German woman whose family had also come to Buenos Aires. But her father had spent the war on the other side of the barbed wire. He was a concentration camp survivor. So that name, Eichmann, Nicholas Eichmann, it caught the attention of this girl's father.

Yes. When he came to visit her at home, her father realized immediately that this is probably Eichmann's son. Capturing Eichmann was the job of 11 Mossad agents, Israel's version of the CIA, who snatched him off the streets of Buenos Aires in May of 1960 and transported him to Israel to meet justice. The exhibit takes us through Operation Finale, the hidden cameras Mossad agents used to ID Eichmann. They came with a special suitcase.

They put the camera inside the suitcase. Casts of the gloves worn by the agent assigned to tackle him on the street. He didn't want to touch him. He didn't want to touch him because it was touching evil, of course.

The fake license plates made for their rental cars. The taped-over goggles the agent stuffed over Eichmann's eyes, so he didn't know where he was going. I do not swear by the Bible. I swear by the Almighty God.

During the five-month trial, Adolf Eichmann would never admit his guilt. He came in contact, but I had to obey orders. I had to do it. But for the first time, survivors of the death camps had the chance to testify about the horrors they had endured. We walked from early morning till late in the night. There were many who on the very first day fell and never got up.

What happened to those? And they remained on the roadside. They were either shot or beaten until they died. There was not a shred of repentance. No, no, no.

And if anything, he was kind of puffed up. If Eichmann thought he would just serve a few years in an Israeli prison before heading back to Argentina, then he gravely miscalculated. Eichmann is found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Adolf Eichmann would be convicted and hanged. Right after the war, the Allies prosecuted 22 Nazis in Nuremberg, Germany. But that was the winners trying the losers. Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel was something else entirely.

The victims themselves seeking justice, even when the world would have understood vengeance. Perhaps that's what's on display in this exhibit, where people can make an intimate acquaintance with pure evil and be reminded of our capacity to triumph over it while keeping our humanity intact. I feel bad that we mention his names and show his pictures because he is very famous now, because he's part of our exhibition. In Israel, we didn't mention his full name in the exhibit. We just say Eichmann.

Because to use his full name... ...make him a regular man. When Steven Spielberg, no less, decided to make a movie based on a book by a novice author, our Brooks Silverbraga just had to find out why. There we go. Oh, that's pretty good. Ernie Klein's life looks like something out of a certain kind of 80s movie.

I've been waiting like a week to do this. The implausible kind. Say hello, kid. I'm afraid I don't understand your point. Where a geeky hero gets to live out his wildest dreams.

Pull it down with the strap and then you push down like that. The car, of course, was immortalized in Back to the Future. Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?

A film and a concept Ernie Klein has thought a lot about. If I traveled back in time to talk to my younger self, he just he wouldn't believe any of this. No, who would? I have a hard time believing it now.

And who can blame him? In 2011, Klein's debut novel Ready Player One became a bestseller. And now he's just finished work on the movie version alongside none other than director Steven Spielberg. Klein's main qualification for the job was... Well, being a big fan of Steven Spielberg movies.

See, it's official Indiana Jones. Oh, that's got the thing. When you started Ready Player One, how much fiction had you even published?

I had not. Ready Player One is my first published work. So in a literary magazine? Nothing. Short story? Nothing.

You were just going out. Yeah. Giving it a try. Ready Player One envisions a dark future in which people spend most of their time plugged into a film. The plot involves a high-stakes scavenger hunt. The clues come from 1980s pop culture. This is great. Promotion of the film has taken over the real world.

There's so much stuff in here I want to steal. Including a massive interactive exhibit in Klein's hometown of Austin, Texas. So these are the stacked trailers from the book. Well, I grew up in a trailer park and living in a trailer park feels not great. And so I imagine like in the future, like what's the, what would be the best place to be?

So I imagine like in the future, like what's the, what would be worse than a trailer park? Klein and his brother Eric were raised in rural Ohio by a mix of their grandparents and an Atari console. A love for Star Wars fed dreams of working in the movies, but for years the closest Ernie came was a job as a video store clerk. When writing screenplays didn't quite work out, he started a novel. Nine years later, with a baby daughter to support, Klein sent the book to publishers. And then the very next day we had sold the rights to Ready Player One for more money than, you know, I ever imagined I would make or anyone in my family had ever made.

My whole life had just changed in that first 24 hours. And then they said, oh, by the way, now there's a bidding war going on in Hollywood for the film rights. Why do you think it would make a good movie? Well, because it was a great adventure. I wanted to make the movie because I hadn't made an adventure film like this, my God, for decades. When Steven Spielberg signed on to direct, Klein, the ultimate fan boy, became his collaborator.

So he's an authority on popular culture. And when we made the movie, we kept going back to Ernie just to pick his brain. Was he able to play it cool around you?

Yeah, yeah, I think he was hanging on a little bit. You know, even now, just talking to him, I'll hang up the phone, having a conversation with him, just talk to Steven Spielberg. It never goes away, you know, because he was such a giant figure in my childhood. You have Steven Spielberg's number in your phone. No, he calls me.

I don't. Oh, does he block it? Does he block the number? I'm sure I can, you know, I can get a hold of him if I need to. But he doesn't. He doesn't hand out that number.

Here we go. Success has given Ernie bigger toys. Now he's an action figure.

But it's love for the little ones that got him here. To make the point, he brought out the Atari console he got for Christmas in 1978 and started playing a game called Adventure. It was the first virtual reality game that I ever played. Very virtual. In the flashing, fuzzy pixels, young Ernie found a secret room in the game where the designer had hidden his name. And that was just a profound moment. Years later, that moment gave Klein the idea for a virtual scavenger hunt, the plot of Ready Player One.

Are you willing to fight? It's a story about someone trying to use their love and knowledge of 80s pop culture to achieve fame and fortune. And you're the person who did that.

I know. I feel like I am a testament to what happens if you be free about what you love and why you love it and not afraid or worried about what other people think about your love or your passions. Just be bold and celebrate the things that you're passionate about and amazing things can happen. Coming up, the perfect touch. OK. A young basketball player with the perfect touch has earned a return visit from our Steve Hartman. Every week, he set himself up for disappointment.

Every week, 14-year-old Jamarion Stiles came to this community center in Boca Raton, Florida, hoping to play basketball with the other kids. And every week, he was rejected. He'll start picking teams and I will be the only one left out.

And then they'll just tell me, just go home and stuff. You can break someone's heart like that. As we first reported last year, the problem was obvious to everyone but Jamarion. He lost his hands and most of his arms as an infant due to a rare bacterial infection. But he insisted that was no reason to give up his hoop dreams. What about soccer? Have you heard of that sport?

Yeah. You would think that I would be good at soccer. I'm really not.

I'm horrible. Which is why, first day of eighth grade here at Eagles Landing Middle School, Jamarion took his case to basketball coach Darion Williams, said he wanted to be on the team. I said, all great. Well, just make sure you try out. You say, OK, great, but what are you really thinking? This man has no arms.

Yeah. How is he going to play basketball? But man, he told me, Mr. Williams, I've never been on a team before. Even if I don't play, I just want to be on the team.

And how could I say no to that? And that's how the Eagles got their first armless basketball player. Jamarion, number two there, quickly earned a reputation as the hardest worker on the squad. He was usually the first one in the gym, usually the last one to leave. Still, he sat on the bench most of the season.

Try one more. Until one day, the coach put him in the game with about six minutes left. And when he eventually got the ball on the far side of the court, everyone yelled, shoot it. So he did. And sank a three pointer.

And if you didn't quite see that, don't worry, because shortly after he got the ball again, this time on the near side for another three pointer at the buzzer. Jamarion Stiles, the kid no one would pick, was now everyone's hero. Since that story first aired, Jamarion went on to play freshman basketball, still number two there, and has every intention of making varsity one day. But here's the best part. After hitting those threes, Jamarion can now play all he wants at the community center. He's picked all the time.

Really, the only thing he won't play is the victim. If I could wave a magic wand right now and give you your arms back, would you want them? I don't need them. You don't need them? No. Who needs hands when you've got this kind of touch?

Last night on Trading Spouses, have you seen it? No, I have a life. Interesting. What's that like? You should try it sometime.

Wow. It's Sunday morning on CBS, and here again is Jane Pauley. John Krasinski played it for laughs in the long-running TV series The Office. Now, he and his real-life wife, Emily Blunt, are co-stars in a movie that's all about harvesting horror in the countryside, which is where Anthony Mason has found them. I saw this on Zillow. You saw it on Zillow?

Yeah, we were looking and I saw that this house was on Zillow, and I thought that's exactly the house I want. On a back road in Pauling, New York, actor and director John Krasinski found the perfect farmhouse for his first horror film. The family that you see in the movie, that's where they used to live. They no longer can because of the sounds of the house and also a tree's falling on it, and so they all decide to live in this barn because it has a dirt floor, and they're able to remain quiet. A Quiet Place is a post-apocalyptic story about a family trying to survive in a world of sonically sensitive creatures that attack at the slightest sound. You're not a horror movie fan.

No, not at all. Scaredy Cat, I think, is the technical term. But in the script, the director, a father of two, saw a film about family. The scares were secondary to how powerful this could be as a allegory or metaphor for parenthood.

For me, this is all about parenthood. That's also what attracted his co-star, Krasinski's wife, Emily Blunt. I just fell in love with this mother.

I just identified with her so much and just the fierceness of her. It's the first time the couple has worked together. Originally, you weren't thinking your wife was going to do the part.

She was shooting Mary Poppins. We had just had her second daughter, so there was a lot going on. So I figured it could only go two ways in my head, which was, will you do this? And she says, no. That's some awkwardness at the dinner table. Or would you do this? And she says, yeah, sure, I'll do it for you. And I'm like, ooh, those both aren't good.

So I just chose the third option, which is not to talk to her about it at all. Cut. One more. How does that feel? That was great. But Blunt asked to read his script.

I previously suggested a friend of mine, and then I read his version. And I was like, you need to call her and tell her that I want to do it. Were you nervous about this? Yes. Did you have discussions about it going in?

Oh, God, yes. A Quiet Place took over our lives for two years. What were the negotiations like?

For my deal or for? We honestly had so many people be like, you're going to be divorced by the end. Actually, we were closer. It was kind of amazing. So this was basically your sound stage. This was our sound stage. They took over this local horse arena, building sets inside to shoot the film's interior scenes. When we met last month, Krasinski was still in the mixing room, mastering the sound for a film whose characters communicate mostly by sign language and hand signals. Way better.

I'm now in the room with her. For this movie, sound is everything. Everything.

It's a huge character, if not one of the main characters. The little rip helps out so much. Love it. He'd shown his wife a first cut. And I'll never forget. She turned to me, put her hand on my knee and said, you just directed a silent film.

And I said, I know, right? And she went, no, no, stop for a second. You just directed a silent film. In A Quiet Place, Blunt's character has to give birth without making a sound. I've never been so terrified to see somebody pregnant. Normally it's like a lovely thing. You're like, you're glowing. A scene that seems destined to become one of film's iconic moments of suspense.

John's very economical how he shoots. So he was like, I just need three takes. Put me through the wringer, you know.

I'm boring myself just talking about this. Krasinski made his debut as a director on a few episodes of The Office, the TV series he starred in for nine seasons. Well, if this were my career, I'd have to throw myself in front of a train. Jim Halpert playing Jim Halpert, a paper salesman at the Dunder Mifflin Company. There was something about the fact that none of us had done anything huge.

We were all in this tiny capsule of almost felt more like regional theater. Hey, Jim, it's Pam. Hey, Pam. Krasinski's character was known for his wry looks and romance with receptionist Pam.

Do you like going out at the end of the week for a drink? But a few years into the series, the Boston-born actor was introduced to Blunt at a restaurant. I shook her hand and no joke in my head just went, oh, no, I knew it immediately. It was just really easy. And he was so funny and sweet. And I think we talked till like five in the morning that night. And that was it.

Pick your hallmark card. It was just like, I felt like I had known her forever. Oh, I'm sorry.

Do you have some prior commitment? The British actress who had broken through in The Devil Wears Prada had just finished filming Young Victoria in the screening room. I'll never forget. She was so good in the movie that this really went through my head. I thought, man, who's she going to date next?

I mean, is it like Ryan Gosling? I mean, I can't keep this for much longer. This is this is nuts. He's an idiot. That's not true.

He knew. I'm Emily Blunt. The couple recently made a video and we want to go on a double date with you offering to double date to the premiere of their new film to raise money for the Malala Fund. You never get out. Ever. It's too desperate.

That's too desperate. Yeah, we got to play it cool. You both kind of have big ears this year. I thought you said big ears for a second. I was like, we do have big ears. Yeah, it is a big year for the Krasinski Blunts, I guess.

Wild. This summer, Krasinski will bring back Tom Clancy's character Jack Ryan in the new series for Amazon. That sounds boring. It's a cool part. It is a great part.

Jack Ryan's our America James Bond. Less sex. That's all it is. And in December, Blunt will resurrect an iconic children's character in Mary Poppins Returns, which she had to explain to her four year old daughter, Hazel. I said, you know how Mummy was pretending to be Mary Poppins?

Because that's kind of how I explain what we do for a living. I said there was another lady who played Mary Poppins and she want to see that film. And she was like, yeah, and now she's obsessed and will probably reject my version of Mary Poppins. You ready for that? Not really.

It'll probably break my heart. But Julie Andrews is Mary Poppins to Hazel. Last month, John Krasinski and Emily Blunt walked the red carpet at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, where A Quiet Place premiered to rave reviews. Night before, Emily said, what do you want out of this experience? And I said, she really asked you that question. She did. She could see I was nervous. And I said, you know, at the end of the movie, if they cheered, that'd be cool. And so we get to the end of the movie and people actually jumped out of their seats and stood up and screamed.

And my wife just screamed at me. Oh, my God. It doesn't get any better than that. It does not get any better. No, truly. I said to the crowd, I said, I don't think I'll have a better experience in my career.

I'll never get to relive this moment. And that's OK. I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening.

And please join us again next Sunday morning. This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out. What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-01-26 13:06:03 / 2023-01-26 13:22:31 / 16

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