In the Pentagon "War Room" scene, the walls are lined with backlit code transparencies, and Nash infers they're lattitudes and longitudes. The Art department was creating one slide at a time in Adobe Illustrator, and people can't pick random digits, so I wrote a C program to generate all the slides, that Art could control for creative effect. As the scene drew near, I was asked to pick locations along the US/Canada border, such as Starkey Corners, Maine. Russell, fearing we were making these names up, challenged Akiva to prove they existed. Luckily I had a Maine atlas in my car.

Art made an error entering a longitude by hand. It moved the spot 200 yards, so instead of pointing this out I updated the script (mistake #1). Day of filming, Art tells me they caught the mistake, and had overnighted a corrected slide just in time. The "wrong" slide matching the script in Russell's trailer was two hours away. There was no question in Akiva's mind that we should get it. We sent a driver.

Now, I knew Ron Howard would be asking me which slides were which, when we filmed the crucial scene. I asked Art so I could move slides as needed, and was told the head of Art had spent all day positioning them. I innocently found the head of Art to ask him to relay his permission.

Oops. In front of dozens of crew he eviscerated me, telling me I was assuming too great a role, I was just a consultant, I should learn my place. (My role had indeed expanded. There's too much to do on a film.)

After we each had a word with Akiva, I discovered that the soon-arriving "wrong" slide was already in perfect position for filming. I had needlessly prevailed in a confrontation I could have avoided (mistake #2).

During preproduction I had offered to Russell that if he ever wanted to use me in a joke, I was game. Russell had missed the festivities so far. Rehearsing at a map table, he feigned not knowing where one of the locations was. The room froze for what seemed an eternity; he didn't mind. I snuck up silently to point on the map. He bellowed "Fuck off! I'm acting!" and turned to match my grin.

No one laughed. Anyone surprised I hadn't already quit that day was sure I'd quit now. Russell had no idea. He came to me later, wondering why no one laughed, he thought that was funny. I told him, "I thought it was funny. Who cares what anyone else thinks!"

We then spent half a day filming in front of the now-arrived "wrong" transparency matching the script in Russell's trailer. It turned out that Russell had memorized the coordinates (I hadn't). Yikes.

Akiva and I gave each other a silent hi-five look over this. Right call, getting a driver. This could have gone badly. So many decisions on a film set are a game of chance.

I even patched things up with the head of Art. The cinematographer Roger Deakins discovered that if he pulled down the slides the wall made a great backlight. The crew could only restore the original slide pattern because I'd made a chart. There was a strong pattern to the slide colors; this would otherwise have lead to continuity gaffes that many viewers would have noticed. So it appeared at first that I was the heathen about to destroy this artwork, when I was the person in the room who saved it.