Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1100404
the Senate Office Buildings. Aer the late 1970s, however, there was almost no use of the Library in Hollywood films for some time, perhaps because of the bad taste le aer an incident during the shooting of All the President's Men in 1975 (fig. 9). Perhaps that film's most imaginative use of locales is the sequence when Woodward and Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) visit the Jefferson Build- ing to gain access to some records of books checked out by personnel of the White House. The core of the sequence is shot inside the famed Main Reading Room, where, as the reporters look through library checkout cards, the camera slowly backs up vertically to the very top of the Library's grand dome, with a view down on the now puny protagonists, rifling through cards. According to one source, the production "devoted three weeks to pulling apparatus up 600 stairs to achieve a dramatic upward pull-away shot." 14 That dramatic shot almost never happened. According to a contemporary report in a local busi- ness journal, the company, aer spending two weeks building a platform from which a camera could obtain a bird's eye view of the Reading Room, hit a snag. en: Forty-eight hours before the shoot, permission to film was suddenly revoked by an official who was horrified to see the platform hang- ing from pulleys attached to the Library dome. Aer hours of desperate telephoning, the pro- ducers finally reached...Jack Valenti (head of the MPAA). Valenti put them in touch with Congressman John Brademas, who sits on the Library committee of the House of Represen- tatives. anks to Brademas' intercession, the scene was shot. 15 e Library shoot for All the President's Men was also the scene of an unfortunate incident that affected future access to the building. Stuart Neumann was a production assistant during this filming and recalled the event in an interview: a member of the rigging crew was running cables up in a false ceiling with acoustical tiles when the ceiling broke and the fellow fell right on an office desk of a Library employee. e Librarian of Congress was not happy, and the building was consid- ered off limits for a time for Hollywood film crews. 16 Aer All the President's Men there was no commer- cial filming in the Library until 1993, with a tepid remake of Born Yesterday. A sequence has the Billie Dawn char- acter (Melanie Griffith) ensconced in the Main Reading Room with her journalist mentor (Don Johnson) dutifully learning to use a dictionary to understand civ- ics texts. In more recent years, some productions have begun again to shoot in the Jefferson Building. Now, with recent films like the two National Treasure thrillers and Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar (2011) featuring its Main Reading Room, the Library has again become a sup- porting player in D.C. movies. In the first National Treasure film (2004), there is a lengthy expository sequence in the Main Reading Room, with a nice pan from the Library's dome down to the two principals (treasure hunters) in the circu- lar reading area. In the 2007 sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the treasure hunters roam the upper lev- els of the Reading Room searching for the "lost pages" of John Wilkes Booth's diary. J. Edgar Hoover actually worked at the Library for five years as a young man before joining the Justice Department. A scene in J. Edgar has the future FBI chief (Leonardo DiCaprio) introducing a young woman to the library's card catalog (fig. 10). is shoot took place in March 2011 and was described in the Library of Congress' house weekly e Gazette. e paper describes how director Eastwood and company took over the Great Hall and the Main Reading Room with "giant, helium-filled bal- loons floated about the floors... illuminating the scene." Fig. 10. Library of Congress reference librarian Sheridan Harvey shows a production crew entries in the Library's classic card catalog during the location shooting of Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar (2011). THE CAPITOL DOME 11