#even though the camera woul probably not be located there

[snarkspawn]

I finally managed to colour this \o/

[greyias]

FIC: Smoke and Mirrors - Chapter 10

Title: Smoke and Mirrors Fandom: SWTOR Pairing: Theron Shan/f!Jedi Knight Rating: T Genre: Pre-Relationship, Slow Burn Synopsis: Something’s rotten on Carrick Station, and Theron won’t rest until he finds out what. But picking at the frayed threads of suspicion quickly unravels a conspiracy much larger than even the Republic’s top spy can handle on his own. (A mostly canon-compliant retelling of the Forged Alliances storyline, as seen through the eyes of Theron Shan.) Author’s Notes and Spoilers: See Chapter 1.

Chapter Index: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | Crossposted to AO3

In the end, it was a compromise. Highwind’s fancy footwork and insane strategy of playing chicken with the targeting arrays managed carry her through the second target. The third one had to be taken out the old fashioned way, though, with lightsabers and blaster fire.

The Gnarls had been reclaimed, and the Imp’s command platform neutralized. Theron was still untangling the mess the invading force had made when they’d sliced into the shield grid, but they’d managed to open up the reinforcement’s approach vectors and they were able to get troops on the ground safely now. A quick glance over at Darok and the large holotable showed him that the second wave was just starting to land.

It was just a matter of retaking the temple. Highwind was still leading the way, blazing a path through Imperials and Flesh Raider like a wildfire through dry tinder. Now that Theron had his hooks into the system, he was able to monitor their progress on a map on the terminal he’d claimed, but he was still trying to get actual eyes on them in the field. It wasn’t much but it made him feel better. More part of the mission. Rather than just being relegated to tech support.

Most of the Jedi’s security cameras had been damaged in the initial assault, but there was one flickery feed from above the temple steps. Theron leaned back, pretending to stretch out the very real kink developing between his shoulders from being hunched over the keys for so long. The entire room was lined with monitors and terminals, all the metal surfaces shined to an exquisite military polish. Perfect for observing a target while leaving them unaware.

Darok was hunched over the holotable, gaze focused on all of the dots and figures of troops and ships as well as the enemy combatants. Occasionally he’d gesture wildly as he let out a terse string of orders. He was the very image of the perfect Republic soldier, dedicated to taking back the homeworld of some of their staunchest allies while keeping his men alive. After this, someone would probably want to pin a medal on his chest.

“The Savior of Tython” — he might have to wrestle with Highwind for the title.

It was too bad it was all an act. After it had been pointed out, Theron couldn’t not see it. The sudden rush of intel and push to raid Korriban combied with the simultaneous attack on Tython. It was too much of a coincidence.

He recognized the mark of a con — the tantalizing prospect of something too good to pass up, something the target desperately wanted more than anything else. A sudden press of urgency and a ticking clock was meant to bypass normal caution, to push the target into action. It was the tactics of grifters and spies, of someone manipulating things to their own end. 

Except that the target this time was the Republic, and whoever the mastermind of this was had used him as a pawn in this game. That was their big mistake — Theron Shan was no man’s puppet. No one could pull his strings and expect him to jump. Whether Darok was the mastermind, another pawn, or just some unwitting bystander he wasn’t sure. All Theron had right now was an instinctual and instant dislike to the man. Maybe it was just Darok’s grating personality. Or maybe it was gut instinct.

Either way, a good idea to keep an eye on him. Gather the data and surveil the suspects right now and sort through the details later. There was more going on than first met the eye here — something bigger simmering under the surface. He’d find out what it was — no one played him for the fool and got away with it.

Right now though, he needed to get eyes on the other player in this game as well.

Theron finished his fake stretch, satisfied that Darok was occupied at the moment, and returned to the keys in front of him. With a few quick taps, he had patched the feed from the staticky Jedi Temple camera into the HUD on his implants. There was probably no way that the single, damaged camera could accurately convey the havoc wrought on his mother’s home, but that same sick feeling started to churn again in his gut as he got a glimpse of the smoking temple grounds. The lush green rolling hills leading up to the temple had been charred to a dull brown, and dust, dirt, and smoke had kicked up a thick haze. The practice dummies and meditation spots that had been part of the serene landscape were gone, likely buried under the rubble. From the fluttering remains of a brown robe under a large chunk of stone that had fallen from one the large looming statues of knights old — it was possible the landscape wasn’t the only thing buried under the rubble. 

He blew out a long breath, gathered his focus, and analyzed the feed beyond the destruction to try and find his team. The dramatic billowing cape and striking purple hue of the twin lightsabers made Highwind easy to pick out even with all of the smoke and rubble. He turned the audio channel from her comm back up just as she finished slicing through several droids that had rushed the group. Kira bent down to examine them, and let out an anguished sound she couldn’t completely muffle.

“Kira,” Highwind’s voice was soft, pitched low to only where her friend could hear. Not measured and even this time, but both sympathetic and gently warning. “We can’t let—”

“These were Master Dentiri’s training droids,” Kira didn’t bother to disguise the anger and sorrow rising in her voice as she stood.

“I know.” The statement was still soft, and there was a thread of a deeper emotion trying to surface. As if Highwind herself couldn’t completely tamp it all down. Theron wasn’t sure exactly what she was trying to keep restrained, but it still struck something inside of him.

“They are merely droids,” Scourge cut in, disdain dripping from his tone. “There is nothing to mourn in twisted metal.”

Teeseven let out an angry whistle protesting that statement, and Kira stepped up to the Sith. Her expression wasn’t visible from the distance, but it didn’t need to be, because her entire posture radiated an anger and rage that was supposed to be anathema to the Jedi. Theron hated it, but he had to agree somewhat with Scourge’s callous statement — at the moment he couldn’t see any significance in the reprogramming of a bunch of training droids.

“Master Dentiri would never let them be reprogrammed like this! Not while he was alive.”

Oh.

“Kira, please,” Highwind approached her friend hand held out in a complacent gesture. “It’s difficult to see all of this, I know, but we need to stay calm and focus on the present—”

It all happened in the same moment.

Highwind cut her own statement off abruptly, and Theron watched on the feed as in an instant her entire posture changed. Back straightening and head snapping up as if some invisible string had pulled at her. Her outstretched hand jutted out forcefully, fingers splaying out into an expansive gesture as both Kira and Scourge were thrown several feet apart by some unseen force. Or rather, the Force. A barely perceptible shimmer rippled across the camera feed before a long vibroblade pierced the spot where the two Force users had just been standing, wielded by a figure Theron didn’t recognize.

He tried to enhance his visual from the feed, but it was pointless. The signal from the camera was barely operating as it was. He could only watch as purple lightsaber met with vibroblade from the new combatant: a bald woman with clearly visible implants, even from the distance. If he’d had time and a clearer image he would have fed her likeness through a database. Maybe he’d get a name, or maybe not. From the woman’s fighting style, the grade of the implants, and the reprogramming of the droids — maybe an operative from whatever was left of Imperial intelligence. 

More of the reprogrammed training droids joined the fray, engaging with the rest of the strike team. Theron could only watch the battle between the distant, flickering holofigures while hearing every clash and strike over the comm. That same feeling of uselessness started to creep up again. He could add nothing to this fight, the outcome was down to the skill of his operatives on the other end. He had to trust that they’d get the job done. And not die in the process.

Theron swallowed the bitter feeling and glanced back at the nearest reflective surface. Darok was still absorbed in his portion of the battle. Perhaps even unaware of the strike team’s close call. The embers of the fire burning inside him flickered to life, that flame of anger tempering his resolve like durasteel being shaped into finely honed blade.

He turned that fervor back into something useful, delving into the sensor data as the battle continued to play out in his HUD. With each crash of the blade, hum of the lightsaber, and shriek of blaster fire, Theron pierced through more of the Imperial firewalls separating him from the Temple. He flung every new layer of data onto the terminals around him, not bothering to hide his work from Darok. Let the bastard see who he was dealing with, let him know that nothing could hide from Theron when he turned the microscope to it.

Maybe he couldn’t lend his blaster to the fight raging on the temple steps, but he could scrape every single shred of data together. Find the location of every single Sith and Imperial trooper lurking inside and obliterate any chance of further ambush. They might have razed the temple and every single Jedi within it, but they would not keep their bloodied prize. That was for damn sure.

As the battle finished, silence settled over the comm. The flickering chaotic image on the HUD had almost stilled, and if he hadn’t seen the telltale cape fluttering in the wind, Theron might have been concerned about the fate of his operative. A dark mood had settled over the strike team, and he almost felt like he was intruding, but pushed it aside. There wasn’t time for that right now.

“Are you clear?”

“We are,” she said.

While they had been fighting, he’d managed to put together a patchy map of intel from the interior of the building. Without hesitation, he funneled that data stream to his feed to Teeseven, and the little astromech faithfully projected it out in front of him.

He heard a long breath exhaled on the other end of the comm. “Is this what we’re up against inside?”

“Yes,” Theron said, perhaps a little brusquely. “No more surprises like that one.”

“There might be still a few of those awaiting us inside,” Highwind said quietly, a weary note breaking through the practiced calm. “Even with this.”

Theron was a naturally suspicious man. It was a healthy trait in his profession to finely hone paranoia into a tool of survival. Whoever the mastermind was that had orchestrated this bleak tragedy would have be someone wily and almost Machiavellian — capable of seeing the lives of the combatants on the field as pawns on a larger Dejarik board. Unwilling or even unable to view them as people. If that exacted a toll on their psyche, would it even be able to be seen?

As Highwind had stalked out of the warroom earlier, Theron had considered her role in this. Logically it was best to consider and eliminate every potential suspect. Darok was first on the list, having been the one who found the opening on Korriban and suggested the operation to Jace. He’d planned that entire mission. It was only natural to suspect him, especially considering his nearly maniacal drive to get into the Dark Council chambers.

But right after Darok came Highwind herself. Theron still couldn’t figure her out or where she fell into all of this. If she had any contact or involvement with Darok prior to this, it wasn’t indicated anywhere in her file. Of course, there had been those missing six months — anything could have happened then. Including contact with a surly SpecOps officer. Of course, that had to have meant that Darok would have somehow engineered her involvement in the operation. Could he have planted the suggestion to Jace to have a member of the Coruscant Aegis? Perhaps but… that didn’t add up. 

Theron had been the one to make the decision on the recruitment from the Aegis. If the Aegis member was the lynchpin in the plan, Darok would have to had to find some way to have each person on that list under his thumb. It was technically possible — almost anything was with his lack of intel — but that was the thing about conspiracies. They worked best by keeping people in the dark. It was the nature of secrets — the less people who knew, the less chance of being discovered. 

Besides, Darok seemed to set Highwind on edge almost as much as he did with Theron. That kind of thing could have been staged. So could have their bristling anger and standoff over the slave pens on Korriban. All of her wild heroics could have been played up for the supposedly stupid spy observing all of this. Her kind and sympathetic Jedi act could be just that — a way to throw him off the scent. Maybe she realized Theron was observing her closely and she was trying to play to his sympathies. Maybe the stoop in her shoulders as she walked up the temple steps was just an act, and maybe the glimpse of the unguarded expression on her face was also part of the show. Meant to convey the anguish and heavy toll of someone whose home had just been destroyed. That tightly wound control slipping through her fingers was something he was meant to sympathize with because it was a mirror of his own state of mind.

Anything was possible.

But as her eyes closed, he heard the heavy, deep breath she took in, and caught a quick glimmer on her cheeks that was quickly scrubbed away before those following in step behind her could see — and that hard suspicion splintered into a thousand pieces.

Whatever secrets lay in her past, whatever the source of those missing six months from her file was… it had nothing to do with this. He felt that as sure as anything. Deep down in his gut, like those sure and certain feelings the Jedi might feel from the Force. Ngani Zho used to say they were one and the same, regardless of one’s affinity for it.

Theron hesitated, before he keyed in his subvocal mic. “Hey. You all right?”

“Yes,” she said almost too quietly for even the overtuned comm unit to pick up. “I will be fine.”

If they were more than strangers, maybe this would have been the moment for him to say something comforting. Or encouraging. As her handler, all he needed to do was get her to finish the mission. Beyond that, none of this was any of his business. He was a professional. They both were. So he swallowed back whatever that feeling attempting to creep up on him was, and pulled up the sensor data.

“There’s an ambush waiting for you at the stairs. Prepare to get swarmed.”

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll be ready. After that?”

Theron blew out a breath, sorting through the stream of code to pick out the relevance of all the data. “There’s shielding around the Jedi Temple Library. They’re up to something in there.”

“The library,” she echoed softly, footfalls slowing their ascent. “A raid on the Jedi’s stores of knowledge. Just like the raid on the Sith’s.”

If there had been any lingering doubt of her being some sort of clever and dastardly mastermind, that put it to rest. Her constantly putting together the clues of the mystery unfolding before them was not exactly the work of an evil genius, just the opposite in fact. She also had a point. The coincidences were starting to stack up, and the more of them they found, the harder it was to ignore.

“I’m sending the source of the shield’s power to Teeseven,” Theron said, not acknowledging her statement aloud. Too many ears here. “You’ll have to shut it down before you can see what’s going on.”

“We will get to the bottom of this,” she promised, out loud this time as if for everyone to hear.

“Communication is going to get patchy when you get inside,” he reminded her. “So watch your back.”

“I will. Thank you, Theron,” she said, not bothering to hide her gratitude. “We couldn’t do this without you.”

She disappeared off from the view of the camera, entering into the ruined temple. An odd tightness began to settle in his chest. It was both light and smothering, and ideally, he’d be able to be alone to try and sort through whatever the feeling was. Maybe it was nerves. It was probably nerves. Too keyed up about the fate of Satele, the rest of the Jedi even, and not having eyes on his operative as she entered the most dangerous leg of the mission.

He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and glanced at the reflection closest to him. Then stood back in alarm from the console, abandoning all subtly as he turned to face an empty room. At some point, Darok had slipped out without Theron even noticing.

He glared at the station that the colonel had taken up residence at, considering the merits of pulling the security footage from the room. Maybe bypass a few Carrick Station safety protocols and track down the errant officer. See exactly what he was up to.

Theron didn’t have time for that. He had people on the ground, and despite the mounting suspicion over the colonel’s involvement in all of this, the safety of those in the line of fire was top priority. Once the mission was over, it was going to be Darok’s turn under the microscope. See what sort of dirty secrets were just waiting to be dug up. The truth would come out, and Theron would see justice done for every single life lost today.

No matter the cost.

[neakco]

TNA - Ch. 3

Ch. 2

This is the last chapter I will be posting online unless there is any interest in it. I love constructive criticism. I probably should have mentioned this earlier but my computer is broken and everything was typed up on my phone.

Chapter 3

Briar and Azalea entered the Godfrey Enterprises Lobby fifteen minutes before their meeting with Theodore and looked around.

"This place sure has a lot of gold and marble." Briar muttered quietly in Russian.

"You would think this was some cash grab of a casino or hotel." Azalea responded in Urdu.

Approaching the reception Azalea continued to speak in Urdu. "We would like to rent a suite please."

Briar had to turn away so he wouldn't laugh and the poor receptionist's expression.

"I am sorry, but would you be able to repeat that in English?"

Azalea kept her face remarkably straight. "Apologies. We have a meeting with the COO."

The man sighed in relief that she spoke English, "May I please get your names?"

Azalea answered since Briar had barely managed to stop silently laughing. "Briar and Azalea Willowbirch."

The man typed their names into the system before his face paled and his hands began to shake. He slowly looked up at them with false cheerfulness, "I am terribly sorry but you are both banned from the building and I must ask you to leave."

"No worries. Do you mind if we stay just inside the doors as I call our ride?" Azalea smiled brightly but Briar caught the glint of steel in her eyes.

The receptionist visibly relaxed, "Please go ahead."

Briar switched into combining multiple languages once they were close enough to the door, "You would think we were the worst of murderers. So what is our plan?"

"I am going to call our ride." She answered as she pulled out her phone. She then switched over to English for the conversation. "No, I promise we are not running late. In the lobby actually. Apparently we are banned entrance."

Briar heard the sigh.

"We were graciously allowed to stay here while calling for a ride. Though we are now being glanced at suspiciously."

Briar heard a ding and looked towards the opening elevator doors. He grinned as he watched Theo step out and hang up his phone.

"Ms. Willowbirch, I am happy to see you made it. Please grant me a moment to resolve this issue before we head up to my office." He then walked up behind reception and looked over the screen.

Azalea just grinned as she put away her own phone.

"Some ride you called us." Briar smirked.

"I think an elevator ride is still technically a ride, no?" She laughed as the strolled towards the desk.

They were close enough now to hear Theo's quiet conversation with the receptionist.

"You are new so please don't worry about it. Just now you know to check next time."

"Yes sir. Sorry sir."

Theo joined them near the elevator and swiped his badge to call it.

Once the door closed Theo relaxed,

"Apparently you two are highly dangerous and top security is to be called at any sign of you being uncooperative."

"Your father?" Briar asked.

"Just be thankful for the board ruling that he isn't allowed to make any company decisions after an event." The elevator began to slow and Theo again stood straighter, "Follow me and try not to stop."

The twins shared a look but followed silently. They quickly understood as various strong perfumes assailed their senses. A fast look around showed them multiple women wearing heavy masks of makeup and all positioning themselves within Theo's sights. Some seemed enthusiastic in their attempts to garner attention while others seemed like they would rather be doing anything else.

They were almost at their apparent destination when a women physically blocked their path to the door.

"Coffee for your meeting." She fluttered her very long and clearly false lashes.

Azalea blinked slowly, while others wore masks of makeup this women's face appeared to be sculpted of it. She switched to a mix of French and Spanish, "Brother, did we enter a horror cinematic?"

Theo accepted the tray of drinks and ushered them through the door before closing it hastily. "Sadly not a horror, just my life." He then stopped Briar from grabbing one of the drinks. "That women likes to lace things with aphrodisiacs."

Rob laughed from his seat on a side couch near the desk. "Is that the one that tried to feed you bright blue Viagra cookies and claimed they were blueberry?"

Theo sighed wearily as he collapsed in his chair, "That is the one. She just needs one more instance of time fraud and I can finally fire her."

The twins shared a look of concern before taking seats in front of the desk.

"Why can't you just fire her for harassment?" Briar asked with a suppressed shudder.

Rob answered from the couch, "Father's policy, Theo can't fire anyone that father directly hired unless they have 3 non-HR infractions of the same type."

"That isn't fair!" Azalea looked furious and was slipping into an unrecognizable accent, "How did the board allow that?"

"Father has the same restrictions on anyone I hire." Theo passed over a folder, "But you are here to talk business, not hear my problems. I managed to locate your parents arrival to Lattuck after I received your message last night with the date and time your parents initially boarded their train."

Azalea and Briar carefully studied the images as Rob stood up and pointed one out.

"Cameras lost 'em there at Bismark St. Tried to get the cab transcripts but they only uselessly keep those for two months."

"This is more than enough, thank you both greatly." Briar stated as he pulled up a map on his phone and started to marking locations.

Azalea looked at the brothers with a little suspicion, "How did you get this all done in one night?"

Rob grinned, "I stayed up a little late but Theo here came to work at 3 am."

Briar stopped what he was doing and both twins glared slightly at the brothers.

"Trust me you two, it was work on this or spend more time at Godfrey Mansion. We both jumped on the excuse to leave."

"The more I learn about Mr. Godfrey the more I contemplate trace less poisons." Azalea muttered into Briar's shoulder.

"Wait until we locate our own parents before you cause other people's to disappear. I refuse to finish this without you."

Theo chose to ignore the comments, "I am sorry we couldn't find anything more."

Briar laughed, "Are you kidding? We are used to following tattered wisps of month old gossip. This is a great lead."

Rob sat back on the couch, "So why didn't you two just hire a detective? Surely you can afford it."

"There are more than a few reasons but two main ones." Azalea started.

"The first is that our grandfather taught us it is wrong to spend our money for purely selfish reasons. For everything we spend we match it with a doubled donation to charities when we can. It is surprising a lot cheaper to travel and accommodate ourselves compared to hiring a detective." Briar stated.

"And the second is that there were no detectives that took our 16 year old selves seriously enough. Those that did try to humour us were very untrustworthy." Azalea finished.

Rob nodded but before he could respond there was a knock on the door and Roisin entered.

"I know I came in early today Mr. Sapphirus, but I gathered the employee pay statements for you."

"Thank you Ms. Ballantyne. If you wish you can compare them to the time statements online and look for inconsistencies, or you can choose to help the admin staff with their tasks."

Her eyes widened in fright, "I shall work on the comparisons." She smiled briefly at Briar before leaving to return to her tasks.

Rob looked at the door confused, "Shouldn't she be in here working with you?"

"Yes but that requires a desk, and even though I have the space for it I was informed that I am not allowed to move the secretary's desk she is now using in here." Theo let out a growl of frustration, "She apparently has her own desk arriving later today and under no instance shall I bring that one in because it will soon be in use again."

"I may not be an expert, but why does the news of help make you look like you would welcome death?" Azalea asked as Briar began packing away the photos in a small bag.

"Because Father is just going to hire another useless secretary." He sighed.

Rob chose to elaborate for her, "Father got the stupid idea in his head that if he hires enough women that eventually one will seduce Theo here."

Briar looked up rapidly, "What? Why?"

"A few reasons; he wants Theo to work less and figures if he is distracted then he can probably slip some more selfish policies in. He also wants Theo to provide an heir to our family legacy. I don't like women so I am useless to him."

"But adoption is a thing. He adopted both of you." Azalea looked offended.

"True, but he can't have kids. Plus i am sure he adopted Theo because I was such a disappointment.  He would probably disown me if the media wouldn't have a field day."

Theo was face down on the desk and mumbled out, "I just wish father could understand that the restrictions he has placed on those women in their contracts causes me more work instead of less. I spend hours after everyone else has left just doing their jobs." Theo lifted his head to look at Rob, "and I don't care what Father says, you are the best older brother I could ask for."

Rob started to jokingly tear up, "Awww, you are adorable little bro, I love you too."

Azalea looked thoughtful and spoke without thinking, "Why do you not just hire your own secretary?"

She jumped as Theo suddenly leapt up and grabbed her hands, "Please say you want a job!"

Azalea looked towards her giggling twin then back towards Theo's hope-filled eyes. "I wasn't, but I have never been a secretary before. What would the job entail?"

Theo let go of her hands and sat back down to start typing, "You are the perfect fit. I saw first hand that you are skilled at data entry, You have told me before that you helped with your family’s own company when you could, you can be polite to the point that you could probably insult someone and they would thank you. Plus I feel I can trust you not to gossip about company secrets." He grinned as he handed her the contract he just printed off. "And the best part is that hiring you would annoy my father and he can't do anything about it."

Azalea looked up from the paperwork, "Administrative Assistant / Bodyguard?"

"Brilliant right?" Theo grinned, "You would be in charge of the entire Administrations Department, thus granting you access to the whole company’s files. Then by doubling as my bodyguard I get to take you to all my off-site meetings with high-end clients and contacts."

"You are granting me opportunities to find my parents while assisting you?" She looked a little stunned.

"Yes and if you look here," Theo came to her side of the desk to point some things out.

Rob took the opportunity to tap Briar on the shoulder, "While Petal is getting an offer I have one for you."

Briar looked at Rob curiously, "What kind?"

He pulled out a business card, "I own and run Umbra Security. I am need of an eye in the sky. Someone I can trust to run cameras and comms for me and my crew."

"I feel special, but you only met me last night. Why trust me?"

Rob pulled Briar over to the couch and sat him down. "I didn't last night, thought you were pulling a long game. So I did a bit of digging and found your family over in Germany. Your story checked out. The main reason though is that the job will give you access to all the public cams in town and some private ones when we got a special job. A handful of cash won't be enough to bribe you to look away and potentially lose that access."

Briar looked carefully at Rob's face, "Do you seriously not have anyone on cameras already? I refuse to put anyone out of a job just for a golden egg."

Rob took a moment to puzzle out Briar's meaning. "Just another reason you are trustworthy. Now normally I run 'em but sometimes I need to watch my crew around higher paying jobs. Last night could 'ave been avoided if I had an eye. Sometimes I get my man on cams but he is a twig and couldn't win a fight with a kitten." Rob's look grew more serious. "It is rare but sometimes thugs go after the cams. I know that I won't have to worry about anyone getting the drop on you."

"I will take the job on two conditions." Briar held up a finger, "I refuse to use a gun." He held up a second, "I am allowed to upgrade or change the room's security and equipment to suit me."

"What kind of changes?"

"Currently I am only thinking adding a pin pad and hand scanner combo that only looks like it will unlock the door." Briar grinned, "I will probably think of more things once I see the space."

"A red herring." Rob muttered before exclaiming, "I approve." He then held out his hand to shake, "All I ask is that you don't install anything deadly."

Briar shook, "You have a deal Mr. Umbra."

"Excellent, I can start you with Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Tonight can be the first shift if you want."

"Sounds good to me, where am I going?"

"It's a little hard to find, so tell me your address and I will swing by before 1900 to lead ya."

"Tranquil Estate." Briar laughed as Rob's eyes widened, "I know I know, my grandfather has the good taste not to name his properties after himself."

Rob laughed with him, "At least one business tycoon in the world does."

Briar looked over to see Azalea trying to fit a large bundle of papers into her bag.

Theo spotted his questioning look and explained, "Welcome package. It has everything she needs in order to annoy my father by following all the rules to a tee. It also includes her own badge so she doesn't need me to call the elevator."

Azalea stood up after succeeding in making everything fit. "If that is everything then I believe I shall go prepare for the battle to make your tower more bearable princess."

"Just don't stab any of the guards, they are prisoners too." Theo spoke through barely restrained laughter.

"No promises." Azalea waved, "See you tomorrow Theo."

Rob left first followed by Azalea and Briar. The latter leaned on his twin and whispered in Italian, " Grandfather would approve."

She chose not to respond verbally and instead shoved him off and went to wait for the elevator with Rob.

Briar chose that brief moment to greet Roisin and see if she would be free that Thursday.

Azalea waved him over when the doors opened and he rushed over with a large grin.

Azalea shook her head, "Come on Romeo, straighten your head back on, we have work to do."

And that is it. This honestly started as a maribat fanfic with Briar as Adrien and  Azalea as Marinette. Rob was Jason and Theodore was Tim. Since I made it into an original I changed a lot of personalities and background characters. All because I wanted to twist the fake dating idea completely. Somehow it turned into a commentary on stereotypes and how it is okay to just be how you are. This covers gender stereotypes and relationship stereotypes. My favourite chapters I have written so far are chapter 7 because I have never written anything like it before and chapters 11 to 14 because they are the serious ones that made me decide to turn this into an original. So again, if you want to see more let me know, if I don’t hear anything you will just have to wait the ten plus years it takes me to get this published.

[coryhqq]

AN AUDITION

LOCATION: Cory’s Bedroom

DATE & TIME: 12 February 2018. 5 pm.

TAGGING: N/A

cory had known that this moment was coming, pun completely intended. he'd known it when he felt his toes curl, when his abdominal muscles and tightened, and his back had arched off the mattress. he'd known when he felt his testicles retract and as his cock started to spurt cum onto his chest all he'd done was moan. sean hadn't stopped thrusting though, the other guy hadn't missed a beat even in the moments before cory had started to cum, when cory had been reduced to whimpers and squirming under the other guy. cory had been impressed. his back was only off the sheets for a moment, but even after cory felt his back make contact with them again he could feel how cold they'd become against the heat of his body. sean lasted for what felt an eternity after cory's own orgasm, and as sean buried himself one final time inside of him cory grinned.

                                                          ***

he had tried three times to start recording this, but each time he'd tried as soon as sean had pressed the record button cory's nerves had gotten the best of him and he'd been reduced to a pile of laughter. there wasn't anything comedic about what was happenening. aside from the fact that at twenty-eight he thought he was going to break into the porn industry. he was pretty sure that if he had brought that up to the men that had adopted him they would have used that supportive tone that still let a person know that they thought they were making the wrong decision. and hell, even if someone had told him a year ago that this was what he'd be spending a monday night doing with his life he probably would have laughed them off.

during his college years he'd often joked about doing something like this, about making a sex tape at least. it had never happened though, and maybe that was for the best. now though everything was real and that was settling heavier on his shoulder in a way that he hadn't fully expected.

cory took a deep breath and let it out slowly and cracked his neck before he motioned for sean that it was okay to start recording. this time he was able to keep a straight face. "hello, the name is cory berry... this is my audition tape."

he could still feel the butterflies moving in his stomach even as he motioned for sean to step into the frame. somehow though as he pulled down his friend's zipper and pulled out the cock that sean loved to talk about he was able to forget about the camera. he only glanced at it once, partially to remind himself of what was actually happening and partially to double check that they were both in frame. once he knew that they were good he grinned as he gave sean's cock a couple strokes. the sound of the moans was enough to ground him again.

cory hadn't been surprised that sean had chosen to go commando. if he had thought about it more he might have thought about how sensible it was. the last thing he wanted to do was lose himself in his thoughts. instead he did his best to think about anything other than the dslr camera that was trained on his face as he took the mushroomshaped head of sean's cock into his mouth. honestly he could see why sean never seemed to stop talking about his dick. it was thick, but no so thick that as cory's nose found itself buried in the man's neatly trimmed pubes he felt that his jaw was going to break. as cory started to bob his head he was already imagining how good it woul feel once it was inside of him.

he didn't know how much time had passed before sean and grabbed his hair and was pulling him away from his cock. it only took a look to see what sean wanted and cory grinned as he moved from the edge of the bed, scooting more toward the middle. at some point along the way cory felt sean pulling off his black briefs and suddenly cory knew that he was fully exposed for whoever would wind up seeing this video. he didn't think about that though, instead he insinctively reached for the bottle of lube and tossed it toward the othe rmale.

sean was almost as impatient to be insdie of him as cory was desperate to have him. of all of cory's friends sean had always been the one willing to do this. and perhaps that was for the best, even as to fingers quickly pressed into him. cory shifted on the bed, unsure how he was meant to make this part look sexy, cursing himself for not thinking to take care of the prep himslef before they'd started rolling. "just fuck me already," cory said, his voice thicker now than when it had just been him talking the camera, the need palpaable between him.

"fuck.." cory cursed. his hands were clutching the sheets under him, his eyes closed. the rality of sean's cock wasn't anything like how he'd imagined. sean gave him an moment to adjust before he started to slam into him. even with that it still took cory a few extra moments to really get used to what was happening.

eventually cory started to moan. he wasn't sure when the first one escaped his mouth, but once it started it was hard for him to stop. after the first few minutes he pressed his hand firmly against sean's stomach and the man had stopped, letting cory readjust so that he could settle in the boy's lap. "shoulda done this sooner," cory whispered as he slowly started torto ride his friend's cock.

everything after that was something of a blur. he remembered feeling sean's hands agains thim, pushing his back down onto the mattress. the longer the fucking went on the more forecul the thrusts had started to feel, and then his toes had started to curl.

                                                          ***

after getting fucked like that cory could have just alid there, but he knew that he had to stop the recording, no one wanted to see that at the end, and so after a few moments after sean had climaxed he chuckled as the guy rolled to the side and made way for cory to make his way back to the edge of the bed.

"guess you know what i can do now..." cory said with another chuckle. the butterflies in his stomach had been drown in sean's cum and for once he felt comfortable in front of the camera. "i never thought that i'd do this... never thought i'd be sitting in front of a camera while cum dried in my best hair, but my life is sorta in a rut and i dunno... maybe wanting to get out of a rut is bad reason to get into this kind of business, but i'm not stupid. i don't want to die having led a boring life and i think that i'd be a good fit with your site. if not, well hopefully you enjoyed this half as much as i did." cory grinned for a moment after he finished speaking. after that he stood and brought his hand up to cover the lens before he pressed the button to end the recording.

[alternative-eyes]

Award-winning investigative journalist George Knapp was a recent guest on Open Minds UFO Radio. His interview was so full of important unreleased information that we are providing a transcript of the interview here. Visit this page to listen to the interview.

Alejandro Rojas: I am here with George Knapp. Thank you so much for joining us.

George Knapp: Always good to talk to you, Alejandro Rojas and it was great to see you in our little secret soiree in Las Vegas last weekend; you’re a traveling guy.

Rojas: I am. I am all over the place, but when Jeremy let me know that you all were going to be screening the film, there was no way I was going to miss that, and especially to see you all who were there which was a lot of fun.

Knapp: Well, it was an interesting crowd. You’ll have to admit there was some interesting faces in the mix.

Rojas: Yeah, definitely. Some of the names we can’t share, but that makes it even more fun and intriguing for the audience, I think.

Knapp: That’s okay, you can say it. Oh, there is one you can’t say, but we’ll get at that, we’ll get at that.

Rojas: Yeah, yeah, we’ll talk about that. I guess to begin with is the fact that really this documentary was the format you wanted to share information about the ranch with in the first place.

Knapp: That’s true. I mean, I started shooting video at the ranch late ’90’s, of course, I’de learned about the ranch around the time the rest of the world did in 1996. There were a couple of newspaper articles that came out about the weird happenings of the property; mostly focused on UFO activity and of course the Uintah Basin already had a reputation well-earned of, has been a UFO hotspot for as long as people have lived there. So, when Bob Bigelow and his team went to the ranch, bought the place, set up shop, installed detection equipment and cameras and the team of scientists this on the property, I got to learn little bits and pieces about what was going on under the condition that I not talk about it until they gave the okay to go forward. In 1999, I finally got my first visit to the property, and then, started going back periodically with photographers. Matt Adams has been my most frequent collaborator on the property, and we were shooting video for what I hope would one day be a documentary project, maybe more than one. After a couple of years of making this business though, Bob Bigelow was concerned, he sort of changed his mind about the direction I was taking. He was concerned that if we came out with the film, the place might be overrun by UFO enthusiasts and other kinds of paranormal researchers. And in fact, it turned out he was right.

So, I put the documentary on hold, at least plans of any kind of distribution, but I continued to visit the property over the years, a couple of times a year, at least once a year, and would always bring a photographer and record what I could. And when we couldn’t go on the ranch itself which in particular during the vast of period which we’ll talk about, I would interview other people in the basin, talk to the witnesses, I got to know some of the Utes and some of the long-time residents, and continued to collect information. And I didn’t know if it would ever come out. I really didn’t if it would ever bear fruit because once Bob Bigelow gave me the okay, Colm and I to come up with a book, there was no turning back. I mean, we did our best, we used different names for the rancher family because NIDS had made that promise to him. We didn’t identify the location, we didn’t use any photos, but of course, people figured it out and started blocking to the property anyway; and it caused a lot of problems.

I think, Mr. Bigelow regretted ever allowing the book to go forward. In fact, I know he did. And again, I still made the promise to him that I wouldn’t go forward with the footage, and so, I didn’t. There were tiny, little bits of it that I used in public presentations a couple of times, but that was it; little tiny slivers. And then, when the property was sold in 2016, it occurred to me, maybe I don’t want to cause problems for the owner, but maybe there’s a chance that I could go forward with this and the new owner said yes, and Jeremy Corbell had been bugging me about it, I see you Skinwalker stuff. And so, that’s how it came together.

Rojas: When it came to the book, the book was a pretty big hit. I mean, it sold well, it got the word about Skinwalker out there. Were you all, including Bigelow, maybe not expecting the book to be as popular as it was?

Knapp: No. I thought it would be pretty popular because it carved a new niche in the field. There was no place quite like it and certainly has never been a study quite like that. I mean, it is the most intensively studied paranormal hotspot ever. You never had seen a scientist on the ground, boots on the ground doing that kind of research. Now, I know there are a lot of criticisms of the study and justifiably so, but there is no template for it; there is no sort of a guide book to follow for something like this because there just aren’t any places like it. Hessdalen is a long-standing study, but it’s mostly looking at lights in the sky, not the kinds of things that the NIDS team had to deal with.

So, I think that Mr. Bigelow probably regrets ever allowing it to go forward, but I knew it would be a hit. And a hit is a relative term because that book, although it’s sold well compared to other paranormal books, it never really pierced the veil into the larger public. And that’s we’re hoping to do with the film, is to attract a larger audience beyond the UFO paranormal field to even if it seems sort of rudimentary to bring people along step by step on how the story unfolded. We want to try to appeal to a much broader audience.

Rojas: I wonder, it sounds like you really sympathize with Bob Bigelow’s concerns with people coming to their ranch. However, you’re a journalist and I’m sure that you’re also, you have this compulsion to share information. So, how did you feel about it? You probably understood his concern that between the time of course you wanted to share information.

Knapp: Well, first and foremost, I made a promise to him. I know there are other journalists who operate differently, but look, this was a long-term study; there was no hurry, there was no reason to sprint. Of course, I wanted to tell the story and I would bug him and bug Colm about it periodically since I started learning what was going on there, and saying, “Look, we need to tell the world about this.” Eventually, Bob came to the conclusion himself and I think at the urging of Colm that after a period where this activity went underground, the Skinwalker, whatever you want to call it, this intelligence that’s there, it didn’t want to be hunted, and it made its intentions very clear in very dramatic ways. And it took his ball and wanted to go home, and when that happened, my arguments that maybe the world should know about it became more persuasive.

And Bob Bigelow figured, “Look, if I let you tell some of the story, maybe people will come forward with other hotspots that we could go study.” So, I wrote a series of newspaper articles in 2003 which means I kept my word for those seven years, didn’t say anything to anyone about Skinwalker. And I did a couple of newspaper articles and bam! they went all over the world. And after that, it became a little easier the cat was out of the bag. It became easier to convince Bob to let us do the book; again, without any photos and specific information about the location and without really identifying the Ranch family either.

And so, the book came out. And of course, he was right. I mean, as soon as the book came out, the place was overrun. I mean, not just the locals who would go out there in Friday night and take their girlfriend and have a little scare fest, or the UFO hunters who would really get obnoxious and go up to the property in the middle of the night, flash bulbs into the windows of the house, or the vandals who would rip off the fence post and steal things, or others who would go out there and have beer parties or whatever really caused some problems.

I remember being with Bob and having a conversation about that and I said, “Look, I’ll volunteer. I’ll go there, I’ll camp out, I’ll chase people away, I’ll be a security.” And he said, “No. We’ll do something else.” So, we flew on his jet, we took his chief of security and went out there on a particular weekend. And he had a bunch of equipment on me and I was in this camo gear and had like a million candle-powered spotlight and I was stationed at the front gate, and his security guy was positioned at the back gate, and we were chasing people off. And I wasn’t there 10 minutes at the front gate when the first truck full of people came up, and I thought they saw me sitting in the bushes in this lawn chair, but they have noticed me, so I jumped up and they were coasting down the road, they turned off their lights, and turned off the engine, just coasted right up to the gate. I jumped out with this million candle-powered spotlight and turned it on and man you could hear them shriek, they fire up this truck and peel it backwards down the road. And I figured by the time that story gets told online, it will be a nine foot tall bigfoot with a laser beam attacking me off the back.

Rojas: Right. It will be Gort, like the big alien.

Knapp: Yeah.

Rojas: That’s really funny.

Knapp: But after that, Bob could see he had a problem, so that was when he started to have round-the-clock security and he had teams from Bigelow Aerospace who would rotate in and out for 10-day shifts. And a lot of those guys, if not most of those guys had their own dramatic experiences, and some of them, as tough as they are, ex-cops, ex-commando, ex-military police, those kind of people, they wouldn’t go back.

Rojas: And one of the reason I’m curious about this is because I kind of put myself into his shoes. If I was in that situation, would I feel guilty. I wonder if you did at all? Now, personally, I feel like getting the information out is so important that it would justify it in my mind. Did you have a tinge of guilt?

Knapp: A little bit, but I’ll have to admit that something even worse is that I got a little quite curious thrill out of being able to know stuff that nobody else knew.

Rojas: Oh, yeah.

Knapp: And of course, you’ve had, I’m sure you’ve had this mental conversation with yourself Alejandro, what if somebody came to you and said, “We’ll let you in, but you can’t tell anybody.” That’s a tough decision to make. Now, I didn’t have that kind of agreement. My agreement was I couldn’t tell anybody until they gave the green light. These were people that I have known for a long time that I trusted and I wanted them to trust me, and I wanted to get around with other people who can trust people. I’m in an information business. I want people in that particular field and others who work on those topics and in sensitive positions to feel they can trust me; and it’s worked out pretty well. I mean, it worked out pretty well.

Rojas: Yeah. I mean, I am the same, and I think that is why I get in a lot of things, because I’m, of course, very careful about sharing information when they ask me not to, but I think you’ll find this interesting, is that the only time I’ve been in this situation was with MUFON with the Bigelow Project because they asked us to sign non-disclosures and at that time I was representing MUFON on PR, so I said no, I said it’s better, I feel for myself, if I don’t know because then if you don’t tell me what I’m not supposed to share, I won’t accidentally share it, if somebody’s asking questions, and little did I know, this was during the time that Bigelow was working with the government doing investigations.

Knapp: Yeah. I know how you feel. I mean, as journalists, we have to sort of figure out whether we’re crossing a line. I never felt I crossed the line because the promise I had made, I kept and I never revealed information. I knew someday I’d be able to record it and I wasn’t in a hurry because this was a long-term study, a long term project. And because they didn’t have any conclusions, there was no impending timeline, a critical point at which we needed to go forward with something. And Bigelow kept his word. When he finally gave me the green light, I was allowed to report it all. There was no restriction that I couldn’t report anything about NIDS. Now, there were–it becomes more complicated a little bit later, but I’m sure we’re going to get into that.

Rojas: Yes, we will. Before we get into that though, another fun story that you told us the other day was how you were used as bait; that you didn’t have your own experiences, but you were in the situation where you possibly could have, so I was wondering if you could share that story.

Knapp: That would have been 1991, I think. So, it was the first time I went to the ranch with a photographer to start shooting on the documentary. And so, I’ve been hearing about the property for over six years at that point, about the kinds of experiences that it happened both to the rancher family and to the NIDS personnel who’ve been on the ranch for a long time by that point, and there were some spooky stuff. The UFOs, wow, I’de love to see a UFO, orbs that they were talking  about, yup, would love to see those, I’m not really crazy about seeing a cattle mutilated in front of me. There was a story about a giant cloud, a dark cloud that sort of step over the mind of businesses, but we can get into that a little bit later; that was kind of spooky. The 8-ft tall, 9-ft tall creature that crawls out of the worm-hole looking tunnel; that was kind of spooky. And then, in the middle homestead, which is where most of the really weirdest and most disturbing stuff happen, there had been a visitors to the property when the rancher family, the Gormans I’ll call them, had still been there before NIDS was there.

And he was, said he was drawn to the property, big Grizzly Adams type dude, drawn to the property, didn’t know what it was, he wanted to meditate and the rancher let him out into the pasture. He and his son said, “Alright, fine. You can spend a couple of minutes, we’ll take out in the middle homestead.” And they went off to the side and kind of kept an eye on the guy chuckling to themselves. And he was there in the field for a couple of minutes, his head to the sky, his eyes closed, his arms lifted up, and his palms on the skies as well. And they hear that cowbell off in the distance and the rancher realizes, “Hey, you know what, I don’t have any cowbells on my cows.”

And then, they see this thing moving through the trees, it’s like a predator, like in the movie Predator; a camouflage opaque sort of a critter, large, moving through the trees, it comes out of the trees, it goes right at this Grizzly Adams dude, the rancher was just about to warn him that something was happening and this creature gets right up to the guy and roars, and it’s a roar like a lion roar, you can hear it a mile away. This guy just about crapped his pants, he jumps backwards, falls on the ground, this thing, whatever it was in camo mode goes back into the trees and disappears. And the rancher comes rushing over and the guy was petrified, the rancher had to pry himself off this guy. They let him off at the front gate and he left screaming, yelling, “This is Satan, it’s the devil, it’s evil.” And they kind of laughed about it because they didn’t know what that creature was. Well, that is the spot where they stopped me to be used as bait.

So, we’re out there the first night that I spent on the property and we tried to do all the things that had historically attracted the attention of whatever it is. The arrival of strangers would be one thing that would do it. We made ourselves, our presence known in multiple ways. We built a fire out in the middle homestead, and did interviews, and made a bunch of noise, made our presence obvious. And then, we dug in the ground. We got an earthmover and dug in the ground just to move things around because that had been the most effective way to get the attention of whatever is there, at least, during the time that NIDS was there.

So, we did all that stuff, and then, Colm says, “I got an idea. Let’s put you on a chair in the middle homestead and we’ll leave you there and see what happens.” So, they hooked up like a couple of microphone, and a Geiger counter, and a couple of other things, put me on this little white plastic chair in the middle homestead where the predator thing had come out where the black cloud had come out, and they left me there and went a couple of 100 yards away with the cameras and the telephoto lenses to watch to see if something came to get me. And I told that story in the film. I was trying to be brave and everything, but I couldn’t quite get it out of my head. There were some bad stuff that had happened out there and I don’t mind seeing UFOs and couple of other things, but I really didn’t want to run into predator and have it roar like that. But nothing came to get me other than mosquitoes.

A lot of people haven’t been so lucky, I think it is an interactive quality, we can get into this later if you want, but whatever it is that’s there, it kind of sizes you up. The people who’ve had the worst experiences are those who’ve had a cavalier attitude or defiant attitude or confrontational. The people who bring guns, for example, and are going to take this on, I’m not afraid of anything, like commando, a gung-ho kind of attitude; those are the ones who’ve had really, really had some bad experiences that extend beyond the ranch. So, yeah, I was bait, I didn’t like it, and I don’t really want to do it again.

Rojas: That’s interesting what you said just there, about how the attitude has–it may have an effect. What was your attitude, I guess, what was your mindset as you went through this? Do you think you’ve, maybe, had more of a respect for what happens at this place?

Knapp: Absolutely. I mean, Colm had prepared me. He had told me that he always makes mental preparations when he’s going to the ranch. He would always do it even though when he was going there all the time, is that he sort of girds his loins in a mental sense, but it is a respectful attitude; we’re hear to learn kind of a thing, you show us what you’ve got if you want to show it to us, but I’m not going to push the idea. Now, the result for me has been I’ve never seen anything. I mean, I never see anything dramatic anyway. I’ve seen some lights on one of the trips that Jeremy and Matt Adams, and I made in the middle homestead that we couldn’t really explain. They weren’t natural source that we know of and not electronic in any way, it’s not gear that was there. And there’s some other tiny, little things that have happened during my business, but nothing anywhere close to the kinds of things that we described in the book.

So, I don’t know why that is. It frustrated me greatly because I don’t know of anyone else, who’s gone as many times as I have who has not seen something for, who has not have experience, but I hope that I have conveyed to whatever it is that I am respectful and maybe it’ll show me, at some point, when I’m worthy. but I’m kind of glad that some of the things that have happened to other people have not happened to me. And yeah, the people who have gone in with a bad attitude are the ones who’ve had the worst experiences.

Rojas: Yeah. I do want to get into it, because like you said, we’re all interested in this field, and want to experience something or see that what we’re looking into is a real phenomena. So, like you said, some of this is kind of scary and I was wondering if you could share the story of the black cloud that affected the researcher.

Knapp: I don’t have the exact dates in front of me, I think it was ’97 when Colm Kelleher and another of the NIDS staffers, a PhD guy, a brilliant guy are walking, again the middle homestead. They had two dogs with them; they would use dogs as sort of biosensors. The dogs would often give them advance warning when something weird was going on, that they either smelled, or sensed, or can see in the dark. And they’re walking in the middle homestead and suddenly both of the dogs go behind the legs of the two researchers who are walking through the field. And they’re huddling, they were kind of shaking, they’re scared of something. And these two scientists look up in the trees and one of them notices what looks like a black cloud moving; at the tree’s not level. And it starts getting bigger and bigger, and it gets into the middle of the trees right in front of them. And suddenly, the one scientist, the second scientist is frozen. And out of him, comes a voice and it’s not his voice, and it’s speaking–I’m trying to remember the exact words because there were a couple of experiences similar to this that happened to other people, but it’s something to the effect of “We are watching you.”

Rojas: Wow.

Knapp: “We’re watching you and you’re not really welcome here.” And this guy is speaking this stuff, and within a couple of minutes, he sort of bounces out of it; he was in the trance. It had taken over his brain, and he bounces out of it, he was disoriented for a while. When they went back to the trailer to spend the night, he had terrible nightmares and dreams, and it stuck with him, I guess for a couple of days. But that really happened and if you can make guesses about who it happened to, I’m not going to say it either way, but I mean, that’s a guy who’s worked for major think tanks, and labs, and the U.S. Military, and he’s a brilliant guy and he didn’t make it up. That was one disturbing experience, but some of the other ones that happened later were worse. I mentioned about these commando types; it happened during the BAASS period. I don’t know if it is too soon to get into that or you want to wait?

Rojas: Yeah, we’ve got a couple of minutes before the break, so I think we have time to introduce that in that there were several stages of the investigation. So, if I’m wrong and you can correct me, but it began with Bigelow and his National Institute of Discovery Sciences, correct?

Knapp: Yes. Bob Bigelow funded that study, created NIDS, he paid for the scientists, he hired them, he hired vets and trackers, and physicist, and biologist, and a lot of other folks. And then, he had people like Dr. John Alexander who were part of the team, visited the property, and then, a science advisory board as well. They would fly up, they’d stay for days other times, fly back, and they had hired local people as well, former cops, they had connections with the Ute tribe; that was all funded by Bob Bigelow and that continued through about 2003 when I was allowed to write the first article. So, the activity had gone underground, there wasn’t enough for the team to do, there weren’t enough paranormal incidents, so basically, they gave up. I mean, the phenomena had made it clear that it was not going to cooperate; it destroyed some cameras, it was just not playing ball.

So, that’s when they stopped, basically, with the study. And then, after that, after the book came out in ’05, then, they had personnel on the property, security personal, but not scientists anymore. There just wasn’t enough to do and NIDS went away. So for a couple of years, it was basically fallow. And then, in 2007, a guy from the DIA reached out to Bob Bigelow and said, “I just read this book about The Skinwalker Ranch, I’m really interested in it, can I go?” And Bob Bigelow said, “Yeah. Fly to Las Vegas, I’ll take you out there.” They did. The guy sort of got the idea that what is associated with UFOs might actually be a much broader perspective of paranormal phenomena, that UFOs are not an end to themselves, that it represents the tip of the iceberg, and he wanted to take a look. And he wasn’t there for five minutes, then he had an experience.

Rojas: Wow.

Knapp: And it was meant to be tailored just for him. It was in an angle inside a building, inside the home there that this thing appeared to him. And he was trying to play it cool and not let everybody else know it was there–

Rojas: Well, let’s hold this for a second. We’ve got to go to break, so we’ll be right back. For those of you listening on KGRA with your commercial break, for the rest of you we’ll share a short musical interlude, and then, we’ll be right back into this incredible story from George Knapp.

Rojas: Welcome back. You’re listening to Open Minds UFO Radio, I’m your host Alejandro Rojas and we are here with George Knapp. And I mean, what you shared just now I was not aware of and this is really fascinating, is that this guys from the DIA in 2007 came to visit the ranch, and you were explaining he had his own kind of customized paranormal experience.

Knapp: Yeah. This guy had–he’s a very serious, rock solid, brilliant guy who had read the book and thought that there might be something there of interest to the DIA, and The Pentagon and national security, so he arranged, he called up Bigelow, said, “Can we go?” Bigelow had him fly up to Las Vegas, they flew to the ranch, and this guy had his experience within 5 minutes of getting on the property, in the main ranch house hearing some stories from the caretakers who live there. And this thing appeared inside the house, in broad daylight, and I’m not going to get into details about what it was, but it was pretty distinct and remarkable and it made a very big impression on this guy.

So, he leaves, he tells Bigelow about it later, and he goes back to Washington, and he looks up Harry Reid, who at the time was the senate majority leader. They had some interactions on national security issues already, told him about that experience, and said, “We need to study this. That place is unique.” And Reid went to some of his colleagues, the story that I’ve told on air a couple of times, some of his colleagues in the senate. He made the argument that UFOs deserve to be studied and there could be direct national security implications, that by ignoring them it didn’t go make them go away, it just made them more enigmatic and they agreed.

So, they set up a program that, initially, was AWSAP. It was separate from AATIP, the program that Lue Elizondo was involved with. He wasn’t involved with actually for another year, but AATIP was the study, the occasional encounters that military personnel had with UFOs; that was an informal organization that existed within The Pentagon, different departments and different divisions of the military. And they would exchange information, videos would come in, they do analysis, and create files, and try to figure the stuff out. AWSAP was created to be something else entirely. It was to look at a broader range of paranormal activity. The DIA guy, and Bob Bigelow, and Colm Kelleher, and everyone associated with NIDS knew that UFOs do in fact occur in connection with other strange stuff; that as much as ufologists don’t like to admit it, there is a Bigfoot connection, and there is a crop circle connection, and there is a connection to animal mutilations. It’s not clear what the connections were other than proximity in the same time in place of all those different phenomena. And here, you had a ranch where all of this stuff was going on, and in that ranch, whatever is there, had in essence, given that guy from the DIA an engraved invitation to come back and he did.

And so, the study was launched. Harry Reid secured the funding. They put out bids on the military websites where other contractors to submit bids. I only know of one other entity that tried to compete for the contract. Bigelow created BAASS, that’s Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Systems; and that was a separate organization within Bigelow Aerospace that got the contract and launched the study, and it’s an amazing study. A big part of the focus was the ranch; that’s not the only part of the focus, I mean, they cast a very wide net and teams collecting information from all over the world; from foreign government. They had teams that were zipping around, as you mentioned earlier in the program, they arranged to have an arrangement with MUFON, and I’m sure they’ve had arrangements with other UFO organizations and researchers as well.

Bob Bigelow, a week after he signed the contract for BAASS to deal with AWSAP, he came on coast to coast with me. And he drop some really big hands to anyone who was paying attention. He basically said it, he drew great, big, glowing breadcrumbs about what he was up to, he said, “I launched this new organization, it’s going to cast a very wide net, study UFOs and related phenomena, and I have an unnamed partner, I have a partner in this. I can’t tell you who it is, but they’re providing financial support” and everybody just kind of ignored that, but there it was.

Rojas: That’s really funny. And that’s what’s really weird about this is reflecting upon that time and you’ve had me on coast when we talked about this before, but now that you mentioned it, I remember that interview and I knew, because I didn’t sign the NDA, but I knew there was some sort of partnership that I was not going to be able to disclose, and that’s why I didn’t want to know. But I was like “I don’t want to know,” so that was my attitude at the time, but you’re right. Nobody caught on–and that’s an interesting thing about all this is that all of us are looking for the government program that’s looking into UFOs out there, and none of us knew. I mean, at least in the UFO community, even some of the people who work with Bigelow, nobody knew about this relationship.

Knapp: Well, I did. And again, it’s the same thing, the same deal, is that I’m allowed to know about it, I just can’t talk about it. And I supposed if AWSAP still existed, if somebody hadn’t sabotaged it and taken the money away, it would still be ongoing, I wish it were because they did some amazing things. And the world isn’t going to know about it for a while and I don’t know when or if that information will come out, but it did some really amazing things and it was definitely making progress. And it’s a terrible shame that it went away, but if they were continuing to do the work that they were doing during that time period, I wouldn’t be here talking about it, I would still be keeping my word. And I kept my word for almost 10 years until the story came out. And as I have mentioned before, when the New York Times, when I’m told late last year. the New York Times is on this, if they’re going to break the story, I will sort of miffed about it, so why don’t I get the break of the story? I’m the guy who’s kept this secret for nine or 10 years. I’m not a paid employee of Bigelow, I have no financial relationship with Bigelow, I know people snipe at that all the time, but that is not the case. I didn’t work for him and I didn’t sign an NDA. But my word was my bond, and so, I kept it and I wanted to do the story, I don’t want The New York Times to break it, I want to break it. And they had this sort of, kind of gently let me know in a non-offensive way that I am not The New York Times, well, of course I know that. I knew that The New York Times was a much better idea. There was some risk, they had told people, if anybody else leaks the story, it breaks somewhere else. We’re not going to go with it, we’ll bury it; and that would have been a bad thing because The New York Times covering it, the front page story changes the whole media environment. It meant that the Washington Post then covered it and Fox News has been doing ongoing coverage and many other news outlets who, otherwise, wouldn’t come near it. Suddenly, took it seriously and suddenly it’s not as crazy to be considering that UFOs deserve to be studied.

And so, I’m glad I made the decision, that I figured well, New York Times will have some of it, but they’re not going to have all of it because I’m not saying I know more about UFOs than any journalist, and I certainly do not believe that, but I knew more than any journalist about this particular program, and I knew that I’d be able to have plenty of stories that I break on my own, and I did.

Rojas: Right. You have been and I’m sure you will continue to. One of the stories that you broke was along the lines of what you had just explained, but I just wanted to kind of get back to for a second is you broke the story that Harry Reid had heard from this third party about all of these things and that what inspired him to fund and champion this AWSAP program. But there’s been a lot of assumption that Reid and Bigelow were friends and that Bigelow had relayed what he was up to. Did Bigelow tell him as far as you know anything about the ranch before Reid heard from this other person in the DIA?

Knapp: Yes. Yes, but it wasn’t lobbying. Bigelow was not lobbying Harry Reid for a program. And Harry Reid actually represented Robert Bigelow when they were both young men in a legal matter involving the death of Bob’s grandparents. But they lost contact, they didn’t stay in contact until NIDS was created. And I had remained in contact with Harry Reid, I always had a good relationship with him even though I did stories that whacked him around now and then because I’m a journalist and he was Nevada’s senior senator. So, I knew he had an interest in UFOs because in 1989, after I first met with Bob Lazar and starting digging into Area 51, Harry Reid was the first person I went to tell about it outside of our newsroom.

Rojas: Wow.

Knapp: I thought somebody’s got to know about this, I want to see if he’s aware of this because he had been a supporter of Nellis Air Force Base, I knew we had an interest in Area 51, not UFOs so much, but national security programs out there. And I told him about it, we were in a limo on the way to the airport as he was flying back to Washington. He says, “That’s really interesting.” He didn’t kick me out of the car, so after that, we maintained a dialogue, a sort of secret back channel dialogue about UFOs. I would send him things from time to time that I thought would interest him and he would send me stuff. The Congressional Research Service had prepared a report for Members of Congress on the UFO issue, I’d never seen it and it never been made public, it has since been made public, but he shared that with me. And then, I would fly back to Washington or he would come out to Las Vegas, and whenever I would see him, whatever the topic was, the official topic and the reason for it, we would go off to the side and have a separate conversation about UFO matters, and it drove his staff crazy because he wouldn’t tell them what we’re talking about and it alarmed them, and I wouldn’t tell them what we’re talking about, and they used to ask too. And then, in ’95, after Bigelow had set up NIDS, I told Harry Reid about it. I said, “This Science Advisory Board is pretty amazing. I had been allowed to sit in on a couple of meetings, I interacted with the staff, I even made a presentation to them one time about the Russian UFO files that I brought back. It’s an amazing group of people; PhDs all around, brilliant people, many of which whom did not want their names used. There were two astronauts, I mean, you can guess who one of them was, Edgar Mitchell, Hal Putthoff, and Kit Green, and John Alexander, the people like that who were willing to put their reputations and their careers on the line to investigate this stuff.

So, I told Reid about it. He said, “You think I could get in to sit in on some of those?” I said, “Sure, you could.” So, he did. I don’t know how many of those meetings he sat in on, but there were a couple. And then, it sort of went away. I mean, NIDS went on its way, Harry Reid’s back to Washington, and there was no real ongoing contact between them. Occasionally, Bob Bigelow would donate to Harry Reid’s reelection campaigns which now, people looking to nit pick and to somehow destroy the credibility of the story, I can tell you they’re full of baloney.

Bob Bigelow was a businessman operating in Las Vegas. Harry Reid was the senior senator and the most powerful Nevadan ever elected and sent to Washington. Yes, Bob Bigelow did donate money to Harry Reid’s campaigns; small, tiny amounts compared to the size of the modern election campaigns, but still is enough that somebody that wants to denigrate the whole relationship, they can point to it and say aha, it’s a quid pro quo. Well that’s baloney, it wasn’t. That was in 2007. So, there had been period of contacts and Bigelow and Reid both respected each other and both understood their mutual interest, but Reid had read the Skinwalker book, he was intrigued by it, I think he had some conversations with Bob about it. So, he was aware of the ranch, but until that DIA guy came to him, there had been no proposal from anyone for any kind of federally-funded, Pentagon-funded research program involving Bigelow Aerospace.

Rojas: Now, when it comes to AWSAP another thing that you’ve broke, a story you’ve broke, and I always tell people, “You know if you want the latest breaking breaking on all of this, you got to go KLAS and the I-Team.” But how and why it ended because I think that’s a really interesting story as well.

Knapp: Well, it is. And the full thing has not been told, and I’m not sure–I can tell part of it because I already have shared with you some of the details, but it’s a multilevel bit of intrigue, and how the Pentagon works and how contracts work. In essence though, opposition grew to the AWSAP program. It was interacting with Elizondo and AATIP, there was exchange of information back and forth, and those two programs were separate for awhile, but they were cooperative. And it alarmed some people in the Pentagon who, in particular, there’s a cabal in there.

Nick Redfern had written about them, I figured out what his name for him was, I don’t think that’s the real name, but they’re basically high-level people in different intelligence agencies who are fundamentalist Christians; who think that anything involving UFOs and the paranormal is satanic, that by studying it we invite Satan into this world, and they wanted it killed for those reasons. I know how that sounds, I’m not belittling anybody’s religious beliefs, but man, that kind of a decision-making, deciding to kill a program that’s doing good work because Satan might be involved, I don’t feel better about the Pentagon when I hear that, but it’s true. Now, there were other factors involved, there was political intrigue there at the Pentagon, somebody sees a pile of money that they consider vulnerable, they will go after it just for other reasons. And so, the money was pulled out from under it. I’ll say this, Bob Bigelow continued to fund it for a year on his own, out of his own pocket. He had, I think it was 50, it might have been as many as 90 employees at one time, but at least 50 of these were curious staff member, investigator types who were boots on the ground collecting files, investigating reports, really doing solid research. In addition to that, you had Hal Putthoff sort of overseeing the creation writing of scientific papers, and several of those have now gone public, I made the list public early this year at the full list and their authors, and it was some solid work; it was well-received in aerospace circles, in industry circles, and at the Pentagon. People with all those papers thought wow this is great it’s looking down the road 50 years to what science and engineering and aerospace could be, and space travel. Exciting stuff, but it got yanked. Bigelow continued to fund it for a year, fought his damndest to keep it alive, but in the end it got sunk, and it’s a shame, it’s a shame. And then, whatever was left of AWSAP, sort of merged back into AATIP.

So, when The New York Times breaks the story in December, they are true. There was a program called AATIP. It did study UFOs, but the $22 million didn’t go to AATIP, it went to AWSAP, it went to Bigelow Aerospace.

Rojas: And some other intrigue which I think I find interesting, there’s so much–because it is complicated about this story that people don’t seem to get, but I have confirmed this with Lrslie Kean and she did, I mean, it was okay to say, but The New York Times had other sources than Elizondo, or To The Stars, or some of the other BAASS people. And I don’t think people–I think everybody assumes that it was Bigelow and his group that gave her that information for the New York Times story, but there’s more political intrigue in that there’s other sources we’re not aware of.

Knapp: That’s true. I mean, the primary instigator of that whole thing, the New York Times story is Tom DeLonge. I know that drives some people crazy, but the fact is he deserves credit for what he did. He put together this group of people and they developed the plan and he sold it, and one way to get it off the ground–I mean, by creating the organization To The Stars, he gave Lue Elizondo a place to go. If Lue Elizondo didn’t have a place to go, he might have stayed in the Pentagon and wallow there, we would never have seen this stuff. Now, Lue did start the process forward on a number of videos being released and he went by the book. There’s a paper trail and I’ve seen it, at least, for the first three.

I remember the first time I met Luis, two days after he stepped on stage with Tom in Seattle, and then, after that, he came to Las Vegas. And I had dinner with him and Tom and Mr. B and he had those videos.

Are there more? Oh, yeah, there’s more; it’s in the process. So, I think after he left, whoever was left over, it was ticked off and he had made this stuff public, and he had a lot of people who were really mad at him, who were surprised when he made that announcement, I think they may have turned off the spigot. So, I don’t know if we’ll ever see more videos, but he, at least, started the process. But the fact is TTSA, DeLonge and his crew are the ones who got the attention, then New York Times showed them enough information to verify what they had heard from other sources. And I think they probably would have shared those videos except the New York Times got them on their own, they got them from somewhere else.

Rojas: Right.

Knapp: And that is why to the consternation, I think, of Tom and his crew, New York Times breaks the story and they don’t even give Tom DeLonge or TTSA a mention, they don’t give them any credit at all. But at the time they were launching their organization, they wanted to raise money, they wanted a higher profile and they kind of got burned by it. I think it created some bad feelings. Leslie Kean did amazing work. I mean, she was the rock on that story in shepherding it because she’s not a staff member at New York Times, but she knew more about UFOs than anyone who was there. And I think if she had had her way, they would have written more stories, but after they made the big splash, they didn’t, they stopped.

Rojas: Yeah, yeah. And I still agree with Tom DeLonge getting, needing to be recognized and I have certainly spun that angle with everything that I’ve done, including my talk out here. But we’re running of time, so I guess I have to pull back and to get intrigue into this documentary which is–I mean, I feel that this documentary is very important and I’m sure you do too because finally the information is getting out in a format which you had hoped it would out at the beginning, and it seems to be doing well.

Knapp: Yeah, it was doing really well. I didn’t check today, but I know when the first day that it went public, it was, for a time, the number one documentary on iTunes, number one in the world. And I think the last word I heard Jeremy Corbell, the director, it was on iTunes number 18, not the documentaries, all films on iTunes.

Rojas: Wow.

Knapp: The top 200 films in the world, it was number 18 which is a pretty amazing thing, and it’s just getting started, it’s only been out for two days. So, it’s a bigger audience than the UFO people and the paranormal people who have been waiting to see it for a long time, so they are the ones who jumped on it, but there’s a whole big audience out there that is wondering what the heck is this Skinwalker thing that’s popped up on this list. And I think there’s a chance we could finally reach the broader audience that needs to be aware of this.

It may be too rudimentary and too basic for some UFO poobahs, but the fact is, this is not meant for them, it’s meant for a much bigger audience that wanted to engage and to realize these issues involve all of us. I’m not talking about some alien invasion or something, but the nature of reality and understanding our place in the universe and our spot in the food chain, we need to think about this stuff. And I think we made a breakthrough.

I am frustrated because after 18 years or so of trips out there, there’s a lot of stuff to report, and we had to leave so much out. The original material as well as new things that we’ve shot that Jeremy and Matt and I have collected and witnesses we’ve interviewed fairly recent phenomena including the new owner and his team; there’s a lot to tell. So, I’m hoping that it is successful enough that we can tell it more and I’d like to include the stories of some of the individual researchers who have been drawn to that place on their own and have had their own adventures. And I know we’re taking a lot of shots from ufologists who, for one reason or another, are ticked off to be on the outside looking in, but too bad that’s the way it goes.

Rojas: Right. I feel that way too. You can be excited about information coming out, or you can be upset because you’re not involved, which, I don’t know. It is frustrating to hear these people have these issues. My last question will be, to that larger population that seems to be out there – larger than I think many of us suspect. What I mean is the religious faction, the people who have concerns that we’re dealing with demons, what would you say to people who say “Maybe they should have shut that down. I kind of agree with those people.” How would you argue your point with them?

Knapp: Here are the facts. People can dispute lights in the sky or mistaken identification of different phenomena. We know that 95% of UFO cases, for example, are probably explainable. But the fact is our government has now confirmed there is no question about it. These are real. They are for somewhere else. They are not ours. And if we don’t figure it out, somebody else can figure it out. So even if you are not interested in the cosmic questions of who are they and how do they relate to us, what’s their interest, why are they here, how do we fit into this. Even if you don’t relate to that, and I can’t imagine any human being who would not, there is national security issues to consider. There is sometimes direct personal safety issues to consider. These things are physical. They have demonstrated a physical reality. They take different forms, different shapes at different times,  It is real and we need to figure it out. If the Russians or the Chinese figure it out, they will exploit it. And I think that maybe they have made progress. Harry Reid thinks they’ve made progress, and Lue Elizondo believes that there are programs. I believe and have been told that during the BAASS study there were foreign governments in the Uintah Basin that were sniffing around and wanted to know what was going on out there. Now that’s seriously. When somebody uses mumbo jumbo and spooky stories and religious beliefs to put the kibosh on a scientific study or a legitimate inquiry, that is troublesome. You know what, maybe it is Satan. Maybe it’s demons. I don’t know what it is. Inter-dimensional travel, dimensional people, time travelers, all of the above, or crypto-terrestrials, or ultra-terrestrials, I don’t know. But we need to figure it out. If not for national security or personal safety, just for the sheer joy of discovery. It is very bad national security policy to say we don’t want to know about something. That makes no sense at all.

 George Knapp Hunt for the Skinwalker Interview Transcript http://www.openminds.tv/george-knapp-hunt-for-the-skinwalker-interview-transcript/42039

[gretagerwigarchive]

‘Lady Bird’ DP Sam Levy on Working with Greta Gerwig, Harris Savides, and More

  by Adam Chitwood,November 3, 2017              

source: http://collider.com/sam-levy-interview-lady-bird/#greta-gerwig

I know that you worked with Greta on a couple of Noah Baumbach’s films but I was curious, how did you first come to be involved in this?

SAM LEVY: Greta and I did three movies together. Frances Ha and Mistress America with Noah Baumbach and Maggie’s Plan with Rebecca Miller. We’ve worked together a lot and knew each other for many years before she offered me Lady Bird. She actually first mentioned it to me at a premiere party for Mistress America and she was extremely humble in the way that she brought it up. She said, “I wrote this thing that I’d like to direct and I’d love to show it to you but if you don’t want to look at it, it’s totally fine. If you do look at it and you don’t want to shoot it, that’s totally fine.” I was like, “Oh, just can I please read it?” I knew she was working on something. It’s like, “First of all thank you for thinking of me because I know it’s going to be amazing and yeah, I’d love to read it.” I read it. It’s such an amazing screenplay and that was it. It was probably a couple days after that we met at the Noho Star restaurant in the East Village and just started talking about it.

That was another one of my questions was what were your early conversations like in terms of the visual approach to this film? What were some of those early ideas?

LEVY: One of the first things Greta said to me was that she wanted the movie to look like a memory, which immediately got my attention and made me excited. When she said that I knew exactly what she meant, but despite knowing what she meant, the thing was, how do we do that? How do we create something that looks like memory? Something that’s dynamic that isn’t just using commonplace methodology that everyone uses nowadays in motion pictures like making things sepia or just crude black and white or diffusion. It’s not about that. It’s more of an organic and internal sensibility. We talked about it some more. I said, “I know what you mean but let’s keep talking about it.” She said, “Yeah, at a visceral level it should feel like the movie is over there.” She extended her arm and held up her palm as if to say, you’re connected to the movie but my palm, which is the screen, is slightly removed from the viewer, but not overly so. We talked about it some more and then together, both of us equally came up with … I think she said, “It almost should be plain. It should almost look plain,” and I said, “But luscious.” She said, “Yeah, plain and luscious.” We started saying that a lot. Plain and luscious. Plain and luscious. It should be beautiful but not distractingly graphic, so that you can engage but have a nice aesthetic bed to fall into and luxuriate in but not distract from the story or the performances or the words.

Did you guys shoot this on film or digital?

LEVY: We shot it with an Alexa. Digital.

That’s surprising, honestly. Because it has that feel that you’re talking about where it’s somewhat—I feel like sometimes with digital it’s too lifelike, too realistic, and you don’t have that sheen of watching a movie.

LEVY: I think Greta’s first thought was it shouldn’t be too real. It should be a little removed. It should feel like a memory. The way that a memory looks when you envision it. From there after we had these great allegorical conversations where we started to get at the technique of memory and cinematography. A photographer that we were looking at a lot was Lise Sarfati, who’s this brilliant French photographer. She’s done a lot of amazing work. She’s done these amazing portraits of young women about the age of Saoirse’s character and they’re very sensitive and soulful. We were just looking at different photos from the era. A lot of high school yearbooks. It’s a high school movie. High school yearbooks from the early 2000s and we started to notice, especially in high school yearbooks, photos have this quality of—they look crappy and distressed. It’s like a color Xerox or it’s taken with a point-and-shoot 35mm camera. By the time they make it into the yearbook, it’s like several generations have been removed from the initial image.

We happened on this technique in the production office. I took a photography book we were looking at and I made some color copies of some different photos because I wanted to tack them up on the wall so Greta and I could look at them and be inspired. Just have things to look at while we were shot-listing and digesting all the location photos we were taking. I started to notice when making these photocopies, it distressed the image much like the yearbook photos, and sometimes you could take the photocopy and re-copy it and it’d lose another generation and you could lose another generation still and distress it to the point that it really looked like these yearbook photos but it was a technique we could utilize in our own way, in this professional context but still bearing in mind the youth who create their yearbooks.

That really cinched that it was this aesthetic of memory that we’d been talking about and then it got us talking about a lot of different things. The early 2000s was a time when high school kids, college kids, would go to Kinko’s and make copies of different things. Term papers or photos to decorate their rooms or their apartments or their dorms. It just seemed to evoke the era in all these different ways. Then we used these distressed images as a reference for how to photograph the movie using the Alexa. Meaning that the color photocopier has its own sensor that scans the image just like the Alexa has a sensor that captures the images in front of the lens. How can we emulate these multiple photocopied images using the Alexa? The quest then came to be, playing digitally which is totally appropriate but how can we create something within this aesthetic of memory that is unique and of its own and not just taking scans of film grain and overlaying them, calling it a day? Which is very commonplace now.

I think it works. I’m 30 so I came of age around the same time and something that really struck me about the film is that it feels of that time but it’s not dripping with nostalgia. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but it feels like you pulled off a magic trick where it felt like I was transported there without feeling like the frame was loaded with “remember this” references or like you said, covered in sepia tone or something like that. I think that the memory aspect that you guys did, I think you really pulled it off.

LEVY: Oh, thanks. I’m glad you responded that way.

Were there any other discussions about that specific technique of transporting the viewer to that world without dripping in nostalgia?

LEVY: There was a lot of discussion about it. Much of it was grounded in the shot-listing process. Greta and I had the benefit of a lot of lead time and we also both live in New York and we liked hanging out with each other so we would get together on weekends or whenever we were both off and we could find a few hours here and there, and we just started going through the movie. I would sit at my computer and I would read the script to her so she could hear her dialogue and then we would just mark down, “This one, we can try and do this all on a wide. We’ll move around, we’ll follow Lady Bird. This scene, she’s in the car with her mom, we’ll probably want some additional close-ups.” We’d try to anticipate editorially where she would want to cut in and out and especially the transitions from scene to scene. We shot-listed the movie twice. We managed to get a pass done before the official prep for the movie started and when the official prep started we went through it again and this time I added all kinds of photos and stuff to each scene. I’d always diagram the blocking. I had a piece of graph paper and I would diagram, “Lady Bird’s going to be here by the door and then she’s going to move to the kitchen, then she’s going to move back to the door and Laurie Metcalf is going to stand still. Tracy’s going to be following,” and so on. Where appropriate I put maybe a reference photo of Lise Sarfati or the Sacramento painter Wayne Thiebaud.

Then during prep what I started doing a lot of was I had location photos, especially once we’d locked locations. I’d put them in. When it was all said and done the shot list was 110 pages, which is about the length of the script. Greta and I pretty much had that thing memorized by the first morning of our first shoot day. We had a brilliant First AD Jonas Spaccarotelli. The three of us really had that thing down and we distributed it to everybody, to everyone on my team, everyone on the AD team, production design, costumes, sound, everybody. Everybody had a sense of “Here’s what we’re going to try and do.” Of course we’d shift and change some things, as happens, but never drastically. Greta and I would know right away if we’d look at a blocking, maybe one of the actors had an idea or we’d just glance at each other and we’d know we need to do less. Usually it was we need to do less than what we’d anticipated.

To answer your question, the planning of the character blocking, the camera blocking, really informed creating the aesthetic of memory. Even though you don’t sit there and be like, “When she’s walking through the parking lot how can we make that like a memory?” Not really about that. It’s just designing everything to be as dynamic and lively as possible with the best possible transitions. Then with that we used the technique of distressing the image just up to the point where—when we were doing tests and especially when we were timing the movie, we’d push things in lighting the movie, photographing the movie, push things up to a point where it was like, “That’s too much. Now it’s too luscious. It needs to be more plain.” We’d always know the moment something was too luscious or would override the story or what people were saying. Really it’s that the design of the image needed to fit alongside the tempo of the work. The musicality of the dialogue and the music itself, the score by John Bryant. The editing by Nick Houy and then Chris Jones’s design, April’s costumes.

What really struck me about the film was that there’s this confidence and this assuredness behind the camera without the pretension or pomposity, which was refreshing given that Greta isn’t some veteran director. It feels like she’s been doing this for years and the way she handles the characters is just brilliant. What was your working relationship like on the set with her as a director?

LEVY: It was amazing. As good as it gets. It was absolutely what you dream about. As I mentioned we had this exhaustive amount of prep. Everybody really put in a lot of work making a blueprint and designing things to be just how we wanted them and then when we got to the shoot, of course everyone has butterflies before the first couple of days. You just really have to stay on the ball, stay focused, make sure everything’s fitting together with the schedule. There’s a lot of pressure. We want to create something transcendent and in order to do so we have to be very responsible to the schedule, to our budget, to our producing team who are amazing, very supportive, and positive. Greta was just so in her element on set. Working with the actors, working with us. Being a great collaborator, giving us room. She played music. She had all these great playlists that she’d made. A lot of songs from the era, from the early 2000s, all kinds of different songs. She knew exactly when to play music. When we were setting something up and the actors were maybe off preparing their lines or something. It just really created a great atmosphere. Then just about at the time we were wrapping up she’d slowly fade it out and then we’d get to work and start shooting.

That was indicative of the attitude towards the whole. She was just highly focused, highly efficient but not prone to pulling all-nighters and working recklessly hard. She’s just very engaged. It’s inspiring. She was constantly inspiring all of us. Then she has wonderful taste. She loves great films, great music, she’s a voracious reader. In that way she’s inspiring to all of us also. All of us, we’d do anything for her. She just got us to a point where you want to move heaven and earth for that kind of person.

That’s so great to hear and I definitely see much more from her to come as a filmmaker, because again as I said it feels like she’s been doing this for years.

LEVY: It does. The fact is, she has. She hasn’t actually directed a movie on her own but she’s worked with amazing people, actors. Written, co-directed. She’s done so many things on great movies with great cinema personalities. She certainly absorbed a lot of that but the fact is she’s her own cinematic being. I knew that the moment she said, “I’ve got this thing, would you read it?” It’s like, “This is going to be amazing.”