The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 9 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Abrams: Extreme project constraints usually end in failure, not success
“I feel like those kind of constraints can be incredibly exciting, and they can also be awful. And I've been in both situations, and I keep promising myself I'll never do that again. It doesn't usually end happily, that story.”
Abrams: The 'magic box' is a metaphor, not a working process
“I don't ever think about the magic box when I'm working on a project, and it's become this thing where people are always like, so, you know, using the magic box. I'm like, I don't use the magic box. It's a metaphor.”
Abrams: Rigid creative processes fail and not knowing can be an advantage
“It's funny, I think as soon as you feel that you have a process, somehow that process betrays you. I think that my true answer is, I think not knowing can be your friend.”
Abrams designed The Boring Company logo and produced its first hat
“I went back to the bad robot office, and I thought I had an idea for a really boring logo for the boring company, so I made up the logo, and I gave it to our workshop, and I said, is there any way we could make this hat today? Beth in the workshop took the log…”
Abrams: Bad Robot uses cross-division reviews to catch creative mistakes internally
“One of the things we're doing lately is saying, can we use the different divisions within Bad Robot to be additive and comment on what the others are doing, so that if something is happening in theater, what do the TV people think about that, and what do they …”
Kathleen Kennedy hired 15-year-old J.J. Abrams to restore Steven Spielberg's films
“She had this idea to give those two movies, instead of giving them to, say, the Smithsonian, she had the idea of calling two utter strangers that were 15 years old. We weren't 30 years old between us, and she gave us these movies that needed to be repaired. Wo…”
Bad Robot's famous logo was an After Effects placeholder made by Abrams
“So I had them both say, bad robot, together, into my laptop. I put that on the little animation in After Effects that I did, and I turned it in, I thought, I'll change it later. And I just never changed it, and it just became the company.”
Abrams: Musk sold roughly 250,000 Boring Company hats in a week
“I think he sold, like, a quarter of a million of them in a week or something insane.”
ABC greenlit the 'Lost' outline, demanding a finished pilot in 12 weeks
“I got a call that Saturday from Lloyd Braun, who had pitched this thing to me, he was the head of ABC at the time, who said, it's greenlit, we're doing it. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about? And he said, we need the completed pilot done in 12…”