According to the news, some terrorists going on trial for planning to attack the New York subway system were planning on detonating a car bomb, but they lost the page from the book telling them how to do it. Hey: That sounds like a great idea for a counter-terrorist strategy! Simply set up some fake terrorist websites with bomb-making instructions in a .pdf format, and have it be 500-pages of drivel with one page of bomb-making diagrams! Oh, but then, intentionally leave that one page out, so they’ll spend all their time reading boring fake crap, and all their money on printer cartridges and paper, and they’d still get nothing out of it! It’s prefect! (Maybe that’s what they did!)
Apparently, the legendary Hollywood producer responsible for Gone with the Wind and Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film) used to write up pages upon pages of highly-detailed, maddeningly meddling notes for his directors to follow (called “memos”: There is a book about them called: Memo from David O. Selznick.), and he would mail them out daily, drowning his production people in details and specifics to contemplate and change, etc., and it drove everyone crazy. (But that’s why his movies are generally so good, I think: that attention to detail.) So anyway, supposedly John Huston hated this, so he would intentionally mess with Selznick by writing back a really long letter to him with no answers to the questions or responses to what was being done about stuff, etc., but with one page missing: i.e.: 1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10,11… (Huston was mostly way out somewhere on location by then, so it wasn’t possible to really change things from home plate unless Selznick went all the way out there in person, and he was busy with other stuff, and Huston knew it.) So whenever Selznick would send a telegram asking about some specifics of what Huston was doing to obey the memo requests/demands, Huston would tell him to please refer to the missing page, and that it was all described there. So supposedly, Selznick would sweat over looking for this missing page, yell at his secretary and the studio delivery boy and the post office and telegram service, etc., and that would keep him occupied until everyone returned to Hollywood and the movie was all finished being shot, so by then it was too late to change anything. And this is the same idea as what I have described above for a prospective anti-terrorist tactic: simply leave out the necessary stuff, and keep them spinning their wheels forever for nothing. It just might work!
(BTW: This story is not in Memo from David O. Selznick, that I remember, but rather, is from John Huston’s autobiography: An Open Book. {I think that’s right, anyway…})
Here’s the shocking story:
