#NATIONAL TREASURE 2 BOOK OF SECRETS MOVIE#
#NATIONAL TREASURE 2 BOOK OF SECRETS FULL#

With the wrap cover, it would be flexible enough to stuff with documents. I pictured a design that was simple, that might look like George Washington had it made as a regular notebook. I pitched the idea of a small, leather portfolio-style cover that tied shut with a cord. I joked that we’d have to rename it the “Shoe Box of Secrets.” Luckily, things zigged again and the new hiding spot for the book was on the shelves of the library, and the space was so small that the huge locked book plan was nixed. I told Ritchie that my one worry was that when we stuffed them all into the pages of the book it would be impossible to close and lock it. I joked that we’d have to rename it the “Shoe Box of Secrets.”Īt this point I had hundreds of pages of extra insert documents and was fielding requests for more.

#NATIONAL TREASURE 2 BOOK OF SECRETS MOVIE#

In the great Hollywood tradition of Big Scary Movie Books, the new design had gotten a little over the top. They were based on my sketch but done by a concept artist on the crew. I was then presented with sketches of how the statue and the book would look. At first, they planned to hide it in the base of a statue. After a couple more zigzags, they decided that the book would be hidden in the Library of Congress. It would have been too complicated to figure out how Nicolas Cage could separate the case from the agent (lockpick? machete? lots of Crisco?). Early on, it was planned that the large, locked book would be in an attaché case handcuffed to a Secret Service agent’s wrist. Meanwhile, the shooting started while the script was still evolving. I added lots of intriguing real stuff that I had unearthed in my research, including exhibits from the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination, aerial photos of Area 51, the flight plan of the first moon landing, and real newspaper clippings of UFO sightings in Roswell, Kennedy’s assassination, Al Capone’s trip to Alcatraz, and the sinking of the Titanic.

I started making dozens of fake letters, reports, photos of alien autopsies, moon landing photos, etc. I dug into the research on conspiracy theories about Area 51, the Kennedy assassination, D-Day, government ESP research, and lots of other fun stuff.

I was told to just come up with secret documents, without any direction on what those secrets should be. He also wanted additional loose inserts scattered throughout the book: loads of photos, newspaper clippings, letters, notes, and diagrams. But the director wanted the pages to have just writing, no images. I thought it would be cool to have lots of color on the pages, featuring hand-drawn maps, cryptic diagrams, and ciphers. I put together a show-and-tell presentation for the director with a couple of large leather-bound covers with a gold-stamped seal, sample papers and pages, documents, etc. I felt like the heft, the seal, and the lock were enough to sell it. I also wanted to cut back on the hardware and make something simpler, but with an impressive lock.

They liked the general idea but decided that it needed the Great Seal to telegraph “president” (the Presidential Seal, which is based on the Great Seal, came along later, around 1850). I was going for something big and impressive looking: huge, thick, leather bound, with lots of gnarly hardware. I sketched a few rough thumbnails, just so we had something to get the conversation going. At that early point we had no script, so we knew nothing else about the book, what would be in it, or how it would be shot. Ritchie outlined the basic idea: when every president of the United States is sworn in, each is given an incredibly confidential notebook which contains all of the secrets too troubling to keep bottled up inside, those that are too unspeakably terrible, shocking, or astonishing to be revealed to anyone, EVER.

Knowing from those experiences how much work the titular Book of Secrets might be, we wanted to get started as early as possible. I had previously made some big book props for Ritchie for King of California (2007) and The Legend of Zorro (2005).

#NATIONAL TREASURE 2 BOOK OF SECRETS FULL#

At that point, there wasn’t a full script yet, just an outline, and a lot of the movie ended up getting written on the fly, as they were shooting. The producers had just sold the movie to Disney Studios and production was going to start up in early 2007. In November 2006, I got a call from prop master Ritchie Kremer about an upcoming movie project: the sequel to National Treasure (2004). The Book of Secrets, for the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007), might be the most involved prop that I’ve worked on.

National treasure 2 book of secrets