Nights at the Museum: When the Met Doubled as a Movie Studio
大都會博物館 晚上變身片場
每晚一關門「瞞天過海：八面玲瓏」劇組立即進駐拍片 清早快閃
By James Barron

For a couple of weeks last year, Rebecca Schear and Sandra Bullock worked nights together. They never met, but they played different parts in the making of the just-released movie “Ocean’s 8” – Bullock’s as the mastermind of a caper that required elaborate planning, Schear’s as a different kind of mastermind.
去年，麗貝卡．席爾和珊卓．布拉克通宵共事了幾個星期。她們不曾打照面，卻在剛剛上映的電影「瞞天過海：八面玲瓏」的製作過程中扮演了不同的角色：布拉克是一場需要精心設計的欺詐行動的策劃人，席爾則是另一種不同的策劃人。

For those couple of weeks, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a museum by day, as usual, and a movie studio by night. When the galleries closed, the film crew arrived, hauled in the gear, set it up, filmed a few scenes and finally, around dawn, knocked it all down and left by the museum’s 10 a.m. opening – only to go through the same routine the next night. Schear, the Met’s senior production manager, was responsible for keeping the movie machinery safely away from the art. Much as her bosses wanted the Met to be in the movie, they did not want to hear about statues that were knocked over or canvases that had holes poked in them by errant equipment.
那幾個星期，紐約大都會藝術博物館白天照常是博物館，晚上則變成電影攝影棚。畫廊一關門，劇組就進駐，把拍片設備運進來，設置妥當，拍攝幾個場景，最後天亮時將設備全部拆卸，在博物館早上10點開門前離去，到了晚上同樣的程序又走一遍。大都會博物館的資深產製經理席爾負責不讓拍片機械碰到藝術品。她的上司雖然很樂見大都會博物館在電影中亮相，卻不想聽到有雕像被撞倒，或油畫被設備不慎戳出洞來。

So, as a parade of movie people filed in – camera loaders and electricians and lighting technicians – Schear, 33, became a sharp-eyed minder, worrying, she recalled, about potential problems like “the swing radius of a Technocrane.”
因此，當膠片安裝員、電工、燈光師等劇組人員魚貫而入時，33歲的席爾就變為目光銳利的守護者，她回憶說，她擔心著可能發生的問題，如「伸縮大搖臂的轉動半徑」。

“A Technocrane is a like a fancy jib,” she explained. “You fly a camera on it for these beautiful sweeping shots. We want to make sure it swung in ways we were comfortable with. It never really got close to the ceiling and not to any of the artwork. We were like, ‘Here is the exact spot where you can put this piece of the equipment and here’s where it can swing’ – and we were standing there to make sure.”
席爾解釋說：「伸縮大搖臂就像奇特的起重機懸臂，你可以把攝影機裝上去，讓攝影機飛起來，拍下漂亮又寬廣的畫面。我們想確保大搖臂以我們放心的方式轉動。它從來沒有真的接近天花板，也沒逼近任何藝術品。我們說的話就像『這個點就是你能擺放這一部分設備的精確位置，那裡是它可以轉動的範圍』而且我們也站在現場盯著，不容有差錯。」

And when it started its ascent, her pulse started to race. “That’s unavoidable,” she said.
當大搖臂開始上升時，席爾的脈搏開始加速，她說，「那是免不了的」。

The Met has labored to put some past financial turbulence behind it while adjusting to new admission fees for museumgoers who do not live in New York state – the Met’s long-standing “pay what you wish” policy ended in March, and the de Blasio administration has laid the groundwork to reduce the city’s contribution to the Met by up to $3 million a year, depending on how much the out-of-staters bring in.
大都會博物館在適應非紐約州居民入場費新制的過程中，已奮力將一些過往的財務動盪拋到腦後。館方長期以來的「隨意付」門票政策於3月結束，而且紐約市長白思豪政府準備削減市府對館方的補助，削減額度端視外州遊客帶來的門票收入而定，每年最多可達300萬美元。

So, for the Met, movies and television shows are an appealing source of additional revenue, though a small one for an institution with a budget of more than $300 million. Met officials say cameras have been allowed in for other movies, including “When Harry Met Sally” and “Maid in Manhattan,” and for small-screen series like “Gossip Girl.”
因此，將場地租給電影和電視節目劇組的額外收入，對這個預算超過3億美元的機構雖然只是一小部分，仍有吸引力。館方說，曾經核准租用館內場地拍攝的電影包括「當哈利遇見莎莉」、「女佣變鳳凰」，以及「花邊教主」等影集。

原文參照：
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/10/nyregion/metropolitan-museum-of-art-movie.html

2018-06-24 聯合報．D4．紐約時報賞析 李京倫

說文解字看新聞 張佑生

好萊塢2006年的電影Night at the Museum描述紐約市美國自然歷史博物館某個夜裡發生的奇事，台灣譯為「博物館驚魂夜」。本文巧借片名當標題，地點換成紐約大都會藝術博物館。到了夜間，博物館變成攝影棚（movie studio）。Double有「一物二用」、「分飾兩角」之意。館方破紀錄出借場地達10個晚上（nights），仍不免對館藏的安全提心吊膽、脈搏加速（pulse started to race）。

作者說電影主角和負責盯場的博物館主管扮演不同的mastermind，字面意義是聰明才智者，某一複雜行動的（of/behind）統籌，特別是犯罪，可說是「主謀」（a criminal mastermind）。Caper在俚語意指不法勾當，尤其是竊盜，或是情節不算嚴重的犯罪電影（瞞天過海：八面玲瓏）。

據說片商回饋了100萬美元，對於Met的開源（additional revenue）不無小補。除了欣賞奧斯卡影后同台飆戲，眼尖的觀眾還能趁機一覽館藏的塞尚、薩金特與勞策的名作。

In ‘The Moralist,’ Woodrow Wilson and the Hazards of Idealism
威爾遜理想主義 影響美國一世紀
從一戰到伊拉克戰爭 入侵他國都是無私高尚行為？
By Jennifer Szalai

Instead of “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made,” Patricia O’Toole could have titled her new book “The Hypocrite.”
派翠西亞．奧圖若將她的新書命名為「偽善者」，而非《道德主義者：威爾遜與他締造的世界》，亦無不可。

After all, as she herself points out, to lay claim to the moral high ground as often and as fervently as Wilson did during his eight years in the White House was to court charges that he failed to live up to his own principles. He called for an end to secret treaties while negotiating secretly with the Allies in World War I. He declared himself unwilling to compromise with belligerents abroad while showing himself very willing to compromise with segregationists at home. He pursued a progressive economic agenda while approving a regressive racial one. He spoke of national self-determination in the loftiest terms while initiating the American occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
畢竟，正如她自己所點出的，威爾遜總統在白宮八年期間頻繁且熱切地標榜自己的道德高度，卻招來未能遵守自身所宣示原則的指控。他呼籲終結密約，卻又跟第一次世界大戰盟國進行秘談；他對外宣稱不願跟交戰國妥協，對內卻又表現出非常願意跟種族隔離主義者妥協；他奉行進步的經濟政策，但又贊成開倒車的種族政策；他以最崇高的措辭提及民族自決，卻又展開美國對海地與多明尼加的占領行動。

O’Toole’s is the third major biography of Wilson in the last decade, coming on the heels of substantial works by John Milton Cooper Jr. (2009) and A. Scott Berg (2013), an output of Wilsoniana that attests to the 28th president’s complicated – and contested – legacy. O’Toole’s book doesn’t purport to be as exhaustive as Cooper’s or Berg’s; her project was born from her interest in World War I, and as she persuasively shows, American foreign policy throughout the 20th century adopted Wilson’s war-forged liberal internationalism, in word if not always in deed.
奧圖的新書是近10年第三部威爾遜主要傳記，緊接在2009年約翰．米爾頓．庫珀跟2013年史考特．柏格重要作品後出現，是證明這位第28位總統複雜且具爭議性遺緒的又一作品。奧圖的書並無意如庫珀或柏格那樣詳盡，她的研究寫作計畫源於她對第一次世界大戰的興趣，且一如她令人信服地呈現的那樣，整個20世紀美國外交政策採取了威爾遜的戰爭式自由國際主義，行為上容或偶有例外，言詞上則始終如此。

President Richard M. Nixon cynically used the rhetoric of Wilsonian idealism to escalate the war in Vietnam, saying that his plan would bring the United States closer to Wilson’s “goal of a just and lasting peace.” Wilson’s principle of national self-determination – a phrase that his own secretary of state deemed “loaded with dynamite” – has since been enshrined in the charter of the United Nations.
尼克森總統犬儒地用威爾遜理想主義言辭來升高越戰戰事，聲稱他的計畫將使美國更接近威爾遜的「公正與持久和平的目標」。 威爾遜的民族自決原則後來被載入聯合國憲章，而這個詞語被他自己的國務卿視為「裝滿了炸藥」。

And by declaring that “the world must be made safe for democracy” in 1917, Wilson articulated how the American people, from World War I to Iraq, would prefer to imagine their military incursions abroad: as high-minded acts of pure altruism, imbued with benevolence and devoid of mercenary self-interest.
威爾遜1917年宣稱的「使世界安全以確保民主」，闡述了從第一次世界大戰到伊拉克戰爭，美國人民如何願意將他們在國外的軍事入侵行動，想像成純粹利他主義的高尚行為，滿懷仁慈且全無自私自利之念。

A biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, O’Toole is a lucid and elegant writer (her book about Adams was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and “The Moralist” is a fluid account that feels shorter than its 600-plus pages. Despite its length, there isn’t a passage that drags or feels superfluous.
奧圖寫過老羅斯福與亨利．亞當斯的傳記，是位頭腦清楚與優雅的作家（她的亞當斯一書曾入圍普立茲獎決選），而《道德主義者》行文流暢，讓人覺得篇幅並沒600多頁這麼長。儘管篇幅很長，文中並無任何一段拖泥帶水或顯得多餘。

原文參照：
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/books/review-moralist-woodrow-wilson-patricia-otoole.html

2018-06-24 聯合報．D4．紐約時報賞析 陳韋廷