It's been a run of important Disclosure-related posts here -- writing about the WikiLeaks situation and even the NASA news conference about life in Mono Lake. Hopefully, then, you can excuse a light, quick end-of-the-year journey into a "making of" story about the A.D. After Disclosure book project.
In his classic rock ballad, "Against the Wind," Bob Seger talks about "what to leave in, what to leave out."
Any finished project -- a film, a television series, or even a book like A.D. After Disclosure -- tends to look after it's over like it could only have been the way it turned out. To the right, you'll see the inner flap to our back cover. It looks familiar to us now but, oddly, it was the very last thing to change as the book was going into the printers.
Two nights before, there was another picture on that cover. We weren't smiling in that one.
We had done an entire photo shoot with the talented Los Angeles photographer Alex Asher Sears for the cover photo and, out of the shoot, came three different looks, all variations on a theme. The theme was basically working writers telling a serious story. So the decision was made to go with collared shirts and loosened ties and no smiles. After all, we thought, when you're talking about a sixty-plus year cover-up, what's to smile about?
But, at the last minute, a debate caught fire and the voices that won the day were the ones that argued that book authors had a duty to appear friendly to their potential buyers and that smiles were not a sign of weakness. That is why, if you buy the hardcover version, you will see the smiles. But there was another picture, one that did not make the first cut, or the last-minute replacement and, yet, oddly, it's the one that both of us actually liked best.
Although we liked this photo by Alex Asher Sears a lot, Bryce's son thought he looked like a "badass" and his wife Jackie thought he looked angry, so it became the one that the subjects and the photographer all liked but, possibly, too controversial for a book project that asks people to actually pay for it.
This photo above was inspired by a photo we'd all admired that had been taken of Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorcese by French photographer Brigitte Lacombe. We liked the stripped down ascetic of the picture and the white background. We asked Alex not to copy it, but to take inspiration from it, and we knocked off a few quick shots in the last minutes, just for fun.
Alex also shot a couple of other excellent versions. One was what we called the "All the President's Men" photo which we liked but ultimately didn't fit the vertical photo layout we had in mind for the book cover.
Full Disclosure: We still love those photos that Alex took that day.
We know we're not smiling.
Think of it this way. We're thinking about the Breakaway Group of secret-keepers and how they've ignored your need-to-know for almost seven decades. It made us a little more somber than usual...
If you want to know a bit more about the book itself, here is the link to read the Introduction to A.D. After Disclosure. It is easily available through Amazon.com. Or you can order it through your local bookstore.
As always, we thank you for considering a purchase of the book through the button below at Keyhole Publishing. It will be shipped directly from the publisher signed by co-author Richard Dolan, and you will receive a free MP3 of "Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song," currently available on iTunes.
