BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 109
* Fear: the wretched thing . . . it’ll die soon. . .
* One of the A.R.C. from “List”
* No one else’s Fingerprints at the crime scene.
* The cops in the hospital/family life or “Gimme a break pal I have X’
* The guy is thrown from the tenth story, he crashes, they scream at him “It was a mistake, go hack upstairs, but please. . . use the service stairs”
* Credit card SPANKY ZZIP-PFFT SPUT!!
* “You are not just an observer MARTYN”
* Bolas ZZUCK! tumble, fire (Burning Man)
* They hired a TOY MAKER for A.R.C.
* We open the tape with the Doyle-like professor on which he speaks to us of his vision and shows us a model of a human eye. They have jute beneath the porcelain.
* Take note, Sparks: “IS this Masonic? “Cause I’m a Catholic.”
* Sparks tries not to speak about his brother . . .
* Martyn calls or observes Lottie on CHRISTMAS DAY or he sees her with a 
* Hanging from the Billboard S.
GDT: The List of Seven was based on the novel by Mark Frost. He also wrote the screenplay and produced a draft that I really like. It’s a fantastic steampunk adventure.
The story is about Arthur Conan Doyle before he writes his first Sherlock Holmes story. He gets tangled up with an occult society in Victorian London that is planning to assassinate Queen Victoria and substitute an automaton for Prince Eddy. The society is building sort of a doomsday machine in a castle in the north of the United Kingdom. And I wanted to create these Caspar David Friedrich-type ruins and Piranesian spaces.
Mark is a very good writer of characters, so Conan Doyle was a really great personality in the screenplay. I love Conan Doyle and know his biography well, so I wanted to include details like the fact that he was an ophthalmologist. And the idea was that he succeeds in the movie only when he includes Holmes as a character, which is based on a secret agent for Queen Victoria named Jack Sparks, who is like a James Bond in Victorian times with all the accoutrements and the gadgets.
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes had a lot of the energy, which is similar to what I wanted to do with the Holmes character in The List of Seven. What I kept saying to Universal was that we didn’t need to shoot Holmes boringly. We needed to shoot him to suit the adventure. We are so used to having a passive intellectual—a guy who lives a monastic life. But for me, Holmes is a guy who is pensive and immobile for long periods—like, literally, he could stay in the same pose on a sofa for days, not even eating—but then, when he says, “Come with me, old chap,” he comes alive and it is an adventure.
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 123
* SIDE VIEW List of 7 “Doomsday Machine”
* “You are going to regret this. . .” He leaves
* “After all that I’ve done for you, you refuse me a simple favor” Spanky in the library.
* The owner of the house/ severed head in a package: “I won’t allow anyone to bring that “thing” near me. It’s in the cupboard.”
* “Holmes” examines the cord, the newspapers, and the paper that’s wrapped around the package with the head in it.