While doing research for my next paper at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I ran across this pdf, the script of Three Days of the Condor, one of my favorite films.
In this brilliant collaboration between Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack, our hero is Turner, a CIA operative working in an office in ethereally beautiful 1970s New York. Turner finds himself on the run and is baffled as to why since all he does is read. Here’s one of the key moments in the plot, here Turner is explaining himself to the character Kathy, played by Faye Dunaway.
Listen. I work for the CIA. I’m not a spy. I just read books. We read everything that’s published in the world, and we–we feed the plots–dirty tricks, codes into a computer, and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. I look for leaks, new ideas. We read adventures and novels and journals. I–I can-Who’d invent a job like that? I–Listen! People are trying to kill me!
The air is thick with Watergate-era government conspiracy as Turner tries to avoid being caught while tracing just who is trying to kill him by hacking into telephone networks.
Well worth watching, or re-watching. Well worth asking…just where is today’s version?