All the President's Men|The Main Reading Room — The Shot That Rises Off the Paperwork

Two reporters sit at a desk sorting White House book request slips, thousands of them, looking for one name. The camera starts on their hands. Then it climbs, and keeps climbing, until the men are two specks in a marble drum and the slips are nothing at all. It is the most quoted shot in the film and one of the few times Pakula lets the audience see the scale of what the reporting is up against.

It was filmed here, in the Main Reading Room of the Thomas Jefferson Building, in 1975. The Library of Congress holds photographs of the crew rigging the shoot under Edwin Blashfield's dome collar, and its own blog has written up the production. The room is a hundred and sixty feet from the floor to the lantern, ringed by Bela Pratt's statues of Philosophy, Art, History, Commerce, Religion, Science, Law and Poetry, with John Flanagan's clock over the entrance. Smithmeyer and Pelz finished the building in 1897 to prove that an American library could out-argue anything in Europe. It does.

The desks radiate outward in concentric rings, which is why the crane shot works — the geometry is already a target, and the reporters are at the centre of it.

The Jefferson Building is free and open six days a week. The Main Reading Room floor needs a reader identification card, which takes about fifteen minutes to obtain in the Madison Building across the street. If you would rather not, the second-floor Overlook puts you above the room at roughly the height where the camera begins to pull away.