Flight

So I'm on the flight to London and I notice this older fellow sitting behind me across the aisle. He's looking pretty eccentric -- stylish brown and black leather shoes with gray slacks and bright red sweater.

He's juggling several bags -- one of which appears to be stuffed with DVDs -- and has an assistant in a fedora and a crumpled pin-striped jacket helping him out.

Immediately he pulls out several large notepads and a dayplanner that is stuffed, and I mean stuffed with pieces of paper. The planner has to be three or four inches thick, and scraps of paper keep squirting out of it on to the floor.

Several times I get a chance to glance at his pads, and they are covered in a spidery script that might as well be shorthand for all I can make of it. For the whole flight, this guy keeps scribbling more notes. Sometimes he switches pads but he's always hunched over, writing and writing.

I fell asleep for a couple hours but as far as I could tell this guy never took a break from his frantic note-taking. His assistant just sat there next to him reading a book.

The one time when the guy got up to do something, he cleared his tray of everything except for two smallish pads with a name printed at the bottom of each sheet:

OLIVER STONE

Holy crap! I'd been sitting next to Oliver Stone for six hours and didn't even realize it. Even after I saw the name on the pad, it was hard to be sure it was him until we landed and I could observe him more fully as everyone was getting ready to disembark.

For the record, he looked perfectly sober.

I do wonder what he was doing in Beijing, though.