Here’s a true story from the writers room. We were helping a freelancer, a first-timer to crime shows, plot her story. We needed a subtle clue to link two killings that previously seemed unrelated.
"I’ve got it," the freelancer said. "What if there is a tiny hole in the victim’s head and we
discover his brain has been drained out of his skull and replaced with dog shit."
"I don’t think that’s subtle enough," I said.
"Why not?" she said. "It’s a small hole."
Needless to say, she ended up backing out of the assignment.
Actually, the brain was destroyed by Jakob-Creutzfeld disease (similar to Mad Cow Disease), which is most notable because cannibals get it when they eat human brains. So the killer was killing other people, chopping up their brains and feeding them to the victim in his meat loaf…
To quote my 2 yr-old son, “OH…MY…GOSH!”
I thought the freelancer was joking…a bad joke, but a joke nontheless. Hmmm…yeah, I want to know how she even got the assignment in the first place. 🙂
She wrote a well-reviewed, independent movie and the studio thought she’d be good fit for our show. It turned out that she wasn’t. The feeling was mutual. Two days after the experience I told you about, she simply got up without a word, walked out of a story meeting…and never returned.
The game is afoot! I’m surmising from your brief chronicled anecdote that the freelance writer really didn’t enjoy being in the company of “mere” television writers, and was too “upper crust” for chaps like you. She believed, perhaps unconsciously, that to be successful in this new milieu of the writers room, she would require shit-for-brains in order to fit in and feel truly connected. Her sudden and previously inexplicable disappearance lends credence to this theory, my dear Watson.
I heard the new episode of Bionic Woman has a brains-replaced-with-dog-shit subplot.
I heard that happened to the writers of Bionic Woman.
So did you insult her back?