I am in a very important meeting right now. I have been asked to take detailed notes on what happens by my boss. These are my notes so far:
12:40: Everyone is cheerfully greeting each other, slapping each other on the back, shaking hands, exchanging hearty hellos, and saying how happy they are to see each other.
All these people would kill each other for a free tic tac.
12:45: Random observation: Most studio executives are tiny, hairless men with big mouths, kind of like Chihuahuas with speaker phones.
12:48: The new hire is introducing herself. She’s alluded to the fact that she went to Harvard three times in the last 1.5 minutes.
12:55: I emailed some co-workers to ask what they think of the new hire. One has replied with an email whose subject line is “hate. hate. HATE.” Another has weighed in by emailing me back a link to the video for “Move, Bitch (Get Out The Way)”. I can tell this new person is going to go far in this business. I’m not being sarcastic.
1:15: I have spoken! A key plot point in this script we’re disussing is that a woman gets murdered. My contribution has been to point out that when a father comes down to the medical examiner’s office to identify his murdered daughter, we do not rip off the blanket and expose her naked body to him, even if she is a gorgeous 24-yr-old actress with a spectacular rack. That would be what we call “totally unnecessary” and “totally inappropriate”.
Even when a victim’s face & limbs have been damaged beyond recognition, I can think of no case where we showed a man his dead daughter’s ladyflower, as it is improbable that he could identify her by her immaculate Brazilian wax job (knock on wood). Furthermore, if the victim were lying naked out in the open for some reason, her legs would unlikely be positioned so as to imply that her gynecologist was about to come in and perform last rites over her vagina.
1:25: I said all that. I’m actually having an argument about this. Of course, it’s pointless because my argument takes for granted that they are interested in realism, when they are really just interested in coming up with a remotely plausible reason for having the actress lay stark naked on a cart for 3 minutes, even if she’s made up to look like a corpse with bullet wounds.
1:34: My continued involvement in this sort of heinousness is why, five times a day, I unroll my prayer rug (made in a feminist commune in Woodstock), face the direction of the holy headquarters of NOW, kneel, and offer up a remorseful prayer to my feminist foremothers.
