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FILE 071 · VOL XIII · You Were the Product
Never Type Your Own Name on This Typewriter
You can sell the work or keep your name. The keys will not let you do both.
Based on: The Hollywood Blacklist
Intake record
| Recovered from | Estate sale, Pacific Palisades, California |
|---|---|
| Contents | A 1946 Royal typewriter, eleven title pages, a Writers Guild membership card with the name scratched off |
| Finder | Rental car agent who bought the typewriter for her daughter |
| Status | Typewriter withheld. Do not type your name to test it. |
| On the record | Real history is cited with numbered sources. Everything else, use your own judgment. |
Recovered file
Miriam Kale had not sold a script in four years. Before that she had sold three, and two got made, and one of them was nominated for something nobody watches on television. Then the work dried up the way it does: slowly, then all at once. She was forty-four, writing corporate training videos, and renting a room in a house in Van Nuys.
She bought the typewriter for eighty dollars at an estate sale in the Palisades because she liked the sound of it. The seller, a grandson, said it had belonged to his grandfather, who wrote movies "under other people's names, back during the blacklist." He said it like a family joke.
Taped to the underside of the carriage was an index card, typed on that same machine, the letters faded to brown.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 071 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.