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Not sure whether this is a Writers' Forum question or a Writers' Challenge. Certainly if anyone wants to use this as the basis for a story they're welcome to do so; it's really too involved for me to handle. But what I'm looking for is the most plausible wrap-up.
Here's the situation: in effect, it's Hannah Montana, circa 1980.
The folks at Disney have hired newcomer Cory Glenn, the 12-year old child (by a "previous relationship", actually a one-night stand with a groupie) of a prominent pop-country singer, to star as title character Bonnie Blake in a film called Junior High Cheerleader. Cory's a singer and a precocious instrumentalist (acoustic guitar, banjo and electric guitar) with a folk-rock background in afterschool programs and the like.
It's a huge success -- within two years there have been three films (with a fourth in preparation), major concert tours, and half a dozen successful bubblegum singles along with an LP or two -- all on Disney labels, credited to (smaller print) Cory Glenn as (larger print) Bonnie Blake. This being Disney, there are plenty of merchandising tie-ins: Bonnie's a straight-haired blonde with a signature red hairband (Cory's hair is light brown, shorter and curlier), and there are pompons, hair accessories, bracelets, action toys, costumes, and lots more, all -- of course, since Uncle Walt and his successors have been doing this at least since Davy Crockett -- representing the character, not the performer.
Anyway -- you probably see where this is headed -- as the summer "Two Sides of Me" tour is winding to a halt in August 1981, Cory, now 14, comes out at the end of the last concert, takes off the wig, and announces that she won't be Bonnie Blake ever again because she, Cory, is really a boy whose voice and appearance are changing to the point where he can't keep the deception going any longer.
The Disney people, of course, are apoplectic, envisioning (probably accurately) thousands of horrified mothers excoriating the company for betraying their family-friendly principles, not to mention massive bonfires of Bonnie merchandise. But what do they do about it?
Idea 1: Claim it was a hoax, that Cory went AWOL before the last concert (which is why they're firing her) and that it was her (female) temporary replacement as Bonnie at the last concert who untruthfully made that statement. Refund the money of everyone at that concert, claim that using a substitute was done without their approval, and announce that they'll be proceeding with someone new in the Bonnie role from now on.
Idea 2: Quickly announce they were duped, that they're considering criminal charges, and they are suing Cory's guardians -- her father's management agency reps -- for fraud and misrepresentation, with damages equal to the cost of recalling all the merchandise and refunding ticket prices from past concerts. Shut down the whole Bonnie operation, admit that they weren't careful enough in checking Cory's background, and ask for forgiveness. (Eventually they take their losses and settle the case in exchange for Cory and the agency forfeiting all unpaid royalties and future earnings. In the meantime, Cory, aka Glenn Donnelly, has left SoCal with his mother, whose drug overdose and subsequent prison term are what set this whole thing in motion originally, and the agency -- which had been planning to finesse the whole situation quietly before Cory (who didn't know) spoiled it for everyone -- no longer has any leverage over him.)
Idea 3: Try to stonewall, though I'm having trouble figuring out how. No refunds; either hire a new Bonnie without explaining why or shut everything down.
Any thoughts?
Eric
Well Write it!
Eric: Sounds like you got a good plot to start with, why don't you write it? Richard
Richard
some questions
i would have some questions - why was this boy willing to pretend to be a girl? Did he want to be a girl or was he talked into it? How were they able to fool everybody since all it would take would be a search for a birth certificate to uncover the truth?
How and Why...
(The continuity here is way out of whack, because I'm trying to answer the questions more or less as they're presented. Please bear with it.)
Anyway, how and why:
He can do it because he has a knack (aided by his folk song studies and covering/imitating lots of pop music on the radio and at home) for accents, dialects and speech patterns, and he thinks of "girl" as one such pattern. As the story begins, he hasn't developed physically or hormonally yet, and knows he's a boy but doesn't have a strong masculine identity.
Being in a boy's arms in a movie scene certainly doesn't attract or excite him but doesn't bother him unduly -- it isn't real and, this being Disney, there won't even be any open-mouth kisses, let alone anything heavy. Things are always well-chaperoned around him (he and his guardians want it that way) so that even in less controlled environments, they never get too uncomfortable. Rumors of romances come and go -- that, after all, is what the likes of Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine are all about -- but they're never encouraged by Disney or by Cory's managers, seldom oppressive and never true. Initially at least, he doesn't even have to fake a girl's physical development, at least not beyond the training-bra stage; some of the Disney execs who made Annette and Darlene hide their breasts under tight t-shirts on Mickey Mouse Club in the fifties are apparently still in management and probably hope that puberty never comes.
Cory's willing to do it because it earns his keep (and more), the fame doesn't hurt, he enjoys performing, there's something fun about being able to fool people, and most importantly it's a way of staying out of a situation back home -- being given to grandparents he's never met -- that he's been told by his mother that he needs to avoid at all costs. (His mother was a teenage runaway.) I think he'd also rather be the son/daughter of Bryan Glenn -- the greatest musician he's ever met and (briefly) shared a stage with -- than the grandson of a plumber named Patrick Donnelly. (Bryan knows Cory's a boy, but things got complicated, especially with Bryan's current wife and children, and Cory's staying in Redondo Beach with Bryan's husband-and-wife management team.)
Nobody who knows Cory has seen Glenn Donnelly's birth certificate. I'm still trying to figure out how that can happen without child labor laws being violated on Disney's end -- hadn't thought about that until you asked. Best I can do is guess that the state people knew the Disney people well enough to take their word for it, and since Disney wasn't claiming that Cory was in an older, less restricted age bracket, the company had no reason not to be telling the truth about her age. Disney went by Cory's original application (submitted by Cory's and Bryan's manager from information that Cory had accurately (except for the name) provided; the sex line was left blank) and since the source of the information was reputable and the agency well established, they saw no reason to research it further. An investigation into Cory's social security number would yield Glenn's name, but in those days before immigration scares, no one had any reason to do that.
Cory convinced Bryan and his managers that he was Bryan's son using indirect evidence, chiefly an autographed and dated Polaroid photo of Hope and Bryan together backstage. Since Bryan was a fill-in with the group that night, that would have been particularly hard for anyone to fake. Cory also brought a faded carbon copy of a letter from Hope to Bryan telling him she was pregnant with a child that might be his. It was way too vague to prove anything, and nothing but Cory's word (and a scrapbook picture in the managers' office of Bryan at age 11 -- the male half of the management team and Bryan had been longtime friends back in Texas where they grew up -- that looked startlingly like Cory) actually connected him/her with the liaison. But it was enough, and after Cory reassured everyone that he wasn't looking for back child support, things got more warm and fuzzy.
He'd initially presented as a girl after calling emergency services when his mother ODed. Afraid the police would take him in and turn him over to the grandparents, he left the house -- taking only his guitar and banjo -- and fled to the palatial home of a girl, Pamela, that he knew from his music program. She suggested the masquerade -- he'd used his girl-voice on her before -- and helped with the physical mannerisms he'd never learned (though he was observant enough to recognize at least some of them). He decided his best bet was to find Bryan Glenn.
An especially convoluted set of circumstances had Cory Glenn (he'd chosen an androgynous first name so he could keep it after he changed back) accompanying Pamela to a two-week session of an exclusive Colorado camp for preteen pop-diva wannabes, hoping Bryan would be an instructor there. He wasn't, though Cory got the address of his management agency to follow up with afterward. But it left Cory, like all the girls there, with a more stage-ready feminine face and hairstyle after a pre-performance makeover, and the camp prepared a VHS tape of Cory's performance -- the one Bryan's manager subsequently acquired and sent to Disney for an audition.
(At their introductory meeting, Cory assured Bryan and his manager that he was a boy, but he'd gone directly from Colorado Springs to L.A. by bus in order to avoid any further obligation to Pamela and her family and had spent the previous three weeks posing as a girl, which left them unsure at the meeting whether he was being truthful on that point.)
Eric
Not quite sure
Not quite sure what you're asking for here. You're basically writing the story in this Forum entry. Why don't you just go and do it properly? It would probably have taken less time.
There's obviously a whole tale in your head (or more... been there, no time to do that) and I doubt if anyone else will be able to do it justice. Sometimes you just have to drop whatever you're doing and get on with it.
Penny, who currently has four stories rattling around inside...
Very Fair Question
I started out just asking about that final plot detail: what Disney does after Cory's revelation. You're right about my knowing the rest, though getting some overall reaction to the plot was helpful to me.
I could indeed write it now, as a detailed synopsis or summary; I'm not sure I was fully aware of that when I asked my question. (And as in your case, there are two or three other stories for which I could do the same.) But turning it into a story is more difficult, and almost infinitely more time-intensive, even if I were more confident that I could make it work. We'll see, I guess.
Eric
Or how about?
America's new adolescent singing sensation was not exactly what she seemed. She was...
by Laika Pupkino
.
The world hadn't seen anything like this since .......... Well, since the last teen girl singer to go soaring up the charts. From Lil' Boo Teena's first appearance on American Idolator the votes poured in as for no other contestant in the history of the show. Some might deem it a sad commentary on the state of U.S. politics that she received more votes than all the presidential candidates for that year's election combined. But others would say she deserved them. After the performance of Proud Mary that gained her the show's top honor a teary eyed Tina Tooner---one of the judges that season---declared her a worthy namesake. And Simon Scowl---the show's ordinarily caustic host---was so moved by it he proposed marriage to her right on the spot. After he was reminded that he was already married, and that the girl was only fifteen he claimed he had only been kidding; but few believed him.
When her first album BOO-TEENA CALL went platinum in six and a half minutes, it seemed that here at last was an "American Idol" who truly lived up to the title. In fact you would have to call her an International Idol, as young girls from Chicago to Madrid to Osaka ran out and bought her albums, posters, t-shirts with her likeness on them, and then her line of chic apparel that she offered in collaboration with the UberMart department store chain.
There were of course cynics, and scoffers, and those who just can't stand the sight of someone else's success. They claim that her debut album was shallow, derivative and overproduced. That her lyrics were indecipherable, and even her voice was largely the product of technical wizardly. The Littermans and the Leenos made all the expected jokes about her, but this didn't prevent them from fawning over her in an almost comically starstruck manner when they had her on their late night talk shows.
Her fan based crossed all demographic boundries. White suburban kids loved her, as did inner city blacks, and her cd of soulful Spanish language ballads CANCIONES EL POLLO LOCO---which had been heralded as a marketing disaster---was not only a surprise hit in the U.S., but secured her fame from Juarez to Tierra del Fuego. And boys, while most of them would adamantly deny listening to her music, were often noticed doing moves that looked suspiciously like the Chicken Dance as they listened to her tunes on their I-Pods and such...
Parents adored her, and found in her a role model they hoped their children would emulate. This wasn't some brazen little slut like Madonna or Britney, but a shy unassuming girl who seldom said anything, and for the most part seemed confused by all the hype and celebrity that now surrounded her. Her only vice seemed to be an almost addictive fondness for sunflower seeds and unpopped popcorn kernels. So the adults were for the most part indulgent when their daughters began wearing red rubber wattles under their chins and beaklike fake noses in imitation of their skinny-legged young idol.
The rumors that started to surface about her were so preposterous that at first not even the Drudge report would touch them. They began with one elderly man, Orlo Milo Rollo, who had a history of mental illness; and could be seen every place she appeared, beating her fans and sometimes even the paparazzi to the scene, to shout out a voice approaching panic, the imprecation: "She's a chicken, I tell ya! A giant chicken!!"
When a restraining order did not dissuade him from harrassing the famous singer, the old codger was tried and shipped off to California's Vacaville State Prison. But subsequent events would lead to a commutation of his sentance...
While performing an impressive leap during a dance number at that year's Grammy Awards, Boo-Teena's wig flew off- revealling a gangly, oversized Rooster. The music stopped, and for a moment the entire Dorothy Chandler Pavilion became dead silent. You could have heard a pin drop. Lil' Boo-Teena glanced around at her audience in a stunned and dull witted manner. And when the boos and jeers began, the programs and other missles began pelting her, she flew off----in the struggling ungainly manner of barnyard fowl---never to be seen again!
The world was shocked, that not only was the pop star not female, but she wasn't even human. The outcry was immediate, and it was deafening. When folks realized how totally and how easily they had been taken in, they became furious. This male creature---this animal----had deceived everyone, and obviously for the most perverted and despicable reasons. FBI files soon revealled that the young diva was actually a suspicious character named Chicken Boo, who had committed a number of similar frauds over the years- posing as everything from a famous matador to an astronaut.
Bill O'Really devoted an entire week of shows to the specter of creeping trans-speciesism. Her records were burned in mass rallies. The children of America had been traumatized by this nefarious poltroon (The plaintive cry of one young girl---"Say it ain't so, Boo!"---became the defining sound bite of this scandal); And a historic class action suit, the first that was based entirely on charges of emotional distress, was in the works. But where was Lil' Boo-Teena? That's a question that remains unanswered to this day...
Still, in spite of all the rage and vipuritude, he had his defenders. What had he---or she---done that was so terribly wrong? People For the American Way and PETA championed a chicken's rights to participate in our way of life. And The Three and a Half Tenors recorded a song about this great pretender that went to #2 on the charts for several weeks:
BUT YOU'RE NOT A GIRL, YOU'RE A CHICKEN BOO..."
.
No, not really relevant but I thought it was funny. A story I posted + then deleted a while back...
~~hugs, Laika
What borders on stupidity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
Love it.
You should have posted it, Laika. Ah! You have, but in a somewhat ethereal form ie it'll disappear in a couple of days.
I wonder if Chicken Boo comes from the same hatch-line as Clara Cluck :)
Robi
I Remember That One...
Didn't realize you'd deleted it. It does seem sort of relevant here.
Eric
There's another possibility entirely.
Disney is well known for being VERY inclusive (perhaps not to everyone, but to many)... (Evidenced by how I was accepted there on my first week full time (24x7) as Annette, while @ Disney World.
Perhaps they might take this as an opportunity to:
use option 10000: Come out "Of course we knew this. How could we not. We never SAID Chris was a girl... We have him scheduled for several more movies and he will continue performing on our label. In fact, the movie going into production next month tells his story..." (Perhaps, said movie is already IN production??? And Chris's 'exposure' was just early advertisement of the forthcoming movie?)
:-) A completely different look, and one that is not totally beyond the realms of possibility. If ANY media company has the credibility and marketing know how to pull such a thing off, it's probably Disney.
Anne
Twisted Options
My dark muse appears to be in control today, as my first thought would be to have some kind of obsessed fan kidnap Cory Misery-style and make him continue to dress up as Bonnie.
My second thought would be that the worst victim of the charade would be the teen actor who'd been publicly "dating" Cory, due to an arrangement by his people and "her" people to keep them on magazine covers. He didn't know her secret, but he actually is in the closet, and this only fuels the rumors more. So maybe his best option is to come out and tell a confused Glenn he wants to keep their relationship going.
But I think the most evil way to go would be to have the lawyers for the Mouse admit everything, but claim that they were allowing this transgendered youth to express her true self, and the only tragedy here is that the American medical community refuses to treat minors with gender identity disorder. Their position is that Bonnie would not have been forced to retire had Cory been allowed to blossom into the beautiful young woman she deserves to be. So as not to come off as disingenuous they throw their muscle behind lobbying to get the laws changed. Cory is turned into the posterchild for a movement, and he receives loads of inspirational fan-mail from actual transgender kids who only felt brave enough to come out to their families because of Cory. When a European doctor issues a public invitation to treat her, Glenn has a dilemma: remain true to himself and destroy all those kids' hopes, or make the ultimate sacrifice and be the role model they need and also have the opportunity to gain even more fame and wealth.
think eeeeeevil :)
poor Cory was found in a hotel room, OD'd on drugs. Which were sadly responsible for her increasingly bizarre delusions. Tsk, tsk. A new actress has been hired to play Bonnie, watch for her new show!
Evil? Maybe...
...Mercenary? Definitely!
We know that artists are generally worth more dead than alive—e.g. Elvis Presley (assuming he's really dead and not somewhere in the building) or Michael Jackson.
Rather than bring drugs onto the scene, kill the character off in a plane crash, or a mysterious boating mishap.
News of the demise would produce a spike in sales, and allow for "memorial" versions, and the company would be able to continue milking the cash cow for many years to come.
Cynical I know, but awfully plausible too.
Premature Surcease
Bike Resources
Bike Resources
okay, you're scaring me
I think you've done this before...
Scrambled Eggs
Talk about EGGS in your face WOW!!
Does anybody remember
The Simon & Garfunkel song "Richard Cory"?
"(Richard) Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head"
. . .
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until they speak.
I went outside once. The graphics weren' that great.
I just had a thought
what if the parents were forcing him because they loved the money and celebrity? What if his coming out was a last ditch attempt to control his own life? and what if the powers that be conspire to keep him a her regardless? Now that would be a dark story .....