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From: Jasper
Date: 8/1/04
Time: 4:48:35 PM
Remote Name: 69.212.37.61
The following is a cleaned up copy of a reply I made to buster about getting ideas from the movies. I think it should be reviewed in this context....
Buster,
There have been many cases where people used a movie as a pattern for a crime. The airplane bombings in the ’60s to collect on insurance came from a Rod Serling movie. A gang of teenage girls who raped another girl with a stick got their inspiration from Born Innocent with Linda Blair. The Columbine High School killings were patterned after Christian Slater’s role in Heathers.
The Bundy murders were different. The killer wasn’t some nut who got an idea from a movie and ran with it. He picked a little of this and a little of that from over a hundred movies. The killer’s bloody gloves are common to several movies. So is the knit cap, the bleeding killer, the killer’s distinctive shoes and shoeprints, etc. The arrangement of items at Ron Goldman’s feet (She Jack the Ripper animation) came out of Jack the Ripper (’88) with Michael Caine. The bloody ski mask in the closet came out of an episode of Remington Steele with Sharon Stone as a college homecoming queen. The story of the entrenching tool in Chicago as the murder weapon is from Best Seller with Brian Dennehy and James Woods.
The general theme of a rich, influential and jealous black man killing his white wife, cutting a Jewish man’s throat, and leaving his own blood on he murder scene is from Shakespeare’s Othello – only most synopses of the play get it wrong. The real villain was a guy named Iago who plotted to advance himself by bringing Othello down with planted evidence and planted ideas. ALL of this stuff is in the Bundy murders, Fuhrman’s notes, his interviews, the early news reports and Fuhrman’s book Murder in Brentwood.
The beauty of taking so many ideas from so many different movies and altering them slightly to match the existing people places and things the killer has to work with is that the patterns interfere with each other. Most people have trouble following complex patterns so taking bits and pieces from many movies and putting them into one crime makes it hard to see any of them clearly and easy to dismiss all of them as coincidence. The mere suggestion that the killer got his ideas from movies is enough to make a large segment of the population laugh and CONCLUDE that the person presenting the idea is seeing “faces in clouds.”
Writing a book won’t make you rich unless millions of people want to read it BEFORE it is written. That’s why celebrities get multi-million-dollar cash advances. This is formula stuff like life insurance actuarial tables. Certain themes written by certain authors = x amount of money for the publisher. The name of a controversial figure in a big controversial news story as the author of a book is a guaranteed best seller. You can't have a Murder in Brentwood bestseller without real murders.
You don’t have to rely on luck to become such a figure in a story about rich, famous, beautiful people; sex, race, religion, jealousy and murder if you can make it happen with yourself as the most knowledgeable, intelligent and controversial person in the story. -- Jasper