A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 19
This is the seventh year in a row I’ve run this series in April.
Today’s story: The Battle Over the Sea-Monkey Fortune.
The way the lawyer William Timmons described the case, it was practically a newsreel melodrama, with a helpless widow being menaced by a heartless tycoon. The story began with the widow, whose name is Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut. She is a onetime heir to the considerable fortune still generated by her husband Harold’s iconic invention, Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys. As her lawyer told it, she was now isolated, cash-starved, often without electricity or running water on a palatial estate on the Potomac River in southern Maryland. Having retreated to a single room in the old mansion, she was prepping for her second freezing winter, barricaded by thick quilts, her bed next to a fireplace stocked with split wood. From this bunker, Signorelli von Braunhut has been waging legal combat against Sam Harwell, chief executive of a big-time toy company whose name seems straight out of a Chuck Jones cartoon: Big Time Toys.
In his tiny office in Sayville, on Long Island, Timmons spoke in clipped, near-noir tones, handing me a five-page summary of the case, eager to executive-produce the plotline. “The heart and soul of this case is trademark infringement,” he said. Signorelli von Braunhut “believes in the concept of justice,” he continued, “and when you have that on your side, then you can get through the day.”
A few years after her husband’s death in 2003, Signorelli von Braunhut licensed out part of the labor of his multimillion dollar Sea-Monkey enterprise, mostly packaging and distribution, to Big Time. If you’ve ever been 8 years old, then you know that Sea-Monkeys arrive in a small plastic aquarium with several small packets that include the tiny brine-shrimp critters, which reanimate once you add water — by way of a secret formula that Signorelli von Braunhut keeps locked in a vault in Manhattan.
The original deal held that Big Time would supply everything except the specially engineered critters — and the accompanying packets, which von Braunhut would manufacture and sell separately to Big Time, which would then bundle the full kits and handle the sales. Also in the contract was a second deal — to buy the company, including the secret formula. It allowed Big Time to pay a straight-up $5 million fee and then $5 million more in installments. Three winters ago, Big Time called up the widow and announced that it considered its previous payments for the packets to be a kind of layaway deal for the company and that, as far as Big Time was concerned, it now owned the Sea-Monkey franchise.
Signorelli von Braunhut first sued in 2013, and last year Timmons filed a further complaint accusing Big Time of breach of contract and trademark infringement. Big Time’s national law firm, Epstein Becker & Green, sent me a statement denying any wrongdoing and claiming instead that the widow improperly terminated the contract. In a particularly contemporary twist to the melodrama, Big Time’s court filings revealed that it was now buying knockoff Sea-Monkeys from China.
This is a comic book advertisement from the 1960s. There’s also this:
Yolanda, was particularly stunning and began a film career in the mid-1960s. She played Lorilie in the 1967 bondage classic “Venus in Furs” — based on the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel of that name, as well as various minxes in “All Women Are Bad,” “Too Much Too Often!” “Death of a Nymphette” and “Assignment: Female.” I watched three of them, for research, and was struck mostly by how these films appeared long before the phrase “money shot” entered the lexicon and the director’s mandatory scene list. When I finally screwed up the courage to ask Signorelli von Braunhut about her previous career, she casually said: “In those days, they might have been racy, but today? I don’t think so.” Which is true. If anything, her brief movie career looks presciently campy — less like porn than like a Mike Myers parody titled, “Cool It Baby” (which is also the title of a 1967 Signorelli von Braunhut film).
Trailers for Venus in Furs and Cool It Baby
The subheading of the article pretty much says it all:
A former 1960s bondage-film actress is waging legal combat with a toy company for ownership of her husband’s mail-order aquatic-pet empire.
I’m not going to invest any time brainstorming possible story angles on this because this has Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski written all over it. The pair whose screenwriting credits include Ed Wood, The Man in the Moon, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Big Eyes, and the recent TV limited series “American Crime Story”, I mean they’ve got to write this, yeah?
But if they don’t, why not take a crack at it?
There you go: My nineteenth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
What would you do with it?
Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.