Damn You J.J. Abrams!

A few posts back I mentioned an old screenplay (teleplay) called 'The Mind's Eye' that I had written for an Australian show called Two Twisted... well, I have a funny story about it. Well, it's not that funny, it's damn annoying actually.

I've been working on and off during the last year to adapt 'The Mind's Eye' into a novella - it's taken close to one hundred hours and is somewhere in excess of 15000 words. It's pretty damn close to finished, and it's taken a lot of time and effort. Now as the title of this post alludes to, the bit where J.J. Abrams comes in is the fact that I was flicking through channels the other night and spotted something that looked very familiar. The show was called Fringe, and the scene that looked familiar involved a scientist extracting a death image from the retina of a cadaver using a scientific process that was almost exactly like what I described in my story The Mind's Eye... right down to the multiple flashes into the eye to build an image matrix.

Now I'll admit that the whole idea of extracting the last image a person witnessed before death is not a new idea, but the way it appeared on television looked so much like the technique I had imagined, and put onto the page. It's safe to say that I got pretty annoyed. Thinking you have a fresh idea in this day and age is pretty naive, but to see it realised in front of your eyes is another story.

The questions that now spring to mind are: Will I ever get my work published after this went to air? As soon as someone reads it, are they going to think I lifted it straight from Fringe? Was all that work for nothing?

If you know of anyone that was working for Bryan Brown’s production company, and they are now working on Fringe as a writer, let me know!