Letters (from)

Selling Myself, Installment II

In March I became a published author, and I quickly realized how important self-presentation is to creative success. This is the second in a series of letters in which I “sell myself” to various prize committees, billionaires, and television executives. The first letter appears here.

My MTV Pilot Pitch Letter

I recently pitched a couple of reality show pilot ideas to the president of MTV. I thought she would be interested in the pilots because they were inspired by a terrible accident involving her mother. The following is my pitch letter and photographs documenting the aforementioned accident. (I have yet to receive a response, despite my request for “A.S.A.P.” action on the president’s part. I’m confident that the shows will be on the air soon despite her foot-dragging, which, to be fair, might be part of her grieving process.)

December 21, 2005

Dear MTV President Christina Norman:

I plowed into a deer the other day with my friend Jordan. Sadly, the deer turned out to be your mother. My partner Andrew and I have been tracking and baiting your deer mother for years in order to capture and subdue her, after which we interrogate her Iraqi-freedom-style and then re-release her into the wild. We recently published our initial findings in the unauthorized biography A Portrait of Yo Mama as a Young Man (Random House, 2005). (Our research indicated that your mother could also be described as a young man.) So this is in part a letter of apology. I’m sorry for sweeping your mother off her feet and imprinting her skull and ears on the hood of my car (see photos). The car is being worked on right now, but get back to me immediately if you would like the hood as a memento. (She may still be alive, but the police officer who followed her off into the woods seemed hell-bent on killing her.)

Happily, your mother has been as inspiring in death as she was in life. Being responsible for her death made me think of some great ideas for sexy new MTV shows. You guys already have the show Pimp My Ride, where you take someone’s jalopy and add weird accessories to it. I think when people think Pimp My Ride, the next thing they think is”quality.” Then right after that, they think, “Spinoffs?” In economics, they call that voracious consumerist hunger “demand.” Insatiable Pimp-related demand all but guarantees success for the following two P.M.R. spinoffs:

1. Gimp My Ride: O.K., you have Pimp My Ride. You have another show called Home Wrecker, in which a person gets revenge on someone by obscenely redecorating the guilty party’s room. What about a sexy three-way marriage between those two shows and Mister Ed? The show would be hosted by a different large animal each week. The animal would talk Mister Ed–style to an aggrieved person who is so angry at someone that they want to see that person get run over by a vehicle. MTV then takes the person’s car, supposedly to go run over the guilty party in a way that would minimize damage to the car. Instead, the stunt driver takes the car and plows it into the animal host for the week, maximizing damage to the car and inflicting a death wound. The host is talking during all of this, and continues to have a good sense of humor about the whole thing even as his/her (all animals should be hermaphrodites to increase the show’s sexiness level to heretofore inconceivable proportions) life slowly expires. After the death scene, an MTV representative (which could be you if you are sufficiently sexy) gives the car back to the person, and they are kind of angry. Note 1: Animals must be trained to want to jump out in front of the car. Each animal must seem to be martyring his/her life to the gimping. I’m quite sure you didn’t get to be the president of MTV without knowing that pity and sexiness are incompatible. Note 2: Former MTV personality Pauly Shore will be a special guest host one week.
   
   
2. Pimp My Whore, Benjamin Franklin: This spinoff would involve a pimp giving his whore to a guy who looks like Benjamin Franklin, who in turn would try to pimp the whore. Each episode would star a different Franklin look-alike. Benjamin Franklin is one of our most popular historical figures. Plus, I heard he had sex with a lot of whores in France. Note: We must not confuse the two shows and accidentally run over a Benjamin Franklin look-alike with a car. Only the animals may know that fate. The Benjamin Franklin look-alikes must be spared.

Enclosures