[…] Those words, describing New York City’s most notorious mental institution, were written by journalist Nellie Bly in 1887. It was no mere armchair observation, because Bly got herself committed to Blackwell’s and wrote a shocking exposé called Ten Days In A Madhouse. The series of articles became a best-selling …read more […]

The investigative reporter locked up is a classic, I bet BECAUSE of Nellie Bly's series of articles. I think it was a pretty common plot device for the really old women in prison movies (the ones before Pam Grier), because you needed the main character to be innocent. Even Escape Plan, the recent movie with Sylvester Stallone, had him as an expert on prisons who has himself locked up in order to escape (incidentally, if there was ever an A-list actor more suited for the part of an innocent character who's sent to an asylum just because no one can understand them, it's Sylvester Stallone. I suppose if you wanted to do the women in an asylum angle, it would probably be Sophia Vergara. This is actually prompting my memory about a few things: one was the trickster character for a prison-centric story I had been thinking about doing, this girl who was pretending to be crazy so no one messed with her. A survival mechanism. She's been there so long her uniform is different from anyone else's, she only has one name on her ID manacle, and her number is just four digits long while everyone else's is 6. And she's not that old! She's definitely suited for something that isn't set in the present. Another was about a prison just for cops: cops don't do well in prison at all, so what if there was a conspiracy or web of corruption so large that they needed to dedicate a complex (admittedly, not a big one, maybe just a whole wing) just for them. There would be this whole other mentality than we normally think of for jail, I think. And what if they're innocent and the bad guys are still out there? They got sold out and screwed over in the trial. You could send in an undercover reporter to find out, but winds up getting mixed up in an escape attempt or something like that. And the third was another article I read some time ago about a private prison that basically organized fights between prisoners, I think they were teenagers, sort of a prison fight club. Now how did we figure that out? Either a whistleblower or a reporter. There's HUGE problems with for-profit prisons that could inspire an undercover investigator to find out, so imagine she goes to this place. Maybe it's co-ed, since it's sold to parents and judges as a rehab spa-like thing, "don't send kids to a brutal cold concrete jail, send them here where they can be safe and get the guidance they need to keep them from becoming criminals" when it's actually a brutal campus. She's there to investigate what's going on and finds these kids and young adults being constantly abused and toyed with by a rotating set of guards (there's a lot of turnover with staff, who usually aren't certified or trained properly), the old ones wanna show the new ones all the screwed up stuff they get to do, so there's constant set of adrenaline and excitement from their end, fresh boots to stomp the prisoners down with. So she goes there to help shed light on this, but winds up being drafted, so now she's got to fight other prisoners to survive, so she can get out and help all of them.

Wonderful prompt! The first idea that comes to mind is the story Nellie Bly couldn't tell about the other people she met on the inside (both sane and insane.) Was there some conspiracy that put them in the asylum? Does she meet someone else that is there (hiding) by choice? Is an inmate actually running the asylum? And what happened during her stay that convinced her to keep such a devastating secret? There are so many potential avenues to explore... this will definitely make it into my idea file. Thanks, Scott.

A modern day undercover journalist: Günter Wallraff. He denounces social injustices, has written books about his undercover experiences: as a steel factory worker, a guinea pig in the pharmaceutical industry, among others. So maybe it doesn't need to be a period piece, just find a modern day location to go undercover, like the gulag. And I don't really know if things have improved in psychiatric institutions.

One sentence grabbed my attention: "There were foreign women, completely sane, who were committed simply because they couldn’t make themselves understood." So what if we're talking about an American tourist in a third world country that is tricked, drugged and then sent to the madhouse because nobody believes her (no passport, no id, in a country with no US embassy).

Or let's turn this into a parody. What if a reporter infiltrated the Evil Empire and wanted to show the harsh conditions to which Stormtroopers, Snowtroopers, Scout troopers and even Imperial guards are put by the Emperor and Darth Vader?

And then again all of this could be framed in a "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" way. Meaning our Protagonist tells about how he became an undercover reporter, how he suffered a lot of things - and the tale turns very, very wild, even surreal. In the end it's revealed that all of that is a product of his imagination. And he's insane.