Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Cry Baby Lane

In 1999, I was twenty-two and I had just graduated from Emerson University in downtown Boston, majoring in Screenwriting, specifically in cartoons and children’s programming. My debt was pretty bad, so when Nickelodeon Studios offered me an internship at the studio in California, I accepted immediately. I jumped at the chance to get away from dead end job at Benjamin Franklin tour guide.

Many of you ask to see Cry Baby Lane but if you want to see the original Cry Baby Lane, you never will, even if Nickelodeon somehow consents to releasing it to you. You won’t be seeing what was shown on TV, and you sure as fuck won’t be seeing the original that Lauer made.

I don’t even think Nickelodeon HAS the original cut of the movie anymore, and if they do it’s in only back-up copies; if the back up copies exist they must be locked away in some vault along with all the deleted episodes of Ren And Stimpy and the never-before-mentioned episodes of Spongebob Squarepants. I’m pretty sure the director, Peter Lauer, has the original copy and it’s probably on his mantle next to his snuff films, that creepy ass fuck.

Anyway, I was hired in 1999 and immediately I was put on a creative production team for the movie Cry Baby lane. It would be almost a year before the movie was due to be broadcast; all in all, it was a pretty low effort kind of thing. There were only four people on the creative team and I was the only steady one; Lauer would replace them on a whim. He said it was to keep it fresh. I thought it was because he was hiding something...and I was right.

We had a little over a year to make a made for TV movie - not just to write it and cast it but to film it and get it edited. Lauer didn’t work fast at all; after the first three weeks we only had the ideas for the first 15 minutes of a 85 minute movie. Lauer, even at this point, was a weirdo. He was tall and lanky, and he carried himself awkwardly - he stuttered when he talked and sometimes, when you were hunched over a piece of paper during those endless ‘brainstorming sessions,’ you’d look up and you'd catch him staring at you, smiling.

He’d look away when you caught his eye, and I guess that was the creepiest part; he always looked like he had something to hide. The brainstorm sessions, at first, were alright. We got the premise of it down pat: two bothers unleash a demon and they get into mischief trying to get everything back to normal. Not exactly daytime Emmy stuff, but you know, it was an alright start. I thought the movie should be goofy and spooky, kind of like a Courage the Cowardly dog sort of deal. However, from the very beginning, Lauer made it clear that he wanted the film to be as scary as possible. He didn’t want it to be cheap thrills, with a good wholesome ending. He wanted to push it farther than Are You Afraid of The Dark ever dreamed of...and I guess he did.

It was about 3 weeks into production when I first noticed something: Lauer had the absolute power of persuasion over everyone else in the creative production team. No one fought him and by the third week, he was already suggesting some morbid things. I remember he said he wanted the the little brother to die halfway through the movie, getting hit with a dump truck. I immediately shot it down. I was the only one who said anything, and it stayed that was until I left the studio entirely and never came back.

At first, cannibalism other fucked up shit was kept to jokes and tasteless comments but as time went on, it became more and more overt. I’d give him an idea idea (which most of the time he would end up using) like “How about the movie starts with a morbid undertaker who reads them stories,” to which he’d reply, “Yeah...and then he can cut them up into little pieces and force-feed them to his dog!” He made those jokes a few times in the early stages. Then he got serious.

He’d stand up like he was Jesus or something, clear his throat loudly, and proclaim his idea. I’d be the only one to shoot it down. Every-fucking-time.

One day near the end of our brainstorming sessions, Lauer cleared his voice and stood up. We all fell silent, and looked at him, like we normally would. He stood up, and said,

“Gentlemen and females, I have an idea.”

I remember what he did - he paused, and looked right at me as he said,

“The story will revolve around the legend of a pair of Siamese Twins. Have you ever heard of the Donner Party?”

Everyone nodded, except for me. I didn’t like where the conversation was going.
“They ate themselves when it got cold. They ate each other.”

Everyone nodded again. I closed my eyes.

“What would Siamese Twins do if they had nothing to eat? Would one wait until the other twin dies, then consume her own sister’s flesh? Would they claw out each other's eyes until one of them died, then dine upon them like a vulture tearing at the skin of a dead deer? I do not know. It is interesting indeed.”

I didn’t know what the fuck I was hearing. I opened my eyes and looked around the room; no one was fucking moving. Everyone’s eyes were on Lauer except for mine, and when I looked at him, he was still staring at me.

“Children like violence, they revel in it. Children like to be scared. So we’ll scare them, wont we, Jonny?” He leaned over the table, getting pretty damn close to my face. His breath smelt like decaying shit. I stared back at him.

“I think your fucked up, to be honest.”

He smiled, then backed away.

“Oh, I’m fucked up alright, but you have to be fucked up to survive in this cutthroat world!” His grin expanded.

“Literally. Right now, I’m going to show you some pictures that will spark some of your imaginations.”

He got up, and locked the door from the inside.

I stood up, and said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Let’s not make any...errors in judgement, Jonathan. Sit down.”

“No-”

“Sit.”

For some reason, I did; Lauer pulled out one of those shitty overhead projectors. He turned on the switch and he speak-shouted, in a unusually high and semi-frantic voice,

“This is the fucking MUSE we NEED to CONTINUE with THIS PRO-FUCKING-DUCTION!
THIS IS WHAT EVERY CHILD SHOULD SEE.”

His eyes bulged in his head.

He put the image down on the glass surface of the overhead.

It was silent.

The image was in black and white, but it was grainy. I could vaguely make out a boy lying on a brick floor, his arms cut off and his bloody little nub black dots. The only thing that was clear was his face. He was bleeding from the mouth.

Lauer almost threw the paper off the overhead, slamming down another one.

It was a zoomed-in shot of the boy's face. It was in color. The blood trickled from his open mouth onto the brick floor, his eyes shut, grimy blood underneath his eyebrows and eyelashes.

Then, his eyes opened, and I screamed. No one else in the fucking room did, and it died in infancy, the shrillness ringing in the air.

The pupils were completely black. The rest of the eye was normal.

The longer I stared, the more the eyes opened, widening and widening untill it looked like the skin above his eyebrows and eye sockets was going to rip in half.

Then they started to bleed. Blood started as a trickle, and I swear to god I could hear it. More, now it was like a full blown stream. More. More, until the brick on the floor was a lake of blood. I could hear it, like I was hiking and I came across a stream, and now I could smell the kid. I could fucking smell his rot.

I leaned underneath the table and vomited. When I rose back up, the images were gone. Everyone else in the room was expressionless. Lauer turned on the lights.

“You may go,” he said, unlocking the door.

I walked through those fucking doors, and I never came back.

This happened near the end of the brainstorming process and by the time I left the casting was done and the script was almost fully written. They were desperately behind schedule; I think Lauer planned it that way, so there wouldn’t be time for proper editing. I never watched the real thing when it aired, but I heard from a friend who was working at the editing department that they had to cut a good 15-20 minutes of ‘disturbing’ footage from the film before it was fit to be released, and it was only fit to be released. They didn’t have enough time to check the footage frame by frame.

I guess he got his wish, unless they cut every single scene that had the pictures in them. Every child watching Crybaby Lane has an unconscious memory of those pictures, and I weep for them, I really do; they fucked me up, and as I write this to you, it will be last thing I’ll ever write before I slit my throat and before blood spatters all over this fucking computer screen.

There’s something I should tell you first, though.

Early on, Lauer posed an idea of the two brothers capturing a squirrel, putting said squirrel in a jar, and slowly drowning it before filling the jar with sand and dropping it into the bottom of a pond. Soon after this was suggested, Sandy from Spongebob Squarepants appeared in ‘Tea at The Treedome.’

Lauer also suggested, in one scene of the movie, for a man with a ‘squid-like-nose’ to take off his pants in front of the two boys and rape them off camera, but heavily implied. Squidward soon appeared as a major character in Spongebob Squarepants.

It was suggested that the two be stepbrothers, forced to live in the same house after the first one’s mom was found dead in a shallow grave, her body heavily cannibalized by her own husband, a local weatherman. A show with the vaguely premise, Drake and Josh, started in 2004, and the step-father is indeed a weatherman.

Lauer also suggested the younger brother have a dog house in which he keeps various animal fetuses incased in acid that he regularly uses to poison his mother to have sex with his abusive stepfather. As Told By Ginger debuted soon after.

A man who captures the soles of children in a vacuum cleaner and sends them to hades? Danny Phantom.

A robot who goes insane on the two brothers, kills one of them wears his skin, pretending to be the dead brother at highschool? My Life As a Teenage Robot.

The list goes on and on. Nickelodeon knows, and they’re continuing the legacy of Lauer, sometimes subtly, and sometimes overtly. And there’s nothing you and I can do about it.

That creepy-ass fuck.

58 comments:

  1. Oh for Pete's sake, they spam /x/ with this shity pseudo story and now here too? I thought you were better than this...what a shame, please stop post shitty creppypasta like this (and start adding more variety, for example, Minecraft creepypasta isn't either fun or scary anymore, not even for /x/)

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    1. It is NOT shitty. This is one of the best creepy pastas I've ever read. The movie is now available for download and people HAVE been scared by the movie. When it aired, people had nightmares.

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    2. People are scared from almost everything. This is just like all creepypasta a dull story. If you want to see something scare, go watch the news. THOSE stories are REAL!

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  2. But I love Danny Phantom D:

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  3. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0221097/

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  4. Well. That imdb link automatically makes this story creepy as fuck. Look at the user boards, and what people are saying.

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  5. Well you got to admit this is creepy, the movie is creepy but not this backstory, yes it may be disturbing but not creepy. The thing I find creepy about this story is that it talks about talks about Laurer "Legacy". The reason why there have been creepy episodes and or creepy things in some Nick shows is because of this man's influence. The Funeral home episode and that sucidal poem Ginger writes in As Told by Ginger. Hyper realistic shots of SpongeBob and the story behind the Flying Dutchmen's remains (Using his dead body as a mannequin) in Spongebob Squarepants. How would this "Laurer" character have so much influence in the world of animation and film making. This movie is creepy to me because when I was ten I saw it, but I don't remember seeing it if that makes any sense.

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  6. lol I did and someone replied "you all know this fucking shit is fake right?" to people who were talking about it 3 years ago lmao

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  7. "the soles of children"

    HE STOLE THIER SHOES OH GOD

    This is the worst one yet. SHEESH.

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  8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUv20TbLTpw

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  9. )))((((((
    (-)...(-)
    ....U....
    ..[___]..---{That's show biz, fo' sho'}

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  10. Oh god! Spelling errors, hit the deck!

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  11. THIS PASTA IN A NUTSHELL:

    "Some creepy ass fuck made a movie. His initial ideas slightly resemble other shows' ideas. I'mma kill mahself."

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  12. The movie actually does exist. I've seen it, plus evidence is above. Peter Lauer is the only person I came up with who fits any of the descriptions. Oddly, I've found only one photo of him on the internet. He's either private or creepy and based on this movie and what I remember of it, he's got some creepiness to him. Also he doesn't just work on Nickelodeon stuff. He's done episodes of many famous comedy shows like Scrubs. Despite the fact the truth about Lauer is pretty mundane, the movie was creepy at the time (though probably not now) and, I gotta say, with a little more work this would've been a good one. As it stands, what makes it good is that you can trace it to something tangible and wonder.

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  13. Hi stop starving me plz. I want more pastas.

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  14. I kinda liked this, especially the links to all the other shows, but the IMDB link made it hella scary.

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  15. Squidward and Sandy both appeared in the first episode of Spongebob. There was no distance in episodes between them, so saying "soon after this idea got made" makes no sense.

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  16. @Anonymous: DON'T USE GAY AS AN INSULT!!!!!!!!!!

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  17. Replies
    1. DUDE FUCK OFF how bout i use straight as an insult? Yeah, well idiots like you shouldnt even be allowed to live, as far as im concerned bastard.

      Delete
    2. GAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

      Delete
  18. I just love the comment on that video! Frakking hilarious! Still, it was one frakked up movie.

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  19. I watched this movie years and years ago.
    I still have nightmares; it really was messed up.
    I'm one that made one of the bigger threads in /x/ and this movie is not a joke. It's 100% legit.

    A lot of this pasta seems like shit, though. Especially all the stuff towards the end.

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  20. You have to be a complete idiot to believe this shit.

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  21. Well, either the movie exists, or there are some serious trolls making this thing LOOK real.

    Even the link to Cry Baby Lane on Peter Lauer's Wikipedia page doesn't exist. The fuck.

    Oh yeah, story is meh. But the real film being missing. Pretty creepy.

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  22. Just so you know, if one Siamese twin dies, the other one would circulate their dead tissue and die too.

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  23. Yeah, the movie exists, but this is all bullshit.
    Next they'll come up with a creepypasta about how all the mexican cheerleaders from the Disney movie about mexican cheerleaders practiced Santeria and then got raped by the living dead.

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  24. FACT: This story was written by Peter Lauer to fuck with people.

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  25. This move is real, I saw it and it gave me nightmares for a week. It was one of the best things ever shown on Nick though, without a doubt. Very well done for a made for TV movie. It's a real shame that it can't be seen now. I honestly wonder what makes Nick so ashamed of their past...

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  26. http://andrewbarrett.com/pages/music.shtml
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUv20TbLTpw

    Not sure if the story itself is real but the movie, at the very least, was.

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  27. I actually vaguely remember this movie. I was about 11 or 12 when it was released, and I only ever really watched two channels at that age -- Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network (Toonami).

    The creepypasta is creative in the sense that it might creep out people who never saw the actual movie. With the backstory behind it and its consequent censorship, it's no surprise.

    However, the movie wasn't scary at all from what I remember. It was like a forgettable episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? (which I found to be much scarier, although I was like 7 or 8 during that time). The only reason it got such bad publicity was because it was heavily advertised and debuted on Halloween weekend, so I'm sure a lot of kids stayed up past their bed time to watch it.

    The only creepy part was the gravestone scene, which can be seen on youtube. I remember watching and the vivid description of the siamese twins was unnerving. The rest of the movie, however, dealt with a demon, and it was probably pretty cheesy (again, it's vague, and -everything- was cheesy in 90s/early 2000s, so I can't judge.)

    If they ever released this you all would be severely disappointed.

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  28. Well, you may be all be about to be "severely disappointed".

    A reddit user has a copy she recorded on VHS. She's currently working on ripping and uploading it to the 'net.

    See this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/jedpc/til_nickelodeon_released_a_tv_movie_in_2000_that

    And the proof she put up on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDlIV-o73Zw

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  29. I've never seen the movie,but I've always been interested in the story and reason behind WHY it was never seen again and why Nick is so ashamed of it.I hope Nick decides to release this movie on TV again.

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  30. don't know about the backstory, but the movie most definitely existed. i watched it with my dad when i was 10, but he fell asleep right away, and i was left alone.. I WAS SO FREAKED OUT. it was terrible.

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  31. AND THEN HE WENT ON TO DIRECT ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT EPISODES YEP SURE SOUNDS LIKE A PSYCHOPATH TO ME.

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  32. what a fucking joke... is this supposed to be believable?

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  33. lol.. I saw that episode. it was shit, like some goosebumps episode. AYAotD had much scarier episodes than that pile of shit. They probably pulled it because it cast conjoined twins in a negative light.

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  34. OVER. its over. thank you /x/ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  35. Yo fuckers:
    I wrote this. It's Creepy Pasta. SHITTY Creepy pasta. Anyone who believes or did believe this is an idiot.

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  36. it is uploaded in piratebay by a redditor. You can now watch it.

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  37. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huXjqwg6elo&feature=player_embedded

    There you go ;)

    THANK YOU, REDDIT!

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  38. http://youtu.be/-OwcQRYoV0U

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  39. I just watched the movie, not so scary if you ask me. It had its moments (The twin was creepy) But nothing more than that. I have no reason why it would be banned. Why not air it again? I mean it's not that bad, a little creepy. Nothing to cause nightmares though. Did they not air it because of Lauer?

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  40. I actually own this movie on a dvd that i burned. I guess that's as close as you can get. At some parts it was funny like how the lil bro was wearing racy red briefs and some guys smoking on a porch saw him and their eyes glowed. My friend was like "I smell children!" Hilarious!
    You can download it on the pirate bay. There's only one there so no guesswork. It even opens with mellisa joan heart.

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  41. Oh great Squidward originated from this movie?

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  42. For people who don't know, this is on t.v again. At least for this Halloween. Teen nick is bringing back classic shows, and I looked through the schedule and Cry Baby Lane was on it. So I recorded it all excited, even though I watched it online before. Just a heads up guys, I read this story before, so I think it's really awesome they decided to put it on the schedule for a Halloween line up.

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  43. It's not fake, it's real, ot was aired. banned. it's all trues!

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  44. Cry baby lane is real its not fucked up it. It was aired and was aired again this past year on halloween on this special that teennick had called the 90's is all that.

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  45. I saw that 90's thing there was kevin and kel or something also doug was there I have all the episodes for doug on my computer I remember seeing like two seconds of cry baby lane before my dad kicked me off the tv

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  46. Movie was real backstory was fake. I was a late nineties kid (early 97 I recall these shows) and this raping of the boys thing is bullshit. He wouldn't have gotten fired? Really?!?! Think about the real world here. Joe patterno was fired because he was barely involved at all with Sandusky and jopa didn't do anything. This stories bullshit. Good, but bullshit. And your really gonna slit your throat? K bro

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  47. Great story! Are you published? I love this story right up until I read the comments and found out it was bullshit. Sasha

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  48. I just watched this movie. Yeah, not scary. This story is a bit of an exaggeration.

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  49. That is the biggest load of shit i've ever heard in my life.

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  50. Dude this maybe fake but its creepy as tuck its not gay but I have read a lot of ones that are gay and if you say don't say gay as an insult its a good one all faggots need to burn in hell

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