Gastroliths as McGuffins, and Cabeza de Sauropod recipes.

[Karen Casino <kcasino@comcast.net>]

Hey, all!

I can't tell you how grateful I am for the responses I've been getting 
to my questions so far. They've given me a lot of meat to work with.

I do feel that based on a number of comments I've been getting that I 
should clarify some of the plot elements I'm working with. There's a 
story concept that Alfred Hitchcock called a McGuffin -- it's an item 
or concept that is of value to a number of different characters, and it 
forms a focus for action in the course of the story. Ever see the Woody 
Allen movie What's Up Tiger Lily? In that film, the action centers 
around a recipe for egg salad. A map leading to a treasure chest or a 
lost mine? The crown jewels? A vial of medicine? The keys to the vault? 
They're all McGuffins, and what they are isn't as important as the fact 
that people will do things to get them.

In my script, the McGuffin is some sort of valuable mineral that's 
present in the gastroliths in at least one herd of seismosaurs. Until I 
find out about something that makes more sense, I'm using emeralds. 
(Any suggestions or ideas here are plenty welcome.)

The story is set in a version of the Morrison environment that is being 
used as a dumping ground for undesireables, the way that North America 
and Australia used to be used by the British Empire. Up the time 
stream, maybe fifty or seventy-five years from now, there is a market 
for gastroliths comparable to the market for quartz crystals that is 
associated with the New Age community. In other words, they aren't 
valuable for what they are; they're valuable for what people think 
about them. One minor plot detail involves the idea that when 
gastroliths are harvested, the harvest has to be filmed in order to 
verify their provenance. Film, not video -- video is too easy to fake. 
Undeveloped virgin film is regarded (perhaps wrongly) as verification. 
While it may be possible to find piles of disgorged gastroliths 
littering the landscape, they aren't given the same value. And it's not 
like the people who buy the gastroliths in order to partake of the 
energies of the sacred behemoths connect the little verification 
sticker with an animal being slaughtered and gutted...

Anyway, when my lead characters are harvesting from a Seismosaur, they 
find that it's been ingesting, as I said, emeralds. Or whatever more 
convincing alternative I'm presented with.

The assumption here is that the animals will tend to ingest particular 
gastroliths from particular locations in a habitual fashion -- that if 
one Seismosaur has been gulping down emeralds, that others in the herd 
will have done the same, and that they will tend to return to the 
source of the emeralds in order to get more. I'm also assuming that 
this will be part of their seasonal migration.

Since this is kind of a significant element of the plot, I'd appreciate 
any help you could give me in rationalizing the situation as well as 
telling me why it ain't feasible... but any thoughts on this will be 
more than welcome.

A minor joke that will probably only be appreciated by y'all is that in 
my scenario, sauropod heads are plenty tasty. (PETA ain't gonna be 
giving me any funding any time soon, I guess.) Think of the way the 
buffalo hunters would kill an animal and eat nothing but the tongue... 
I'm thinking that the way to cook a sauropod head would be to braise or 
barbecue it. Any thoughts on what kind of Morrison wood would be 
suitable for barbecue? Nobody's bragging about their ceder-smoked 
brisket. How would you cook a sauropod noggin? (Okay, now I'm getting 
silly. But still, cabeza de Seismosaur tacos with guacamole. Mmmm.... 
Make the new guy eat the eyes. Tell him it's a compliment; they're the 
best part.)

Also, I'm at the point where I have a rough treatment of the story. 
I'll have a more finished version by Wednesday, and a full treatment by 
next Wednesday. If anybody's interested, I'd be happy to send it to 
you.

Thanks again,

Sean Craven