Are You related to Cutter Spindell?

 


In 2005 I was going through a rather contentious divorce. I have to admit it affected my mood. I would meet every week end with my brother and we would  riff on movie ideas. I was in a somewhat unhappy place and most of my ideas were influenced by  my cynical state of mind but were funny, in a dark way.  

We came up with an idea and a character called the "bad humor man" because both of tended to like dark humor jokes. Together we came up with a movie scenario involving the "bad humor man". He was either a doctor or an orderly whose wife had kicked him out of his house and now he walked into patients rooms and cracked cynical jokes sort of like Don Rickles. The patients initially would be angry but after awhile would look forward to his visits and invariably their condition would improve partly due to the "healing power of humor. I felt that the character would be like a dark version of Patch Adams. There was more to his story but that is not the point of my post.

Since neither my brother nor I would likely ever make it out to Hollywood to pitch our ideas ( we are not the Coen brothers after all) I thought I would run this idea by my patients, especially those in the entertainment industry. One of the people I told my "pitch" to was Rob Coudrey,who was working on the Daley show at the time. He didn't say much and shortly afterwards he moved to California. 

A couple of years later I was doing a Google search for my image and I kept finding an image of a demented looking clown doctor under my name and I didn't think too much about it until I researched further and found that "Cutter Spindell" was an actor that played a clown doctor on Children's hospital ( an internet show). It was originated in part by Rob Coudrey who played the clown doctor. I watched an episode or two and the show wasn't exactly what I had  in mind, but it seemed to be successful and it went on to become a tv show on the swim network.

I never have spoken to Rob since he moved out to Hollywood, but his career has done well and I regularly see him on TV and in the Cinema. While I am not sure he remembers our conversation, but he did give his character my last name, albeit with a different spelling. I am not sure whether I am flattered or not, but it is a good story, I think. 




from Ask Dr. Spindel - http://lspindelnycdds.blogspot.com/2021/03/are-you-related-to-cutter-spindell.html - http://lspindelnycdds.blogspot.com/

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