The Most Haunted Writers’ Room in Hollywood
Do You Dare to Enter… Room 101B?
The Capital Studios lot has its fair share of ghost stories, but legend has it no place is more haunted than the derelict Room 101B. Home to TV writers’ rooms since 1947, and radioplay writers’ rooms before that, countless macabre occurrences have been reported over its long and bloody history. Lights flickering, sudden shifts in temperature, and an unmistakably chilling voice echoing throughout the vents, repeatedly trying to pitch the same sexist joke as though the fifth time he says it it’ll suddenly become funny.
“If those walls could speak… they’d tell a lot of dick jokes,” said Harold Joyce, staff writer on ‘Mitch & Franny’, 1959’s hit sitcom about a lovable chimney-sweep forced to live with a hard-nosed nun. “In fact, sometimes they did.”
The most notorious of room 101B’s ghosts is a malicious being that writers called ‘Dr. No.’ During table reads and punch-up sessions, a spectral voice was heard to loudly proclaim ‘Ehhhh…’ and ‘I don’t love it,’ and ‘Can anyone beat that?’. He is believed to have been a co-executive producer from a long forgotten multicam who now haunts the room, unable to move on until he finds a better joke.
Past inhabitants of the room also recounted that when the room ran late, ghostly rails of cocaine would appear on the table in front of them at the stroke of midnight. “When we tried to snort them, we’d bleed from our eyes and speak in tongues,” said William Munson, co-producer on 1982’s ‘Twelve’s Company’. “We stayed up all night pitching what we thought were hilarious jokes… but in the morning the notes were just a crude drawing of a penis.” Munson paused. “Actually, maybe that was just regular cocaine.”
Studio staff have attempted to have the room exorcised, but any priest who enters has fled the room screaming mere minutes later, after being subjected to forty-year-old stand-up sets from spectral comics working on a tight five for the comedy store.
But perhaps the most frightening of these unusual happenings is a poltergeist named Norma who commits unspeakable evil… by removing the names from lunches and coffees and mixing them all up. Some claim she was a vengeful Writer’s Assistant who died before she ever got a shot at being promoted to staff writer. To this day, her victims number in the dozens — all PAs who have been fired over her supernatural shenanigans — one less competitor for a promotion that will never come…