Scrap

The Film/TV Rights are currently under option.

With the author’s intoxicating, compulsive, and blackly comic flair, SCRAP follows Esther Ray as she pieces together the life of a stranger – uncovering dark and sinister truths. As you may remember, OTHER PEOPLE’S CLOTHES was one of the most anticipated novels of 2021, was part of a big auction for film and TV and is currently in development with Mark Gordon Pictures. Screenwriter Alexa Karolinksi (UNORTHODOX) is writing, and Calla is also closely involved in the process.

Esther Ray legally can’t talk about what made her drop out of the glitzy New York art world and start making books by hand, but she’s sworn off working for the rich and now she’s happy. She’s just bought a cabin in the mountains with her fiancée Jessica and they’re planning on having a baby.

But when Jessica abruptly breaks it off, leaving her with the cabin’s mortgage, Esther is forced to accept a job from Naomi Duncan, yet another member of the art adjacent criminally wealthy. Naomi ships over two hundred boxes of ephemera from her family’s life, and under the guise of extreme birthday secrecy, instructs Esther to produce a series of scrapbooks for her husband’s surprise party. Esther quickly becomes obsessed with the Duncans, fixating on their lavish lives, and their eighteen-year-old Tik-Tok influencer daughter, Tabitha.

While binging true crime podcasts and sorting through the contents of the boxes, Esther comes to realize it’s not just family photos that Naomi has been hoarding. When Naomi suddenly dies before the project is complete, Esther becomes convinced she was murdered. Inspired by the amateur detectives that narrate her bloody podcasts, Esther uses what she has learned from the scrapbooks to embed herself in the Duncan’s life, in an attempt to find out who killed Naomi and why.

Calla Henkel is an American writer, playwright, director, and artist who lives and works in Berlin. She has staged plays at Volksbühne Berlin, The Whitney Museum of Art, as well as at New Theater, the experimental theatre space she founded and programmed in Berlin from 2013-2015. Her art writing has been published in periodicals such as Texte zur Kunst, Spike, Mousse, and others and her artistic work with Max Pitegoff has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. She currently operates a bar, performance space, and film studio called TV in Berlin.