The summer movie schedule includes one-word titles that tell you what to expect (“Godzilla,” “Armageddon”), titles that offer little hint of the plot (“Snake Eyes,” “The Hairy Bird”), titles that feel the need to elaborate (“Ever After: A Cinderella Story”) and even one title that is the mathematical symbol for the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (“Pi”).
Just as filmmakers have yet to discover a foolproof formula for making good movies, they also haven’t come up with a set way to name them.
“I think it’s the most difficult part of the whole process,” said Mark Gill, president of Miramax’s Los Angeles operations. “There’s no real pattern that gets you there.”
A title’s impact on a movie is the subject of ongoing debate. Some argue that a bad title can kill a good movie. Others feel that the title largely works or fails along with the movie itself.
“My theory is a good movie makes a good title,” said Tom Pollock, Universal’s former motion pictures chairman. “If `Titanic’ had been a bad movie, you would have seen gigantic headlines: `Titanic Sinks Again.’ A title like `Titanic’ is waiting for a bad movie so headline writers can take potshots at it.”
“Is `E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial)’ a good title?” asked Castle Rock Pictures President Martin Shafer. “Is `Forrest Gump’ a good title? It’s hard to know if these are good titles or just movies that people loved.”
In cinema’s earlier days, moviegoers often knew little about a new movie other than its title and stars. Now, the title is just one element of the marketing campaigns. For instance, Miramax’s “Good Will Hunting” made more sense in the context of ads that explained the title pun by emphasizing that Will Hunting is the name of Matt Damon’s lead character.
Nevertheless, filmmakers and studios expend much energy naming and renaming movies. A couple of months before its release, “As Good As It Gets” was called “Old Friends.” The upcoming Chris Farley comedy “Almost Heroes” has previously been known as “Edwards and Hunt” and “Lewis and Clark.”
Also on the way are a teen comedy retitled “Can’t Hardly Wait” from “The Party.” And Neil LaBute’s follow-up to his indie hit “In the Company of Men” is an adaptation of his play “Lepers,” but the screen version will be more innocuously titled “Your Friends & Neighbors.”
Most of the major studios treat the process of titling films as state secrets and refused to discuss the subject. Miramax’s Gill was more forthcoming.
“What we do is we ask everyone we know to come up with 100 titles for this movie,” said Gill, formerly Miramax’s marketing president. “Ninety-seven out of 100 are terrible, two are mediocre, and one may be worth pursuing. There’s no magic to it at all. It’s all about throwing volume against the wall and seeing if 1 percent of it sticks.”
The final decision, he added, is made by the studio chiefs along with the marketing head and the film’s top production people, such as the producer and director. Gill said the studio does not test market its ultimate choice.
“There’s no reliable way to do that,” he said. “I don’t believe in it.”
Instead, what they rely upon is their instincts about what makes a good title — though, like the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, it’s mostly a matter of knowing it when you see it.
“If they’re descriptive, that always helps,” Gill said. “If they don’t sound like every other generic movie title out there, that helps. And if it fits in the context of talking about the movie as a whole, that helps.”
Recognizing bad titles often is the easier task.
“I think the biggest sin a movie can commit is being unmemorable, unpronounceable or confusing,” Pula said. In the first category, he considered “It Could Happen to You” a terrible change from the original title of the 1994 Nicolas Cage/Bridget Fonda charmer, “Cop Tips Waitress $2 Million.” He also cited the 1973 thriller “SSSSSSS” as a classic hard-to-pronounce example.
Gill said Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” scared off moviegoers who didn’t know how to pronounce “Aphrodite.” Another movie widely considered to have suffered for its title was 1994’s “The Shawshank Redemption.”
“I didn’t think it would be a problem at the time, but we got so much feedback afterward from people who said, `What does “Shawshank” mean?’ and they had a hard time even pronouncing it,” Shafer said of the Castle Rock film, based on the Steven King novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.”
But Pula disputes the notion that the title killed “Shawshank.” “The death of that movie was that it was about two guys in a prison — and two guys in a prison in the early 1900s,” he said.
“A textbook example of a really bad movie title that certainly could have affected the box office is `Dying Young,’ ” Pula added, referring to 20th Century Fox’s 1991 tearjerker released while he was a senior vice president there. “We had the biggest star in the universe at the time (Julia Roberts), and now we have her in `Dying Young.’ People don’t like dying, they don’t like youth dying and they certainly don’t like their big stars dying” — although Roberts’ character was not the sick one.
“If you make a movie sound like it’s utterly depressing and has no entertainment value, that’s a bad idea,” Gill said. “If it seems like it’s soft and gentle and sweet and charming, those titles tend to work against you because the movie business is about provoking people off their Barcaloungers.”
One Miramax title that, in retrospect, failed the grade was the 1995 Hugh Grant comedy “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill, but Came Down a Mountain.” “Oops,” Gill said. “People felt like they knew what it was about, and they couldn’t remember it.”
That title also violated the general preference for brevity. Short titles are considered easier to recall, and marketing people like them because they don’t take up too much space on a poster or ad.
“Some producers have the theory that action movies and movies aimed at young audiences have to have to have strong one-word titles,” Pollock said derisively. “(The thinking is) they’re too stupid to remember anything longer.
“Then there are the two-word titles that have adjectives and nouns, where you take an adjective that is synonymous with death — `Fatal’ this, `Lethal’ that — and a noun that is often a phallic symbol — `Lethal Weapon.’ It’s stupid.”
The danger of short titles is that many blur together: “Breakdown,” “Bulletproof,” “Damage,” “`Daylight,” “Deceiver,” “Fear,” “Frantic,” “Malice,” “Ransom,” “Revenge,” the upcoming “Blade.” And could you quickly summarize “Fatal Attraction,” “Fatal Beauty,” “Dangerous Beauty,” “Dangerous Minds,” “Desperate Hours,” “Desperate Measures” and “Extreme Measures”?
Then again, just because a title is distinctive doesn’t make it a winner. Take “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag.” “It’s limiting,” Pula said. “It’s pretty much telegraphed decapitation. It’s not going to fall in the category of crowd pleaser.”
“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” is long, but, like “Home Alone” and “Titanic,” memorably sums up the movie’s premise. Steven Spielberg’s upcoming World War II film for Dreamworks, “Saving Private Ryan,” does the same.
“It’s a great title,” Gill said.
This summer also will feature two movies set in the disco era: Whit Stillman’s evocatively named “The Last Days of Disco” and Miramax’s portrait of troubled Studio 54 founder Steve Rubell, “54.” “Brevity is obviously a key, but there’s more than that,” Gill said. “It could be interpreted in different ways, it’s very easy to remember and pretty descriptive.”
Another brief title, “Pi,” could prove troublesome because many publications — including this one — don’t have the typographical capability to follow the releasing company’s request that the movie always be referred to as the mathematical symbol (and 16th letter in the Greek alphabet) and not the spelled-out version.
Often a title’s appeal doesn’t become apparent until after the movie is released — and embraced. Pollock noted that studio executives tried to talk filmmaker George Lucas out of “American Graffiti” because they contended that no one knew what “graffiti” meant. Lucas also caught flak for his next movie.
” `Star Wars’ — people thought it was about divorcing Hollywood couples,” Pollock said.
Shafer said there was little enthusiasm at Castle Rock when Rob Reiner renamed his movie about 1950s boyhood friendships from “The Body” to “Stand By Me,” which became a much-embraced movie.
Likewise, “Rob came up with the title `When Harry Met Sally,’ and at the time no one thought that was a good title,” Shafer said. “But after the fact, people said that’s a great title.”
Pollock said his biggest fight at Universal was over Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s fanciful novel “Shoeless Joe.”
“If you call a movie `Shoeless Joe,’ for baseball fans it’s a movie about Shoeless Joe Jackson, and for non baseball fans it’s a movie about a homeless person,” Pollock said, adding that over Kinsella’s and star Kevin Costner’s objections, he renamed it “Field of Dreams” — phrase that has since become part of the vernacular.
Director John McNaughton said the only one of his movies that received any title tweaking was his debut, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.”
“Originally we just wanted to call it `Henry,’ but because we were making it for a video distributor, there too many `Henry’ movies in the catalog, and they wanted to change it to something more exploitive,” the Chicago-based director recalled. “So the compromise was `Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,’ so the people who wanted to buy the videocassette would know what it was about. I think (the distributors) would have preferred something more like `Blood Buddies.’ “
In contrast, McNaughton said 1993’s “Mad Dog and Glory,” his first movie with an A-list cast (Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman and Bill Murray), never had its obscure title questioned from the moment it appeared on Richard Price’s script. The title refers to the main character’s names, though you’d only know that from seeing the movie.
As for McNaughton’s latest, biggest commercial hit: ” `Wild Things’ was always `Wild Things,’ ” he said. “I never really liked the title from the beginning because it sounds so exploitative. `Wild Thing’ is the song, and when you make it plural, it seemed awkward to me. But by the end I couldn’t think of anything that worked better. I’d grown used to it.”
