When characters say the name of the movie
This handy montage might make you think twice about letting your characters use the title of the movie in dialogue.
(via fourfour)
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November 6th, 2009 at 6:22 am
You realize now someone’s going to have to cut together all the clips from The Nines where people say “nine.” ;)
November 6th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Nice. But how would a writer know exactly which line — if any — is/will become the actual title of the movie? For instance, I’m a freelance writer, and never has my proposed title been used (verbatim) in the actual newspaper or magazine publication. And my titles don’t all suck. A more interesting post would have been about the vetting process titles go through, including the ensuing headaches for writers when their carefully-crafted titles get tweaked or tanked. Of course, the opposite is also true. F.S. Fitzgerald had a slew of bad titles for THE GREAT GATSBY — including UNDER THE RED, WHITE AND BLUE and HIGH-BOUNCING LOVER (I’m not kidding) before Perkins, his editor, rescued the great ironic title from the dust-bin of bad names.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Out of context, I agree they’re all comical. It always slaps the audience in the face in a certain way, but I’m not sure I’m totally dissuaded yet…I’m one of at least two (or was) who enjoys the title-in-the-dialogue moment. I get a kick out of it.
Then again, I’m a huge fan of Mystery Men. Draw your own conclusions.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:00 am
The Upright Citizens’ Brigade did a bit about this. Something about a guy in a video store claimed he was in Star Wars and had the titular line. The video store guy called him on it, and he said he could prove it. He brought in some tape where he had spliced in a video of himself (I think in some kind of home-made aluminum space suit?) saying “Gee, I sure am tired of all these STAR WARS”. Then later in the episode he had a video where he said “I sure am glad to be OUT OF AFRICA”.
Family Guy did a bit about this a few episodes ago too. Peter said he loved it when they say the name of the movie in the movie, and I think it cut to Peter watching Clear And Present Danger. Then later in the episode someone used the phrase “The Family Guy” and Peter giggled.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:53 am
I thought twice. I still think it doesn’t matter.
November 6th, 2009 at 11:01 am
They also missed this one: http://buboblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/buboblog-reviews-i-love-you-man.html
November 6th, 2009 at 11:21 am
interesting. some of my favorite movies of all time are in that vid. if anything, it makes me think I should have the film title in the dialogue.
November 6th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Agreed with gilliebean. I love that part of As Good As It Gets, in fact, I would go so far as to say that is my favorite part of an excellent, touching film. Why not use a line of dialogue that is also the title? As long as it doesn’t sound forced.
In “Good Morning Vietnam” for example, that was Williams’ catchphrase. It would have not made sense to title the movie anything else.
You can end up naming your Depression drama: “The Dust Bowl Really Was Truly Terrible” and no one would raise an eyebrow or you can pick out a good line from the story and go with that.
November 6th, 2009 at 11:27 am
I don’t remember the movie being called The Basic Instincts.
November 6th, 2009 at 11:39 am
They missed my favourite, when Nic Cage says “I want to take his face… off!” And then he says it again.
November 6th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Years ago I read an interview with Penn Jillette in which he said that whenever a character says the title of a movie, he and his friends applaud.
November 6th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Although an entertaining montage, I don’t believe the title within dialogue is trite, overused, unnecessary or a screenwriting faux pas. In fact, the alternative would seem avoiding what’s natural (and entertaining). I’m grateful Zemeckis & Gale didn’t think twice when having Dr. Emmett Brown utter, “Back to the future!” A legendary quote.
And although it’s not film, when René first mentions “variant” in your short story (which I’d highly recommend to anyone: http://johnaugust.com/variant), it helped align pieces of plot floating around my head.
John, I don’t mean to attack, just curious: What did you mean by think twice?
November 6th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I’ve got one of those movie ideas that hasn’t made it past the single index card stage. It’s called SO LONG SUCKERS! And the hero says the title not once, but eleven times. At the end of each reel. At the same instant the cigarette burn appears. And then he jumps out a plate glass window or jumps out of a plane with the last parachute or something. I’m thinking he’s going to be a time-traveling thief…
November 6th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
@Nima:
The Nines will be brutal, but Go has it a lot, too.
@Joshua:
I would think twice about stretching to get your title in dialogue. Fried Green Tomatoes and Basic Instinct are the two that give me the most pause.
November 6th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Oh, well… As long as you don’t actually try too hard to get the title mentioned in the dialogue, it’s fine by me. The Back to the Future one definitely rocks my socks. And every time someone on the tv series Doctor Who asks the title question, I get a great big grin on my face. (Not so much when they ask “Yeah, but… doctor what?” That’s plain wrong. I think.)
As an amateur filmmaker I’ve been guilty of title-calling too. Which was just the sort of self-aware wink Courtly Love needed, really. Damn glad I didn’t do it in Black & White: Silent, though. (I know, I know, I need to work on my titles!)
Jurassic Park totally makes sense, Forrest Gump makes sense, Notting Hill, King Arthur… But to me, it’s even funnier when there’s title-calling in a movie other than the one being called. See Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra for a completely fitting way of encorporating “the empire strikes back” into the dialogue.
November 6th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
In all fairness to the “…basic instincts” clip, that scene was definitely not from the original film. If it was from the sequel… well, this issue was the least of its problems.
November 6th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I don’t think the title Jerry Maguire is spoken in the movie. Not that I recall, anyway.
November 6th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
On Family Guy they did, As Good As It Gets, then Clear and Present Danger, then (following the rule of three) went for the immortal line of dialogue :”The only way I can defeat him is to become, Superman 4: The Quest for Peace”.
TV tropes have page dedicated to them; http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TitleDrop
November 6th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
“Agreed with gilliebean. I love that part of As Good As It Gets, in fact, I would go so far as to say that is my favorite part of an excellent, touching film. Why not use a line of dialogue that is also the title? As long as it doesn’t sound forced.”
IIRC, AGAIG was called OLD FRIENDS before James Brooks took over, which probably means they didn’t come up with “As good as it gets” as the title and then try to shoehorn it into the dialogue. I also think it’s a pretty good title and that that scene doesn’t take you out of the movie.
November 6th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Wait…what films are these clips from?
November 6th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
That was torture.
But only because the video got really boring after 40 seconds.
November 6th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
If that montage was meant as a criticism, it’s a pretty lame one. Would’ve been kinda challenging to get through The Maltese Falcon without saying the Maltese Falcon.
November 6th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
“And you people, you’re all astronauts, on some kind of star trek.”
November 6th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Nobody remembers the absolute greatest example of saying the title in the movie? It’s “Beastmaster 2!” At the conclusion of the sword-and-sorcery madness in the pre-credit sequence, the evil queen (or whatever) angrily declares, “Bring me the [McGuffin] — sorry, I’ve forgotten the exact line, because I’m still laughing about the next part of the sentence. She looks directly into the camera and continues: “…and Beastmaster, too!”
Super titles.
Brilliant! Saw it in the theater.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
I think Tom Wilkinson says “In the bedroom” near the beginning of the movie, on the lobster boat.
November 6th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Imagine Gruber snarling “You really die hard, Cowboy.”
November 6th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
It’s been done so much that Animaniacs at least once did a riff on it where Yakko turns to the audience and says, “there’s your title folks. Goooooodnight everybody!”
I believe it should be avoided except where one is purposely breaking the fourth wall for comedic intent, unless the title is a common phrase that is entirely germane to the subject. It’s hard to avoid using the phrase murder-suicide in a movie about murder-suicide, but then it sucks as a movie title which is one good reason I am using it only as a working title.
November 7th, 2009 at 12:10 am
I often wish they had explained the title somewhere in the narrative… ESPECIALLY in movies about disabilities.
CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD would’ve made a lot more sense if we’d been given even the slightest inkling what the title was quoting.
Same goes for CHARIOTS OF FIRE and SOUND AND FURY.
In fact… NIAGARA NIAGARA wouldn’t have made any sense at all without it. – Until you finally come to realize that the story is about: girl with Tourette’s, who is repeating the name of her own desired destination, the title is meaningless. – But once she says it… KA-BAM. – Its heart-wrenching.
(If you haven’t seen these movies… they’re good ones. – But I might most avidly suggest familiarization with Niagara Niagara.)
November 7th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Johnny, your DIE HARD example is great and shows how really cheesy saying the title can be. Sometimes you’re not going to be able to avoid it, though. Like THE SPANISH PRISONER – if they didn’t talk about that specific con in those words, you wouldn’t get the connection to the story.
A better way to go is to use a famous quote so that we already get the connection. CHARIOTS OF FIRE and SOUND AND FURY, for example – also STRANGER THAN FICTION, KISS KISS BANG BANG, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, etc.
November 7th, 2009 at 9:48 am
In DEFINITELY MAYBE, the ending of the movie was spoiled for me by the saying of the title — Abigail Breslin’s character is wondering how her parents met, and her dad tells the story in flashback, leaving her to guess which woman in the story ended up being her mom. But as soon as Isla Fisher says “Definitely maybe” in dialogue, I knew the ending. Oops.
November 7th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
My boyfriend has a rule that you have to clap whenever anybody says the title in the movie, so when that happens at my house it is a joyous occasion.
November 7th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I saw “the Road” last night, and several characters make several references to the road in very meaningful ways. It only detracted from the movie because I’d recently read this post.
November 8th, 2009 at 10:40 am
28 Synthian
Maybe you already know this, I haven’t seen the film of CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD, but in the play, and I imagine this would have been in the playbill too there is a quote from Tennyson that goes “For why is all around us here/ as if some lesser god had made the world, /but had not the force to shape it as he would?
Also, and I don’t remember if this was in the play or something we discussed in my analysis class, but the Bible talks about us being made in Gods image and being children of God, so is someone born with disabilities born in the image of a lesser God? I’m not trying to debate this question here, I just wanted to bring it up, because I think it’s a brilliant title!
November 8th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
If a person is such a hack writer he doesn’t recognize it’s not working then the script probably has bigger issues.
If a reader is such an arbitrary rule freak that he’ll toss the script just because the title appears in dialog, he was going to toss your script anyway for some other insane reason.
I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.
November 8th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
@ Tom Manning
Yes.
Unbeknownst to most, there was a long standing tradition of looking down upon deaf children as illigitimates.
“Those born deaf are incapable of learning.” -Aristotle
“Deaf children are a sign of sin.” -St. Augustine
“Higher education of the deaf is useless.” Congressman Elihu Washburn -1860
For centuries they were literally treated as a consequence rather than a gift, and beings drawn after a lesser God. — And I think that’s important.
I’ve always been fascinated by how powerful our own wrongness can be… That’s why I picked Children of a Lesser God as an example… because the “title line” was in the play, but cut from the film… and (in my mind) the movie suffered for it.
November 8th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
@Synthian
Gotcha. I agree, when you understand the title, it really deepens the impact of the play, the movie should have followed suit.
On a side note, my theatre professor was a friend of Mark Medoff. Apparently Medoff was furious when he walked on set and found them filming the scene in the pool. He felt that them connecting together in the silence of the water destroyed the theme of isolation James and Sarah faced in the play.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Yes again.
Clearly, Marley Matlin deserves her Oscar. – But some people just plain didn’t understand why.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:48 am
So you clap when the characters say the name of the movie? What about Wizard of Oz? You’d spend all your time clapping.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
If “Back to the Future!” is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
I remember reading long ago that Penn Jillette would have friends go to midnight movies in Times Square, and whenever they said the title of the movie, his entire group of friends would yell “Title!”
I’ve since adopted that, and continue to do it to this day.
Quite looking forward this line in a few weeks: “You truly ARE a ninja assassin!”
November 9th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
My favorite non-title use is in You Can Count on Me, which ends with Terry saying “Remember when we were kids? Remember what we used to say to each other?” and Sammy just nodding, but not answering… and the audience knows what it is, since it’s the title of the movie.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Also, it kind of goes without saying, but simple titles are the easiest to incorporate without being awkward.
Fight Club: Natural.
Fried Green Tomatoes: Less natural.
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain: Thankfully, they made the smart choice (as far as I remember).
November 9th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Doesn’t strike me as a problem, especially since most of these movies are really good.
Also, proper nouns (like Jurassic Park, Fight Club) are essential parts to the movie.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:56 am
@Nick
If we’re trying to come up with a generalized rule I think any title that also the describes an object or major plot point in the story is probably not only ok, but maybe inevitable.
“The Maltese Falcon” is both the title and McGuffin. It might actually have been weird to have called the movie anything else.
“Mall Cop” “Groundhog Day” “Inglourious Basterds” “Forest Gump” “Apollo 13″
Seriously, what else would you call these films and how else could you possibly tell the story and not say the words?
With regards to “Fried Green Tomatoes” is that really what the movie is about? I don’t think so and I think that’s why any attempt to do the “title drop” on that phrase sounds funky. Same deal with “The Color Purple”. They just aren’t what the story is actually about. Might be an interesting and lyrical way of saying something about the story, but to put that into a major line dialog and title at the same time sounds forced.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Are we to assume that neither the words “Prince of Persia” nor “Sands of Time” will make their appearances in the film?
November 10th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Kudos Dave in DC, but I believe the film in question is actually DEATHSTALKER II…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoEfF2Wrfoo
…though it’s understandable one might confuse the two. Another memorable example not in the video…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU0stiqsy88
November 10th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
@Anonymous (45):
Almost positive the words “Prince of Persia” are never spoken. But “Sand of Time” happens a lot, since it’s the MacGuffin of the story.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Wow, this thread is still active…isn’t it obvious that uttering the title of the movie in the movie depends on the movie?
Titanic, ok. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, not so much.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Some of these lines are actually cool movie moments that perform their intended dramatic function- “always do the right thing” in context, is hardly ham-fisted, and I love the way “The Breakfast Club” ties up the movie (it might not have worked if they had ACTUALLY HAD breakfast together).
This just makes the case for how cool it is when it works, and how awful it is when it doesn’t, not that it shouldn’t be done.
I always found the “Saving Private Ryan” line EXTREMELY cringe-worthy.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
@Johnny – he couldn’t have said, “You sure die hard, cowboy.” The movie was originally called NOTHING LASTS FOREVER, after the book it’s based on.
November 15th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Do we need a rule?
If you force it, the audience will notice.
If the title is just a clear statement of an element of the movie, meh.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
During the NEVER ENDING STORY…the audiences were quoting the title long before they mentioned it in the movie.
November 20th, 2009 at 12:23 am
almost all the actors knew. no fun. seriously never given this phenomena one single thought. Basic instingt-scene could be shot over, but i guess we don
t notice when its not an isolated frame. kill me with a dagger, between my legs and beyond. p.s Anyone knows the title of that movie mentioning august a billion times? august, august, august…. many times. that movie was pretty coolNovember 20th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
ok, i`m on to it. getting the name of the flick in a few hours. I have to write it down so i remember it. Little girl looking for august. only problem with it not all the scenes work. but lots of cinematic secrets in it and new stuff. I think.
November 20th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
-Princess- from 2006. I wish i made it. “we are celebrating (put in danish name here)
s movie, its gonna make us rich” hahaha, a line from the flick. Awesome experience.November 25th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Synthian–The title of CHARIOTS OF FIRE comes from the hymn “Jerusalem,” which is extrememly well-known in England (and which is the first thing we hear in the film). The filmmakers did not explain it because they took for granted that everyone watching already knew it. Obviously, they were not expecting the film to be the international success that it was.
November 27th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Executive Decision! so bad it looked like the actor wanted to start laughing when he said it hahaha
December 3rd, 2009 at 12:56 am
Do the Right Thing & Breakfast Club both work well in that context. And Blue Velvet’s gotta get some kind of pass because it’s sung.
Also because it’s insane.
December 5th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
I’m just a LAW ABIDING CITIZEN!