I’m Italian (and living in Italy). I’ve written my two first screenplays in Italian, basically ’cause they were college assignments, but my true goal is to have a career in the U.S.
My English is pretty good, so that’s not the problem. According to my teacher, the problem is gonna be my name. My name is Pierluigi Bellini. He says that with my way-too-Italian-to-be-understood name there’s no way someone’s gonna read my screenplays outside Italy (or Europe).
Is that really that important? Should I change my real name for a nickname? He suggests that if I wanna get my scripts read in US I should at least sign them as “written by PJ Bellini.” It sounds really stupid to me to change my name ’cause of that, but he says that it’s a pretty common thing for foreign writers. What do you think ’bout that?
— Pierluigi Bellini
Rome, Italy
As a writer who legally changed his difficult-to-pronounce German name to the calendrical moniker August, I gotta say your teacher is right.
(I can’t just throw out that bombshell without answering the obvious question: my family name is “Meise.” In German, you’d pronounce it MY-zuh. My family pronounced it MY-zee. But for my entire life, every stranger, every restaurant hostess, every telephone salesperson has pronounced it Meez (or occasionally, MEE-see). And I can’t blame them. It’s a name that doesn’t particularly announce its ethnicity, or give you any clue what to do with it. I didn’t envy another 70 years of correcting how people pronounced my name — it’s a terrible first 15 seconds of conversation — so I legally swapped it for my father’s middle name before moving to Los Angeles. The last time I heard myself called “John Meez” was when the court clerk called my case before the judge.)
You’re in a much better spot, my Italian friend. There’s no need for you to legally change your name. If I were you, I’d just trim off the “luigi” part when you write professionally. “Pier Bellini” is an awesome writer’s name. It sounds like an apéritif you’d be offered on a yacht in Cannes.
Five years from now, when you have a movie in theaters, we’ll see your name and remember you wrote in to the site. That’s the mark of a cool name.