Hello kids! Uncle Phil here with another riveting screenplay topic. How important is the title of your script? Do you slap something on the title page? Or, do you really agonize over what title will best help your screenplay masterpiece jump of the page, like a frog from a hot frying pan? Do you think of your story title first, then write your script? Or the other way around? Personally, I always endeavor to come up with a good title to my screenplays. I think some of my better ones have been Four Negro Girls In A Church (controversial), Gaze Towards Infinity (Epic) The Immortal Jack the Ripper (Familiar but catchy) or The Man Who Bore the Myth (cryptic).
I see tons of scripts with bizarre or bland names and often wonder what the hell people are thinking when they name their script.
So what are you thinking about when you name your script? To accompany this post, I'm pasting a link to an interesting article discussing this very topic thread https://www.moviemaker.com/archives/series/first-draft/first-draft-scree...
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Title is all important, "Shawshank Redemption" did nothing at the cinema. Won awards, people hunted down the tape/DVD. I think it still holds some retail sale records.
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Three different elements of a script are all-important; the title, logline, and poster. And of these three, the title is most critical. I'm currently writing a microbudget that I expect to shoot/produce myself within the next several months, so my situation is a bit different. But I can honestly say that I agonized over the title first, then the uniqueness of the story and contained locations, followed by the logline and poster concept. When they all come together and magically click, there'a feeling of unstopability that sweeps over you that's hard to put into words.
I just give thing working titles. Films get retitled in different markets all the time. "Mad Max" was retitled "The Road Warrior" for the American market.
Some scripts I have a title before I put pen to paper; others, I agonize over, give a working title, change it, go punch a bag, ride my motorcycle, have drink and then throw darts at random pages in the dictionary.
All working titles, I try to make them relevant to the central underlying theme. Movie about a girl protagonist n a video game contest, 'Flipping the Score', that kind of thing.
You could use Run for the Roses. I think it's past the statute of limitations.
Hey uncle Phil....i will admit I spent a short amount of time trying to come up with a title...my goal was to limit my title to three words, and it must sum up the entire story/series...
Not a lot of time or thought goes into the title compared to the story outline or script. But the titles for my stories get revised a few times around.
I start a new project with a working title so that I can keep them separated and findable in the files but the titles almost always change; The Game became Aces and Eights (as an example.)
I heard comment the other day that a title can get someone to read your spec. American Hustle was originally titled American Bullshit, it got read. But just like a label on the bottle of wine, it may be memorable, but it's the content that counts.
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I'm a firm believer in perfecting the movie title! Can you imagine how many people would have gone to see "The Space Farmboy"? Who knows how many brilliant films/scripts were ignored because their titles sucked?