Ras: My Dark Data – Screenplay Titles

You can learn a lot from an experiment with negative results – one that doesn’t support the theory that generated it. Because these results seldom get published, scientists call them “dark data.” In last week’s post I talked about three elements of a good title. This week I’d like to dissect one of my many disasters in writing for what it can tell us about titles.

Some years back a writing partner (not Kaze) and I tried our hands at a screenplay. Our idea was to analyze the elements of Hollywood thrillers and then cold-bloodedly craft a screenplay that fit the bill. Forget art, we swore. We’ll learn to write screenplays by attempting the most commercial one we can possibly imagine. May as well have something saleable, we thought.

In the end we did get that screenplay on paper and my partner did attempt to peddle it to Hollywood. It was the tale of a streetwise good guy, who would ideally be played by Denzel Washington, up against an evil-genius madman – a Hannibal Lector-type sicko with a yen for mass murder. The climactic moment is a duel between our hero piloting a blimp and the villain flying an ultralight over a rally on the Mall in Washington, DC, with the intention of spraying the crowds below with weaponized smallpox.

We completed our draft the summer before 9/11. Horrendous timing. The real-life tragedy of 9/11 would for understandable reasons dry up the Hollywood market for mass-murder thrillers for the next couple years. The high-water mark for us, in fact, was making the top eight percent of entries to the Austin Film Festival.

Looking back, I can see we made many mistakes. The biggest may well have been the title. Early on, one of us – quite possibly me – came up with the working title Fishkill, and we slapped it on our draft with the idea that soon we’d have something better. Fishkill was meant to suggest the villain’s attitude toward human beings. We eventually wrote in a scene where investigators discover a secret room in his mansion containing a massive mural with thousands of tiny fishlike human corpses.

So let’s run Fishkill through my template of things a title should do:

• Make readers want to read it;

• Be memorable so they can tell their friends;

• Suggest a major theme of the work.

We see that Fishkill fails abysmally on the first count. Who would go to see a movie called Fishkill? Maybe the fan base for green documentaries about companies polluting.

A beta reader said he thought it was going to be about a small town on the Hudson River.

As we neared completion, we both agreed that the Fishkill title had to go. We brainstormed separately and we brainstormed together. We combed pop songs and sought punning phrases that seemed somehow au courant. We came up with Lonely Boy, Kill Joy, Killer App, Conspiracy of One, A Youth of Promise, The Beast Within, Blood Like Wine, Thrill Kill, and Ivy Leaguer (our villain is a Harvard drop-out who never lived up to his early potential).

I ransacked British and American poetry looking for a phrases that might elevate this tawdry tale and make it more memorable. Something to lift it out of the one-word ruck of Armageddon, Cliffhanger, Coma, Scream, and Seven.  I became fond of Easeful Death (Keats), What Rough Beast? (Yeats), His Own Dark Designs and The Superior Fiend (Milton), Design of Darkness (Frost), Little Boy Lost and Tyger, Tyger (Blake), and Barbarism at Last (Byron). And for a time my favorite was The Mind Diseased – from Byron’s line in Childe Harold: “Of its own beauty is the mind diseased.” Not a bad tag line for our psycho.

But over time Fishkill had acquired a kind of reality in our minds. Lesson #1: If you title a piece too early, that title can congeal and limit your ability to do better titles later when you know more what your story is about.

As we worked through other possibilities – my notes reveal that I alone generated nearly 100 – one of the two of us could always find a reason not to like any title we came up with. Lesson #2: Collaboration can be a hard and, on occasion, counter-productive process.

Both of us were aware that whatever we chose would be temporary. Hollywood studios, like magazine editors, traditionally apply whatever title they think will draw the biggest crowds. But still, our title would be the first thing anybody would see in picking up the screenplay. In less than a second that title would point any potential reader/buyer down a road and she’d feel an intuitive like/dislike before reading a word of the actual screenplay.

I think the title’s very importance froze our judgment capacity. Like a 90 percent free throw shooter who misses the first free throw in a one-and-one with two seconds left in the game when his team is one behind, we clutched. Not that we were anything like 90 percent screenwriters.

In the end we left Fish
kill on the damn thing by default. We could not agree on anything better, we were exhausted, and we said, in effect, What the hell? It’s only a first draft.

In a fine post called “Depth of Work,” the novelist , historian, and blogger Steven Pressfield talks about that quality and what it takes:

Then comes the hard part: appending reason. Discriminatory intelligence. Now we have to ask the really hard questions. What is this stuff all about? What am I trying to do? What is the deepest truth underlying this?


I read a story once about Barbra Streisand at a recording session. She did take after take of the same song. The reporter telling the story said he couldn’t tell the difference between Take One and Take Two, or even Take One and Take Nine. But, he said, he could tell the difference between Take One and Take Sixteen. Obvious Ms. Streisand could tell. That too is depth of work.


What we’re talking about here is head-banging, non-glamorous, nut-busting labor. It’s lonely. It hurts. It drives everybody else crazy. It requires tremendous professionalism and courage (or, perhaps more accurately, stubbornness and mulishness) and control of our emotions and our fears.

So in our giving up on a better title, in settling for Fishkill, my collaborator and I were revealing ourselves as amateurs, dabblers, rookies, chumps, and slackers. Lesson #3: We thought we were committed to doing this screenplay well, but we had little idea what real commitment is.

And Fishkill? There it sits this morning, three pristine copies preserved at the bottom of my filing cabinet – Fishkill forever.