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07/22/2006: Titles, The Sequel


This is an expansion of an idea I presented yesterday. But this time it comes with an anecdote!

When I was in grad school at UC Berkeley, I got a part-time job at a company that named products. It was a fantastic job and I loved it. While I was there, I heard a few rumors about a just-completed project in which the company had generated hundreds of fake movie titles. Some of the namers wondered out loud what the project had been *for*. Were they really naming movies, they wondered; is that how it's done?

Within months, I got into the Disney fellowship. Although I was a television fellow, we all mixed freely with the feature fellows. Some of them told me about a brainstorming exercise they participated in as part of the program. They were given a long list – hundreds – of fake movie titles. They had to pick their favorites and then pitch stories to fit the titles. Where could such a list have come from, they wondered; do studios really have piles of potential titles lying around?

I will never know *for sure* if there was a connection.

But I'm sure that this is a pretty great brainstorming technique. And not just for features.

Throwaway
Dragonchasers
Circles
Pay in Pain
Scar Tissue

Those are titles of episodes of The Shield. Great titles. Evocative. Don't they just make you all… speculative? What if your House spec had one of those titles? Your Battlestar Galactica? THEN what would it be about?

Playing this game doesn't mean the resulting spec will even have this title, of course. It's just meant to be a springboard, freeing your brain from its well-worn tracks. Personally, I have a great title for a series, that I've been rolling around for a while now. Someday, I'll know what the show is.

Coming up: Oh, I've still got more to say about titles.

Lunch: Starbucks ice-blended mocha and a scone. Sound more like breakfast? Maybe, but breakfast was pasta in putanesca sauce.