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Having quite enjoyed UK novelist Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal (although I never saw the film, a friend having warned me that it had been turned into ‘a frumpy Fatal Attraction’), I decided, upon its US release, to check out the reviews of her follow-up, The Believers. In the first one I clicked on, I was startled to read this sentence: ‘Heller’s last novel, Notes on a Scandal (What was she thinking?) was a big hit.’ Ouch, I thought, and clicked on another. This one said, ‘Following on from her study of an increasingly disturbing relationship between two women (What was she thinking?), Heller…’ Hang on, I thought, that’s an odd coincidence. But, as I soon discovered, every single reviewer had reached this same conclusion: Heller was mad to have written Notes on a Scandal, despite its huge success. What was she thinking? Eventually I realised what had happened. They weren’t saying, ‘What was she thinking?’, they were saying What Was She Thinking?, for that was the ridiculous new title the publishers had conferred upon Notes on a Scandal in the US. But then the movie, still bearing the story’s original title, became a hit, so the book had to be changed back. Hence the phrase Notes on a Scandal (What Was She Thinking?). It seems this sort of thing goes on a lot; Stephen Fry’s The Stars’ Tennis Balls was retitled Revenge in the US. Not even Revenge of anything. Just plain old Revenge.
Fine, that’s slightly interesting, but hardly a subject you need devote this many words to, you’re probably thinking; you’re wrong, though. I’ve been obsessed with mystifying title changes ever since I was kid in New Zealand, where Smokey and the Bandit II had been rebadged as Smokey and the Bandit Ride Again. Why had they done this?, I mused to my eye-rolling friends. Was it because both Herbie and Alvin had successfully ridden again? Or had the public suddenly turned on Roman numerals? Shortly after this, George Hamilton’s much awaited but crushingly poor follow-up to Love at First Bite was released. Overseas it had been called Zorro, the Gay Blade, and the poster, with Hamilton in a garish, swishy pink costume, left one in no doubt as to why. But New Zealand wasn’t ready for that, apparently, so the title was changed to Zorro Swings Again. He wasn’t gay anymore, he just liked to swing. There were other examples: Michael Mann’s Thief became Violent Streets, for no good reason. Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (the one with, as every kid knew, the flying silver metal ball that drills into your face) became The Never Dead. It wasn’t until decades later when I saw Australian auteur Antony I. Ginnane’s Fantasm, that I realised why. There, it was John Holmes’s enormous member that was drilling into someone’s face, so I could see why the distributors were keen to avoid confusion. Of course, the most famous title change, both for Australia and New Zealand, was Flying High!. The actual title, as we now know, is Airplane!, but supposedly the change was made, not, as I had thought, because we say ‘aeroplane’ down here, but to stop people confusing it with the Airport movies. The fact that this hadn’t happened in any other country in the world – possibly because of that exclamation mark, but more likely because of the trailer and poster – seemed not to have occurred to them.
In the eighties, sometimes a song becoming a hit was enough to trigger a title change. The justly forgotten Matthew Modine wrestling movie, Vision Quest, came out here as Crazy For You, while, thanks to Barnesy, Ron Howard’s Gung Ho became Working Class Man. This last title was one of many to later confuse everybody by coming out on DVD with its original US name. How many people rented the James Woods movie True Believer only to discover they’d already seen it on VHS as Fighting Justice? (Not many, probably. Bad example.) Interesting and memorable titles were replaced by bland and forgettable ones; Adventures in Babysitting became A Night on the Town; The Woo Woo Kid became In the Mood; and Penn & Teller Get Killed became Dead Funny (although it wasn’t even remotely such, possibly because of the bizarre choice of director, Bonnie and Clyde’s Arthur Penn. Was he selected simply because he had the word ‘Penn’ in his name?) Sometimes the reverse happened, as when Out Cold became Where’s Ernie?, or when Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF became The Vidiot. Or should have. Local distributors decided to have an each way bet and settled on the appalling Vidiot from UHF. When Howard the Duck bombed big-time in the States, Greater Union decided to try to bamboozle the Australian public into seeing something called Howard…a New Breed of Hero, although the now-silhouetted hero on the poster was still suspiciously duck-shaped. Conversely, it was decided that Harry and the Hendersons didn’t make enough of its hero’s animality and so it was renamed here Bigfoot and the Hendersons. I guess without the Bigfoot in there, we may have thought the Hendersons were merely playing host to some bloke called Harry. Harry Hamlin perhaps, or, for those with long memories, Harry Worth. It was Melbourne’s ‘Hoddle Street Massacre’ that supposedly led to the Sidney Poitier movie Shoot to Kill being relabelled Deadly Pursuit, although, as I recall, the papers made much of the fact that the gunman had chased some of his victims around the intersection, so maybe Deadly Pursuit wasn’t much better.
Occasionally US distributors gave us a taste of our own medicine, as anyone who has put on the local DVD of Mad Max 2 and wondered why it’s now called The Road Warrior will attest. Evil Angels became A Cry in the Dark (bland), Harlequin became Dark Forces (the least of its problems), and Salute of the Jugger became The Blood of Heroes (Thank Christ. What the hell is a ‘Jugger’, anyway? How many of you, like me, thought for years that it was ‘Juggler’? I mean, honestly, who calls themselves The Jugger? Apart from, maybe, someone who can sink an impressive number of jugs? Even then, it’s hardly a good premise for a Rutger Hauer vehicle. But then again, what is?)
Through the nineties, any film that had underperformed overseas was ripe for a title change and yet not once did this make a jot of difference. No one wanted to see Hero, even when it was preceded by the word Accidental. There were no queues for Mad Dog Time, despite it now being called Trigger Happy and despite a number of lunatic TV appearances from its director, Larry (son of Joey) Bishop, wearing the same clothes he would later sport onscreen in Kill Bill 2. And removing the word ‘bleak’ from the title of Kenneth Branagh’s In the Bleak Midwinter (it came out here as A Midwinter’s Tale) didn’t help; it was the words ‘Kenneth Branagh’s’ they should have dispensed with. Although, I can understand this impulse. I don’t care how many awards Love in the Time of Cholera has won, I just don’t want to see a movie with the word ‘cholera’ in the title.
In recent years, we’ve seen the memorable (although not necessarily good) title Lucky Number Slevin changed to the instantly forgettable The Wrong Man, the explanatory 13 Going on 30 changed to the useless Suddenly 30, and the utterly shithouse Live Free or Die Hard sensibly changed to what it should have been all along, Die Hard 4. Actually, no, they couldn’t even leave that alone; instead of 4 it had to be the already dated 4.0. I did appreciate it when someone tried to arrest the torrent of ‘ing-word-followed-by-name’ titles (like Waking Ned Devine, originally released here as just Waking Ned to save time), by saying, ‘No Saving Silverman, that’s one too many. You’re coming out here as Evil Woman.’ As usual, it made no difference. People didn’t want to be reminded of ELO. And, finally, last Christmas we saw the strange decision by the local distributor of Four Christmases to rename it Four Holidays. I guess they figured that no one would be interested in seeing a Christmas movie in December.
As for my own work, such that it is, calling a film Bad Eggs was perhaps asking for trouble. There had been a film released under that title in Germany in 1946, although I don’t think this was the reason the Germans decided to change our Bad Eggs to Mit vollem Einsatz! (Their exclamation mark, not mine), which translates roughly as With Extreme Force! But, for once, the refit was a success; not only has the film been much better received in Germany than here (cue David Hasselhoff joke), under the new title it is much harder to write a review that reads simply ‘…stinks.’
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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