Putting the F-word in a movie title proved a step too far for the people of Hatfield and a bunch of janitors, as John McKay discovered
What's in a name? Would A Matter of Life and Death be less of a masterpiece if we had to endure the US title Stairway to the Stars? Would Shanghai Surprise be any better if it came right out and called itself "Some Shite with Madonna and Sean Penn"? My first feature, Crush, is a comedy-drama starring Andie MacDowell, Imelda Staunton and Anna Chancellor as three fortyish friends whose lives are all stirred up by the arrival of handsome younger man Kenny Doughty. Oh - and it used to be called "The Sad Fuckers Club".
I didn't make it up. It was presented to me, as a living breathing idea, by a set of women doctors I once knew who were working too hard to get a date on Friday nights and so would get together instead, drink cheap liquor, eat chocolate, smoke cigarettes and have a competition to decide who was the saddest fucker of the week.
Meantime, I had written a play, Crush, about an older woman and a younger man, which had begun to sprout more female characters and become a movie script. It seemed in need of a new title.
Script development is a trackless waste littered with the bones of great ideas that no one actually ever read, or read on a sleepy Friday, or simply gave to the young new script-reader who was later diagnosed as dyslexic and so went to work in TV. But the great thing about "The Sad Fuckers Club" was that no one ever forgot it. Agents, script executives and movie financiers all said laughingly: "You'll never get it made with that title." But you could tell it had brightened their day.
It was a great title: it incorporated the three key elements of the movie. Sad - because the film deals in a funny way with both loneliness and grief; fucker - because there's quite a lot of, er, fucking in it; and club - in that this is essentially a film about the friendship among a group of women. It's ironic, in that the women call themselves this name, and gives a fairly clear warning of the film's salty language.
In my mind, I was quietly digging a foxhole: no way, ever ever, was I going to allow the title to be changed. That was my last bastion. That was my flag on Iwo Jima.
But film-making is nothing if not practical. Having secured the interest of a star ("Did I tell you what a sad fucker I am?" said Andie MacDowell when we first met her, drinking jasmine tea from a porcelain cup and looking so impossibly beautiful we would have believed anything she said), the little problems of making and selling the film had to be breached. Selling, in fact, comes before making. The international sales people wanted a name - and their prospective American customers didn't want that name.
The fact that everyone had already heard that name in the trade press made the concoction of a new name even more urgent.
Reluctantly, I thought, OK, let's give it a temporary name. For pre-sales purposes only. They'll see the error of their ways in the end. And so began the circus.
Current thinking in British film financing is that makers have long been out of touch with sellers. If only makers would ask sellers in advance what they could make that would sell like hot cakes, we'd all be meeting on a yacht in the Bahamas.
Accordingly, any time my producer, Lee Thomas, and I tentatively came up with a new name for our as-yet unfilmed film (how about "The Roaring Forties", "Desperate.com", or "Old Enough to Know Better"?) our e-mail would return to us with myriad comments and new suggestions from development, sales, marketing, and janitorial supplies. "Dear Lee and John, not sure about your titles. Office generally divided. How about 'Forty and Frisky', 'Bitter Bitches Ball' or 'Anyone For Sex?'" (Actually, I do quite want to make a film called "Anyone For Sex?" but as a title for this particular movie, it is "King Sucks of the Sucking Notions from Hell".)
It is a universal rule that the smaller the creative item under discussion, the harder it will be for a group of people to ever make up their sodding minds. This is why corporate logos take six months and cost a million quid.
The project went to market as "John McKay Untitled" (which used to be called you-know-what. . .) In the meantime, we were gearing up for production in the Cotswolds and needed to book location use of churches, schools, country houses. The first question of the excited vicar/headmistress/etc would always be: "And what is the film called?" My philosophy of dealing with good-hearted local people on films is don't tell them anything they don't want to hear, because when they see the film in the end they'll be delighted and everything will be alright. Why let their imaginations wander in the meantime? "John McKay Untitled", however, was not inspiring confidence in the English county of Warwickshire; as a compromise, we adopted the stolid but uncontroversial nom de guerre, "A Certain Age".
All went quiet on the title front during a delightful nine-week shoot. The actual business of making a film is, of course, always the simplest bit.
But by the time we were editing the movie, its titular bypass once more began to tell: what name would we cut on to the start of the film when showing it for test screenings? Secretly, I had become quite snug in my foxhole. You can't easily name a baby in advance of its being born, but now it seemed to me that my movie was taking shape as a grown-up, funny, bitter-sweet thing - perfectly titled "The Sad Fuckers Club". Soon everyone would agree, and the rest would be laudatory interviews in Empire magazine.
It was the first test audience who stopped me in my tracks.
They were in Hatfield, just north of London. And Hatfield were very clear: they liked the funny stuff and the sad stuff and the beautiful stuff, they even liked the naughty language, but they weren't prepared to say that word when they bought their ticket. In other words, they weren't cynical metropolitan movie types who got a kick out of saying "fucker" to each other. They were normal.
We wriggled. We considered the stars option - "Sad F**kers Club" - but you still have to actually say it some time. We thought about an intriguing acronym - "SFC" - but what does it mean to anyone who doesn't know the secret? Janitorial supplies were meantime brewing up another bevy of corkers: "The Man Rush", "Three Flavours of Blue", "The Female Odyssey", "Get Us Out of Here" . . . and so on.
Per-lease! Lee and I began to argue with increasing bitterness about things like whether "ladies" (as in "Ladies' Night") was funny and ironical, whereas "women" (as in "The Women's Singles Championship") was frumpy and old-school feminist.
In the end it took the mechanical deadline - the very last moment where you tell the man with the typeface what name he has to put on the front of the finished film - to provoke a short meeting with our chief backer, wherein we decided to call the film Crush.
Which, you may recall, is what it was called in the first place. Do I think it was worth all the effort? Yes, I think it's fine. Will I think twice about putting "fucker" in the title next time? Probably. Now, did I tell you about this idea I've had called "Anyone For Sex?" - (Guardian News Service)
Crush is released in Ireland on July 12th