Elusive titles and allusive dialogue

Oh words. I’ll get to you in a minute.

Meanwhile, do yourself a favor and catch Widow’s Bay on Apple+. That shit is good as hell. My appreciation for Matthew Rhys notwithstanding, the rest of the cast is also stellar, the mood and ambiance is dialed in perfect and the narrative culmination from episode to episode was fantastic. I am a fan.

Back to the words.

Usually when I’m working up a script idea I land on a title pretty early. Maybe it’s changed a few times, as I’ve sometimes changed the scope or frame of the script by the time I get to a fade out, but mostly I don’t get stuck on these thing. Mostly a title hits me like a brick or crystalizes with a sudden, violent clarity that lets me move on to the actual grind of chiselling away three tons of granite to find the perfect 36.5 lbs polished masterpiece within (even if the ears always end up looking a little off-kilter). But the current albatross is playing hard to get. I got a whole vomit draft out, been sitting on the general concept for a while and finally dialed in the right voices for my main characters, and I dig it. The concept is sharp, the emotional battering feels appropriately weighty, the story edges are pretty much there, but the title is a void.

I need a new dictionary, a new human history, something and it just ain’t there. Nevermind the last few weeks I’ve spent digging through the linguistic weeds, hunting for something that doesn’t just describe the script, but is the script. There is a vast, yawning chasm between a title that sortakinda fits as a label and one that acts as a tone poem. A label tells you what’s in the box; a tone poem tells you how the air feels inside the room before a single line of dialogue is spoken.

I dunno, maybe the perfect title isn’t out there. I’ll probably spend another month agonizing over a word or two, only to eventually settle on something stupidly simple that I can pretend was the plan all along.

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