{"id":9342,"date":"2005-11-28T13:00:59","date_gmt":"2005-11-28T18:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2005\/11\/28\/titling\/"},"modified":"2005-11-28T13:00:59","modified_gmt":"2005-11-28T18:00:59","slug":"titling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2005\/11\/28\/titling\/","title":{"rendered":"Titling"},"content":{"rendered":"

For reasons having nothing to do with the obscure films<\/a> post, I recently had the opportunity to see Terry Gilliam’s Brazil<\/em><\/a> (for perhaps the fifth or sixth time). It’s a close call between that and Casablanca<\/em><\/a> for my all-time favorite movie — how can you go wrong combining Kafka and Orwell with Monty Python and Tom Stoppard? (Brazil<\/em>, I mean, not Casablanca<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Of course there is a wonderful backstory to the making of the movie, in which Universal studios chopped up the movie to make a “love conquers all” version with a happy ending, which Gilliam refused to have his name associated with. Fortunately that version never got released, as Gilliam resorted (intentionally or not) to a fiendishly clever strategy: he surreptitiously showed his version to groups of film critics, and the LA film critics society awarded its “best picture of the year” award to a movie that hadn’t even been released. The awards, which Universal would much have preferred go to its other movie Out of Africa<\/em>, embarassed the studio into letting Gilliam’s version be distributed, albeit without any support.<\/p>\n

You can read all sorts of fun trivia in the Brazil<\/em> FAQ<\/a>. My favorite is this: Sidney Scheinberg, president of Universal and the man in charge of the happy-ending version, decided he didn’t like the title, and solicited suggestions from his staff. (To be fair, the title would have made less for his version; in Gilliam’s version there is an elaborate soundtrack by Michael Kamen that is constructed primarily out of variations of the song “Brazil,” all of which was replaced in Scheinberg’s version by rock music, to attract teenagers.) Here are the suggested replacement titles:<\/p>\n