Monday Morning: Working Title

By Nathalie on February 7, 2005 7:58 AM

While your higher functions percolate, and the thought of blog posts with real paragraphs makes you think “life: why bother,” ease your eyes into the workday with GC’s lit-lite version of the teen mag quiz. Topic: book & movie titles. Goal: Match the published titles (left column) to their working titles (right column). Click “continued” for the answers.

1. White Noise	a. Blanche’s Chair in the Moon
2. The Great Gatsby	b. Pansy*
3. The Lemon Table	c. Anhedonia
4. Look Homeward, Angel	d. O, Lost
5. Pretty Woman	e. Rage in Age
6. Gone With the Wind**	f. The Inert Family of Gases
7. A Streetcar Named Desire	g. $3,000
8. Gravity’s Rainbow	h. Panasonic
9. Annie Hall	i. Mindless Pleasures
10. Summerland***	j. Trimalchio in West Egg****

* Other working titles included Fontenoy Hall and (the very Bond-worthy) Tomorrow is Another Day.
** The novel, not the film.
*** As written by Malcolm Knox, not Michael Chabon.
**** Other working titles included Under the Red White and Blue, The High Bouncing Lover, and Trimalchio’s Banquet.

Answer key: 1-h; 2-j; 3-e; 4-d; 5-g; 6-b; 7-a; 8-i; 9-c; 10-f.

Working titles were gleaned from Caroline Baum’s 2003 piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, and today’s piece by Adam Langer (Crossing California) at thebookstandard.com.

Besides providing “before” and “after” shots of famous titles, Langer’s article also gives away the backstory to one of 2003′s most memorable titles:

… As for Jincy Kornhauser’s Winner of the National Book Award, that catchy title started out as a joke.

“The title was always Fame and Honor,” she says. “But as I got closer to finishing, my publisher told me that the title had to go. It was a drab title. Abstract nouns, apparently, make lousy titles. (War and Peace, for example.) Anyway, I wasn’t surprised, but I was kind of cheesed off, because I really liked my title. So I came up with a clever ploy: I would “suggest” increasingly goofy or inappropriate alternatives until, in the end, they gave up and let me keep it. My first outrageous suggestion was based on a story I once heard, about this guy who made a student film entitled something like “Winner of Twelve Academy Awards.” St. Martin’s e-mailed back that this would be problematic, as there might be legal issues, but I asked them to work on it. About a month later they called and said that their lawyers were “fine with the title,” and everybody loved it, and it was already creating “buzz.” Once I realized what they were talking about, I was of course aghast. As it turned out, St. Martin’s was right and I was wrong.”