Gloury Days
A couple of weeks back, Sean O’Hagan, writing in the Observer, reported that filmmaker Quentin Tarantino recently ‘went on an all-day bender and was spotted talking loudly to himself in a Soho bar. He claimed that he was writing a script and trying out dialogue’. To me, this excuse just doesn’t ring true; going by his usual timetable, it will probably be years before Tarantino gets round to writing a new script. I’d like to think that he was actually rehearsing his latest answer to the inevitable question ‘Mate, what’s with the spelling of Inglourious Basterds?’ Most critics have decided that he opted for the deliberate misspelling to distinguish his movie from Enzo G. Castellari’s correctly rendered Inglorious Bastards (1978), and thus avoid years of people looking up the wrong one in Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide (Leonard gives Castellari’s film only two stars and my guess is that Tarantino will be hoping for more. Or anything but the dreaded ‘BOMB’.) Tarantino himself has so far remained schtum on the matter, but this didn’t stop David Letterman from wading in the other night. Shifting even more uneasily than usual, QT stammered out something about it being a ‘Basquiat-like touch’, which further baffled the host, who quickly changed the subject, possibly from fear of a scalping.
Here’s my theory. Tarantino is a notoriously bad speller and, according to some unconfirmed reports, a borderline illiterate. This hasn’t prevented him from punching out at least three brilliant screenplays and winning an Oscar for, well, you know which one. But when the script of his long-vaunted ‘men on a mission’ movie hit the Internet a few years back, much sport was made of its many typos, particularly the author’s handwritten title on the front page: ‘Inglourious Basterds’. Tarantino must surely have been furious that the script had been leaked at all, let alone subjected to such advance analysis and mockery. ‘Fuck it,’ he must have said. ‘That’s how I’m going to spell it, then. Let’s see how they like them apples.’ Sorry, ‘motherfucking apples’. Doesn’t that sound more likely than that Basquiat nonsense?
It has been most enjoyable watching the critics wrestle with Tarantino’s grammatical affront. The snootier the writer (i.e. Jonathan Rosenbaum), the more [sic]s they sprinkle through their review, with several worrying that if the film is a hit, young people may come to regard ‘inglourious’ and ‘basterd’ as the correct spelling. Not since The Pursuit of Happyness has a film title been seen as such a threat to the Queen’s English. I haven’t seen Basterds yet; I’m not sure why. It might be the scalpings. But, as I hear tell, the title is the least of its revisions. Apparently, in the US, young’uns are leaving the cinema convinced that World War II had quite a different ending, partly due to the efforts of Austin Powers.
Here in Australia, the real misspellings and misnomers usually occur when a movie hits DVD. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I am something of a collector of DVD cover mistakes, and I report here just a few of my recent favourites.
The front cover of Doctor Detroit spells the star’s name ‘Dan Ackroyd’. I see that this has now been corrected on the distributor’s website, but the copies in the shops are still all wrong. But then, it’s Doctor Detroit; I’m guessing there hasn’t been a lot of restocking. Unlike the case with The 40 Year-Old Virgin, which, through several reissues, continues to star someone called ‘Seth Rogan’ and feature an extra titled ‘You Know How I Know Your Gay’. At least in its new Special Edition, Escape From New York no longer stars ‘Kurt Russel’. Brigitte Bardot rarely has her name spelt wrongly, but the local DVD of Viva Maria! is emblazoned with the phrase ‘The World Will Never Forget The Two Heriones Who Charged Into Battle Undaunted, Unafraid and Undressed.’ I wish I knew the artist responsible for that one. I’d send him a Heriogram.
The spine – that’s where most of the cock-ups occur. Among my favourite DVDs with spinal problems are the Pink Ribbon double feature of The Break-Up and ‘Kknocked Up’; Mark Lewis’s classic documentary ‘The Wonderful of Dogs’; and the Great Directors Collection edition of The Rainmaker, which omits the title from the spine entirely, replacing it with a large gray slab of nothing. The (admittedly appallingly titled) Australian film Playing Beatie Bow is spelt ‘Playing Beattie Bow’ on its spine, despite the artist going to great pains to emulate precisely the logo on the front. And while The Last Seduction is correctly identified as being part of ‘The John Dahl Filmmakers Collection’ on the front, it aligns itself to ‘The Nicolas Roeg Filmmakers Collection’ on its spine. As opposed to the actual Nicolas Roeg film Bad Timing, which, despite being part of the same series, is branded as belonging to ‘The Nicholas Roeg Filmmakers Collection’. I wouldn’t be surprised if you popped it in the machine and on came Nicholas Nickleby.
Given all this, it is now most embarrassing to report that perhaps the record number of mistakes occurs on the DVD cover of Guru Wayne, a film in which I myself appear, for approximately twenty disgraceful seconds. The film was shot in 2001, but was only released, straight to DVD, two months ago. There are many accounts as to why, all of them too scurrilous to print, even here. Nonetheless, despite having eight years to prepare the cover art, no fewer than three actors, Peter Helliar, Fletcher Humphrys and the man who plays ‘Guru Wayne’ himself, Paul Dalglish, have their names spelt wrongly on the front, while Jane Allsop, though (surprisingly) spelt correctly…is listed twice.
To be fair to the makers of Guru Wayne (not a sentence I ever imagined myself saying), all the actors’ names are spelt correctly in the actual credits, unlike in many a more prestigious film. Even Annie Hall, while spelling his name correctly in the opening titles, lists ‘Christopher Wlaken’ at the end. One of our own Best Picture winners, Bliss, features end credits riddled with misspellings, although for maximum titling incompetence, you can’t go past Phil Avalon’s The Finder (2001), where names in the opening titles are seemingly spelt phonetically (Alan Cinis is ‘Alan Chinnis’), while in the closing credits, the actors’ and characters’ names frequently swap sides to hilarious effect.
In last week’s Rescue: Special Ops, George Smilovici’s name was spelt ‘George Smilovic’. I know what you’re thinking (aside from ‘why the hell were you watching it and how the hell did you make it to the end credits?): surely it’s ‘Smilovici’ that’s wrong? But by far the most frequently misspelt name in Australian credits is that of entertainment lawyer Davids Darzins. Few can resist the urge to ‘correct’ his Christian name to ‘David’. It is spelt wrongly in Crackerjack, Russell Coight’s Celebrity Challenge and, yes, Guru Wayne, to name just three.
My favourite ‘name spelt wrongly in the credits’ story involves the Australian comedy Take Away. At its premiere, director-producer Marc Gracie spent a good several minutes praising the estimable Joel Pearlman from Village Roadshow and saying how they couldn’t have made the film without his support. But when the credits ran, guess whose name was spelt wrongly? Joel was used to this, however. His name is even misspelt ‘Perlman’ at the end of perfectionist Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Who would have thought that Take Away had something in common with Magnolia?
But, finally, two confessions. I myself did the end credits for The Late Show Presents The Olden Days and it was only a couple of years back that I spotted the character name ‘Seargent Olden’ scrolling past. While on page 110 of my book Lolly Scramble, you can find the word ‘see-though’ used to describe the transparent-arsed pants designed by Ryan O’Neal in the long-forgotten So Fine, an error that has somehow survived four printings. I’ve tried contacting the proofreader to complain. The basterd won’t return my calls.
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’). Click here to see an extended version of his video shops report from ‘The 7PM Project’.
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