Naming Stuff

The accountant is having a little contest where we're supposed to come up with a caption for a photo she took of our location manager. I love that kind of stuff and of course I entered.

The point is it reminded me of the other work competitions I've entered and the 2 I won.

The first was on Freaky Friday. The writer of the final version of the script only had a couple of weeks to bang out her pages. She apparently got burned out and wanted help coming up with the title for JLC'c character's book. I worked pretty hard on that for an afternoon and came up with the winner. Of course, I can't remember what the title was, but it's in the movie, so you can just look it up (look for LL in the tv studio - she's supposed to be doing an interview on it). The book was about growing older so I found one of those obscure words that nobody's ever heard, no they don't know what it means or even how to pronounce it.

The second was on Sky High. This time, the director was looking for a name for a Chinese restaurant and for a super-hero team - the prize was $50 for each. I put in my suggestions and won for the restaurant (Paper Lantern). They ended up changing the script and not needing the super-hero team, so we never found out who "won" that one.

Now, this may not seem like a big deal and it probably isn't, but the trick to coming up with names like this is they have to pass clearance. Most studios have a department, or they hire an independent company, whose job is to take all the names used in a script and make sure there won't be any legal challenges to using them. It's probably as easy as running them through a huge database, but it's not something I'd care to do. Whatever the process, most of the really clever names for stuff are taken by somebody, somewhere. It's not easy to come up with a good name that isn't already being used.

Ok, I just got on a dictionary site and looked up the word - senescence. The title was something like "Through the Looking Glass: Senescene in Retrograde". It was supposed to be new-agey and only the last part was mine. Like I said, it's obscure and they made it's unknown pronunciation part of the dialogue.