There’s a charmingly cynical habit that many newspaper editors have of coming up with a deft headline and then commissioning an article to justify it. Some years ago, drowsing through an interminable speech on the environment by the Prince of Wales, I saw a colleague write down the phrase “Flaccid Reign.” “We’ll run it two months after the Coronation,” he whispered.
I expect he will—and who’s to say he’s getting things the wrong way round? If you start with a great title, you’ve got something to live up to, to vindicate. In U.S. law, there is no copyright on title—as we are reminded by Warner Brothers’s famous attempt to sue the Marx Brothers over their film A Night In Casablanca. The Warners alleged the Marxes were infringing their copyright in Casablanca. Groucho responded by threatening to sue Warner Brothers for their use of the word “Brothers.” So, if you want to write a novel called Gone With the Wind or a song called “Over the Rainbow,” go ahead. Titles are like truffles—they’re out there waiting for someone to sniff them out. If you get to it, and you make it yours, congratulations.
That’s what Rebecca Gilman has done with Boy Gets Girl. It is a play about a stalker—the theme of a thousand television movies. But it has a vastly superior title to its many predecessors. In the Thirties, Sam and Bella Spewack wrote a nifty Broadway comedy called Boy Gets Girlabout a couple
