“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare famously had Juliet say. And while she then spoke of the changeability of words to express true love (smells and roses and all that), we’re sure her real concern was for the poor souls in script clearance whose job it is to sniff out renegade spellings of the English language’s most common names.
A recent piece of satire that appeared in The Beaverton indirectly made light of this situation, which we face on an almost daily basis. In the article, which picks on spellings of Megan (Meaghan, Megyn, Meagan, Meggan…!!), a Weird Spelling Coalition led by the dubiously named “Mhegan” insisted that her configuration of letters is the one true spelling (one spelling to rule them all?). The “Council of Me(a)g(h)ans” had to then strike a deal to standardize the spelling of the name to “Meagghayn.”
Establishing spelling variations is only the beginning of the journey character names take before becoming clear for use. Once the internet has coughed up all the frantic and misguided spelling disparities, we then make sure those names don’t belong to anyone prominent who is relevant to your story, anyone in the location a production is set, anyone of a certain profession, anyone with a specific education or qualification and, indeed, it seems, anyone.
Commonly used names and spellings often help establish if a name is considered clear for use or not. A general rule we follow is that if we find three or more listings by a name (including spelling variations) for the same location then it is considered common for that location. This can be trickier than it sounds. For instance, is Hank a nickname for ‘Henry’? [Yes.] If we are searching the first name Bill, how many variations of that name are there? (William, Will, Willy, Billy, Billie etc.)
One method we like to use to judge if a spelling is common is consulting the phone book of New York, a city with over eight million residents. If a certain spelling doesn’t show up there, then we conclude that it’s not common. So while there may well be someone out there somewhere by the name Wilyam Shaickspier, if we don’t see it spelled that way in NYC then it’s not a spelling of the name we are going to search. Otherwise, as you can see, the possibilities are infinite.
And search we do, often finding conflicts. The process has been ongoing for many decades of movies and television shows. A script in the early 1970s featured a character by the name of Edward Bunker who lived in present-day New York. The research company had to check the phone book records to make sure there were no listings by that name, or that the name was common enough that nobody could sue. Of course, one listing did show up for a man by this name in Queens, leading the character to be changed to the now-familiar name of Archie Bunker from the sitcom All in the Family.
Source: Michael Kmet, www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/blog/script-clearance-and-research-unacknowledged-creative-labor-in-thefilm-and-television-industry/#more-737
The original name for Groucho Marx’s character in the 1937 feature film A Day at the Races was Dr. Quackenbush, a name that production thought was a ridiculously impossible name for a doctor. Groucho was very keen on the name, and was disappointed when it was discovered that there were doctors by this name in the United States, most of them eager to sue if the name was to be used. The name was changed to Hackenbush. “At first Groucho was disappointed in the name change, but he grew to love Hackenbush so much that he even signed it to letters.”
Source: Deborah Looney, www.tcm.com/this-month/article/150249|30024/A-Day-at-the-Races.html
Of course conflicts with professions are not limited to prominent individuals. If a character is specified as working for a certain real-world company, or if that character has a professional designation or certification (actors unions/membership associations), we will check those too. An example from our recent work: A character needed to be checked in Toronto and Buenos Aires as current/past employee of an actual, very prominent automobile manufacturer in both Canada and Argentina. After correspondence with this company, we found an actual person by the character’s name at the Canadian automobile manufacturer. The character name needed to be changed.
To Shakespeare’s age-old question, then, we might answer: “Potentially many hours of research.”
First published March, 2020