‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ used to be a pretty good song before it became a fairly awful movie. Now it will be impossible to listen to Percy Sledge’s tremblingly emotive cry from the heart without thinking of Andy Garcia giving moist-eyed Meg Ryan that puppy dog on prozac look. Which is marginally preferable to Roy Orbison’s ‘Only The Lonely’, which now conjures up visions of an extremely overweight John Candy slobbering over a pasty-faced Ally Sheedy. And I don’t even want to think about The Temptations ‘My Girl’, and Macauly Culkin’s first screen kiss. Shit. I just thought about it.

Film-makers and advertising agencies are conspiring to hi-jack our musical heritage for their own evil purposes. The 12 year old spawn of Satan who lives in a corner of my house and plays loud heavy metal all day (I don’t know how he got there. When we had him installed, he was a standard issue sweet innocent baby) thinks ‘Pretty Woman’ is a song about prostitution, and that ‘Frankie And Johnny’ were not a pair of murderous star-crossed lovers but a waitress and a short order chef. He was astonished to discover Grace Jones’ version of ‘Demolition Man’ in my record collection, and wanted to know why she was singing about Sylvester Stallone when she used to go out with Dolph Lundgren. Was she trying to make him jealous?

The ten year old, on the other hand, just wanders around singing the hits he has grown up with. “Woh, body form, body form for you” is a particular favourite, although he also knows hundreds of songs about soft drinks, various breakfast cereals and a wide variety of chewing gums. I was playing The Beach Boys’ ‘Barbara Anne’ when he joined in with lyrics relating to a dairy product apparently known as Ba-ba-ba-baby bell cheese.

But I digress. Scanning my lists of forthcoming releases, alongside Corrina Corrina (Whoopi Goldberg is the gal on Ray Liotta’s mind) and Only You (Marisa Tomei makes Robert Downey Jr.’s dreams come true) I was horrified to notice a movie titled Simple Twist Of Fate. Bob Dylan’s classic, dry, emotionally understated tale of heartbreak remains one of my all time favourite songs, but is now about to become a film starring . . . I can hardly bring myself to say this . . . Steve Martin. The Man With Two Brains meets the man with brains enough for two.

But it gets worse. The synopsis describes this as the heart-rending story of a man who fights to keep his daughter from being returned to her biological dad. I mean, Jesus Christ, what next? Blood On The Tracks starring Jean Claude Van Damme as a train driver forced to defend his vintage steam engine from a gang of terrorists? It Ain’t Me Babe, a comedy of mistaken identity starring man-of-a-thousand-faces Jim Carrey? Mr Jones, starring Richard Gere as a wacky manic depressive who falls in love with his psychoanalyst?

MIND FUCK

The latter, of course, is the genuine article, and will be released in Ireland shortly, but fortunately it makes no allusions to either Bob Dylan’s or Counting Crows songs of the same name. In fact, why it is called Mr Jones is something of a mystery, apart from the fact that Gere’s character’s surname is Jones, and he’s a Mister.

But coming up with a great film title is no easy matter, as I know only too well. A short film for which I wrote the screenplay is about to get its premiere in the London Film Festival in November. Now, as regular readers will know, it is not like me to be modest. The reason I have not mentioned this particular achievement before is that I didn’t know what to refer to it as.

The film is a strange, excessive and extremely perverse tale of an encounter between a patient and her psychiatrist. Asked to come up with a synopsis for the Film Festival Programme, I provided them with the following: ‘Bondage, humiliation, prostitution, rape. It was just another day in analysis. As Sigmund Freud always said: You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.’ It was rejected on the grounds that rape should not be the subject of a joke, particularly a joke as bad as that.

Basically it is the story of two very sick minds. Or perhaps that should be the product of two sick minds. It was co-conceived and directed by award winning advertising director Bob Lawrie, a man who thinks political correctness is a description of the bondage and domination practises of certain British politicians. Bob is the shock jock of British advertising, probably the only man to have had a children’s cereal ad banned from the cinema because it was deemed too scary (it involved a cartoon dog tying a cat to a railway line. The twist was that the cat did not escape).

An Atari ad was withdrawn after complaints about a man ripping off his face to reveal a skeleton beneath and Bob’s Yorkie ad was emasculated when the advertising authority noticed that every time his large breasted heroine entered a scene, conspicuous bulges appeared in the trousers of the muscular chocolate munching Canadian mountain men (they insisted on cutting the erections, although they made no comment on the heroines breasts, which grew conspicuously larger as the ad progressed). All harmless stuff, in comparison to his first movie anyway.

Until a few weeks ago we used to refer to it as ‘Invisible Woman’. After screenings people would say to us, “I didn’t see the invisible woman,” to which we would triumphantly reply “Exactly!” but the childish pleasure of that joke soon wore thin. But when the time arrived to give the finished film a proper name (Working Title just doesn’t have the right ring to it) we came to the conclusion that all the great titles have already been used.

Most of them by Hitchcock. Psycho, Frenzy, Vertigo, Spellbound . . . any of them would have done the trick. Or one of Brian De Palma or Roman Polanski’s sub-Hitchcock titles, like Obsession, Body Double, Repulsion or Cul De Sac. Short and sharp, with a psychological bent, that was what we wanted.

For a while I favoured ‘Psychodramaqueen’. Bob, never one to use a sledgehammer where a multi-speed road drill and a couple of pints of KY gel would do the trick, leaned towards ‘Analysis’, with the emphasis on ANAL. ‘Therapy’ and ‘Mind Fuck’ were briefly considered, the first being abandoned because it sounded too polite, the latter for being too rude. Finally, we accepted the obvious, and named it after a song.

And so, I apologise in advance to any fans of Patsy Cline, whose haunting ballad of love we have misappropriated as the theme tune for our film: CRAZY. As the synopsis now reads: The doctor will see you now. BE A FREUD. BE VERY AFREUD!