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August 2001, Week 4

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Subject:
From:
mpomeran <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 24 Aug 2001 11:03:36 -0400
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Readers might be interested to know that in the arcane
business of motion picture scripting and copyrighting, it is
not only an aspiring actor who is forbidden by law to take
on an "already-owned" name, as in the case of poor
James-Stewart-who-had-to-become-Stewart-Granger.  The legal
department of the Hollywood studio, at least during the
1950s but I'm quite sure beyond that in both directions,
made certain you were being proper even when you named a
character.  You couldn't simply pick up a character name
used in another film, of course; but you often couldn't
simply pick up a character name from somebody in real life,
either.  One of the people (I was going to say "ironically
enough" but there were so many of them, I suspect, there's
no real irony here) who had this kind of trouble routinely
was, you guessed it, Alfred Hitchcock.

Murray
Toronto

[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> >>You are confusing Stewart Granger with Farley Granger. It was Farley who
> >>appeared in Rope opposite John Dall. Although I think Stewart would have
> been
> >>rather hot in it.
>
>      a rather more interesting "error" than might
>      at first appear . . . for i believe that the actor
>      who went by the name of stewart granger was
>      in fact named james stewart but was unable to
>      use his own name because it was, as we all know,
>      already "taken" so to speak . . . and of course the
>      other james stewart plays opposite farley granger
>      in ROPE,  giving the film a portmanteau "stewart
>      granger" and making leo right in a joycean kind
>      of way
>
>      mike
>
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