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Aaron's Blog
Man with no lines in his
head writes headlines
Nov. 19, 2008 -- When I was a teenager riding the subway to Stuyvesant High School from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, long before New York Magazine dubbed it the Yupper West Side; in fact. just a few blocks from where I lived on West 89th Street was 84th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues, which some civic organization trumpeted as the worst block in all of New York City, and to think we moved to the Upper West Side from a place called Hell's Kitchen, but I digress; I used to crane my neck over riders' shoulders to read the headlines in the New York Post and the Daily News, little thinking that I would one day be writing those headlines myself.
As a freshman at the City College of New York, I joined The Campus, one of two student newspapers at the school. The first story I was assigned to write was about a series of old movies to be shown in the South Campus cafeteria. When I opened the paper, a photo from a movie I didn't recognize accompanied my story along with a headline that said, "Welcome now to Rick's cafe."
I was like, "Huh?"
I can't tell you how long I resisted writing or even saying things like "I was like 'Huh?' " because it seemed a bastardization of the English language, but everywhere I turned someone was saying "I was like, 'This'," or "I was like, 'That'," and so finally the phrase just slipped out of my mouth, and then it appeared on paper, but while I would leave it in the text of a story I was editing at the Bergen Record, I never entered it into copy myself, not because I didn't think it appropriate, but because it would then pass through the hands of an anal supervisor who would turn red at the mere sight of it, but I digress. I took the copy of The Campus with my story in it to one of the paper's upperclasspersons, pointed to the headline and said, "I don't understand this" or words to that effect.
The upperclassperson looked at me like 'Huh?' His look was something like, "You're 17 years old and a New Yorker and you've never seen 'Casablanca'?"
I had just learned an important lesson not only about headline writing -- a lesson with which several supervisory types I have worked under over the decades would not agree, while others would -- but about filmdom as well. I have since seen "Casablanca" many times, as well as "The African Queen," and the "Maltese Falcon." I've never seen "The Treasure of Sierra Madre."
The lesson about headlines was that you should give the reader credit for knowing a thing or two about popular culture. There was no mention in my story of Rick's cafe, but the headline writer assumed that anybody who was into old films -- especially at a culturally savvy school such as the City College of New York, which turned out such stars of stage and screen as Zero Mostel, Edward G. Robinson and Cornel Wilde, not to mention more nobel laureates than you could shake a wandful of pixie dust at -- not only would know where Rick's Cafe was but could toss off lines like "Out of all the gin joints in all the world ... " without ever having been in a gin joint or having seen any of the world beyond the Bronx or Brooklyn. My first supervisor at the Bergen Record, the late beloved Bob Sumner, for all his warmth and nurturing, would have tossed that headline across the newsroom and made me go stand in the corner for 15 minutes because having lived and breathed copy editing 24 hours a day for the last umpteen years, Bob never went to the movies, and thus movie references in headlines were verboten unless they were clearly explained in the story.
When I look back, "Welcome now to Rick's Cafe" was a pretty good headline. It transports the reader not only into an article about the movie but into the movie itself. And if, like me at age 17, the reader doesn't know what or where Rick's Cafe is, then he or she can ask, or now, some four decades later, Google it.
Good God, I take it all back. Google Rick's Cafe and the first thing that pops up is some upscale restaurant in Jamaica, and "Casablanca" doesn't come up until the seventh entry. But if there hadn't been a Humphrey Bogart, the place probably would be called "Jamaica Joe's."
Thanks for reading.
-- Aaron Elson
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