A Family Affair, currently one of the most-watched movies on Netflix, is like Amazon’s recent movie The Idea of You, only reconfigured to more explicitly serve a stereotypical audience of moms and their gen Z daughters. In it, writer Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman) unexpectedly falls in love with movie star Chris Cole (Zac Efron), 16 years her junior, much to the chagrin of Brooke’s 20-something daughter Zara (Joey King), who works as Chris’s beleaguered personal assistant. If Idea of You felt a bit like erotic fanfic, A Family Affair is more like a sitcom with some Nancy Meyers-style flattery thrown in. It has the mildest hint of sex – Zara catches Chris and Brooke mid-coitus, and Kidman shows off a little side boob – and its low-key cringes would withstand most parent-and-adult-child watches. It is rated, like seemingly most movies, PG-13.
So it’s a little surprising to read that the movie’s script, when Efron first read it, was originally titled Motherfucker. (Albeit, Efron claims, bleeped out.)
The movie formerly known as Motherfucker was written by Carrie Solomon; it’s her first credited screenplay, and she wouldn’t be the first writer to use an eye-catching NSFW (or NSFMP – Not Safe for Movie Poster) title that obviously wouldn’t survive the journey to the screen, even if every other aspect of the movie was perfectly and respectfully preserved. No Strings Attached, a 2011 romantic comedy starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, was more bluntly called Fuck Buddies at the script stage, with one draft even opening with the characters debating whether or not they want to use that particular moniker to describe their casual-sex relationship. Last year’s raunchy road trip comedy Joy Ride supposedly punned on a seminal 1993 Asian-American family drama, for a working title of The Joy Fuck Club. Later this summer, Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice will hit theaters sans its original title, Pussy Island.
Obviously, the general public isn’t especially privy to these changes, until they become interview fodder as it did recently for Efron – and even then, the casual viewer of A Family Affair won’t necessarily be reading through the industry trades for interesting tidbits about the original title. It’s a particular subsection of movie-retitling trivia and working-title trivia, where movies sometimes shoot under an alias (“Blue Harvest” for Revenge of the Jedi) or get switched before release (“Revenge of the Jedi” in fact became Return of the Jedi). But boldly unusable screenplay titles are still an odd mini-trend – especially when that title’s boldness doesn’t match the movie in question
In many cases, the original title has felt present in the spirit of the movie. No Strings Attached ultimately was an R-rated comedy, albeit not a particularly raunchy one; the retitling felt of a piece with the mildly dispiriting journey from screenplay by the very funny Elizabeth Meriwether (the creator of New Girl) to a late-period comedy from Ivan Reitman (the director of My Super Ex-Girlfriend – and a few good ones, too, but still). Joy Ride genuinely pushes the envelope with what it depicts (though, like a lot of raunchy comedy, it’s ultimately more talk than action; even its onscreen threesome is partially clothed), and understandably couldn’t get away with a title that sounds like a porn parody. Presumably the phrase “pussy island” remains somewhere in Blink Twice.
A Family Affair, though, can’t even bring itself to say the word “motherfucker”, at least in its final form. Maybe Solomon had a version of the script that was more overtly sexual, more provocative, or at least more plainly profane in its humor. But the final film is a cloistered bit of nothingness where the characters’ negligible problems are visible from miles away, and the solutions arrive with borderline insulting ease. This is a movie where the major characters are a huge and beyond-wealthy movie star, a beloved and quite wealthy author, and her daughter, whose biggest stressor is the idea that she isn’t yet a movie producer at the tender age of 25. The big lesson is about Zara making things about herself; in other words, it’s the kind of lecture a privileged kid might hear from their equally privileged parent.
Would it be a stretch, then, to call the movie’s cutely raunchy original title another form of Hollywood insularity? Motherfucker is there to catch Efron’s eye, or maybe lure Nicole Kidman, whose taste in movies appears a bit edgier than these warmed-over leftovers, into a project that might otherwise elicit an eyeroll. Of course, you can’t really blame a screenwriter for marketing their work in a harmless way, and no star at Kidman or Efron’s level is likely to sign on if they don’t see something of worth in the actual role they’re being offered. But an impossible-to-use title is a great way of presenting as a more daring, more interesting movie than will actually be made – which I’d argue that A Family Affair does in its finished form, even without knowing what its old title was. The movie presents a potentially icky, uncomfortable situation, then shrugs its own story off as ultimately uncomplicated empowerment for everyone involved. Maybe the title should have stuck with the swearing, but aimed for something more honest: instead, call the movie A Waste of Fucking Time.