There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment that can be played for laughs, but it’s just as hard not to smirk when a film that takes itself seriously calls itself by its own name. Many filmmakers will go out of their way to avoid this moment of clunky announcement. You never hear, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis snarl, “Welp, there will be blood,” or Leonardo DiCaprio mutter, “You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.”
That last sentence reminded me of an old Fresh Air interview with the director of those two movies, Paul Thomas Anderson:
Terry Gross: I kept waiting in the movie for somebody to say, “There will be blood!”
PTA: I had a friend, Terry, that any time he would go to see a film, and the title of the film was said onscreen, he would scream out, in the audience, this horrible obnoxious noise. He’d say, “Buc-KAW!” Really loud. So I just always remember… god, if I ever… my friend would scream from the back of the audience!
I told my kids that story years ago and from that point on whenever it happens in a movie we watch they’ll let out a loud “Buc-KAW!”
It just happened last night, in fact, when we watched What About Bob? and Julie Hagerty shouts, several times, “What about Bob?!?” They also did it last week when Richard Attenborough said, “Welcome… to Jurassic Park!” And come to think of it, it would be funny to note which pizza night movies get a “Buc-KAW!” or not. (Psycho, for example, has no “Buc-Kaw!” moment.)
