Hazards in Headline Writing

Not an image of Gena Rowlands in The Notebook.

Gena Rowlands died last week at the age of 94. She was perhaps best known for blazing trails in a series of films like “Faces” (1968) and “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), an unmatched performer and a patron saint of American independent film. Or perhaps not. When news of her death first emerged, the headlines of numerous news outlets, like CBS and NBC and USA Today, deemed Rowlands as the star of “The Notebook (2004).” That was a nice film, a sweet film, a film to watch on your phone while you’re relaxing on the beach, but I mean, c’mon, this would be like deeming Parker Posey, who thankfully will never die, as the star of “You’ve Got Mail.” Many, including the actor Carrie Coon, took to the social media platform Still Referred to as Twitter to voice incredulity: “We lost Gena Rowlands,” wrote Coon, “but also our dignity, as headlines trumpet: actress from ‘The Notebook.’” This caused others to voice incredulity that Coon would knock a movie so many loved, and that was, in fact, directed by Rowlands’s son, Nick Cassavetes. Coon riposted further incredulity that people could not hold two truths at once. Indeed, the news outlets that mentioned both “The Notebook” and “A Woman Under the Influence” probably got it right; each one has a place. Maybe we just need copy editors to have a fuller grasp of film history.

The hullabaloo made me think of Sarah Vowell’s piece for This American Life in the 90s, eventually collected in her book “Take the Cannoli,” in which in advance of Frank Sinatra’s death she implored television networks to refrain from peppering their future Ol’ Blue Eyes obits with snippets of “My Way,” “the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly-dictatorial chestnut in the old man’s vast and dazzling backlog,” an unworthy testament to the monumental singer’s career. (I know that when Bruce Springsteen dies, which he won’t, the television news networks will play “Born to Run,” of course, and that’s fine, even if I have always fantasized about them playing the first verse of “The Price You Pay” instead.) They did not heed her call. The dead might well be happier dead, as the esteemed philosopher Harry Lime once noted, but it’s only natural to want to properly honor the legacy of a mountain-mover like Rowlands. Or like Faye Dunaway, whenever her time comes, which I hope is not any time soon. 

Indeed, what this minor hubbub really did was reinforce my now semi-long-standing apprehensiveness in regard to Dunaway. The obituaries themselves will be fine, no doubt, as they were with Rowlands, but even if her own mountain-moving work was, I dare say, more universally known than that of Rowlands, it was so long ago that even if “Dunston Checks In” wasn’t enough of a box office hit to get cited, I can still imagine oblivious copy editors summarizing Faye Dunaway as “Hollywood star who read the wrong Best Picture winner at the 2017 Oscars.” If I see that in the headline - if I see that in the first paragraph of the eulogy - then there’s gonna be trouble.