I was at the library the other day and realized that I still hadn’t seen The Bourne Identity. So I said to myself “Hey, I’ll just pick up the book instead.” Perusing the shelf of Robert Ludlum titles, I realized they all had these very stilted, cold war, nouny sort of names. The Osterman Weekend. The Holcroft Covenant, The Chancellor Manuscript.
So I wrote a little script to autogenerate Ludlum titles for me, just in case I should ever need to ghost write a book for his kid.
Here is your randomly generated Robert Ludlum title. To get another one, just reload the page. If you enjoy it a lot, consider clicking on one of our convenient ads to help sponsor the site.
Your next Ludlum book is:
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The game, as invented by Salman Rushdie, is to take an existing story and come up with a Ludlumesque title. The canonical examples are “Hamlet” -> “The Elsinore Vacillation” and “Othello” -> “The Kerchief Implication”.
With The Bourne Identity (movie) there was a fair amount of liberty taken with the plot (as is common with most book to movie productions, but I would suggest more so than usual). Then with the second, The Bourne Supremacy, they kept the title and a character or two, but abandoned the plot. They also did things which made it impossible to keep anything in the third movie true to the third book (beyond having Bourne as the main character of course). Personally, I just enjoy the two creations as separate works which happen to share names, but I imagine it would take very little effort to find fans frothing over the differences on the internets.
Normally I’d be irritated that someone else thought of this before me, but if you’re going to be outdone, one can’t complain about being outdone by Salman Rushdie.
This is a fun game. And, I notice, one that drives your page hits way up.
I got something like “The Uhura Imperative” a moment ago. Excellent.
“More hits” doesn’t actually get me anything other than increased bandwidth (our ads only yield revenue if people actually click).
If I wasn’t so lazy I’d make it so you could reload by submitting a form, rather than reloading the page. But WordPress is sort of retarded about javascript, so I didn’t.
Jon F’s report of Rushdie’s version of this game amuses me greatly. Some stories take a totally different character when imagined through a Ludlum-filter…
Star Wars: “The Blueprint Appropriation”
Jaws: “The Selachian Denial”
Gone with the Wind: “The O’Hara Ordeal”
Citizen Kane: “The Rosebud Ambiguity”
Casablanca: “The Bartender Ambivalence”
Joyous.
Of course, being a geek, I immediately start looking for ways to game the system.
The Rock: “The Road to Alcatraz”
Casablanca: “The Shocked, Shocked Ascertainment”
The Scarlet Pimpernel: “The Aristocrat Extraction”