Austin Light - Movie Title Typos: Making Movies Better by Subtracting One Letter

Copyright 2015 by Austin Light. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-4521-4956-1 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-4990-5 (epub2)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-5372-8 (epub3)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-5373-5 (mobi)

Designed by Neil Egan and Ben Kither
Illustrations by Austin Light

Chronicle Books LLC
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San Francisco, CA 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

Special quantity discounts are available to corporations and other organizations. Contact our premiums department at corporatesales@ chroniclebooks.com or at 1-800-759-0190.

Title Key

: War of the Worlds

When I was a kid I would make crappy movies with my brothers and friends. Godzilla movies with toys and paper backgrounds. Over-choreographed living room lightsaber fights that never looked as cool as they felt. Backyard trampoline wrestling extravaganzas with preposterous signature moves. We knew they were crappy when we were making them, but that didnt matter.

We probably spent more time making our movies than we did watching them, which was fine by methe making was the best part. I eventually stopped making movies, but never stopped making things. I always have to have a project, something fun to work on. Making stuff is in my DNA.

That never-ending desire to make things is what led me to InkTober, a month-long drawing event created by artist Jake Parker that challenges artists to make thirty one ink drawings, one a day. It sounded like fun, but I needed a topic.

Around the same time a coworker showed me a Reddit thread about movie titles with one letter missing. Hilarious what-ifs and could-have-beens, they were movies that would have been fun to make with my brother and friends.

So I did the next best thing. I drew them. Every day I made a new movie with a silly drawing and a new plot description. It was the closest adult me could get to those papercraft Jurassic Parks and ramshackle lightsaber fights of my youth. At the end of the month, a friend helped me post a gallery of the images to share with the Reddit community. And then the Internet exploded.

Suddenly my silly drawings were everywhere. They were viewed more than a million times in less than six hours. Friends of my friends friends shared them on Facebook. They were featured in a segment on the TV show @Midnight. Robert Downey Jr., Molly Ringwald, and Wes Craven all shared them on social media. It was bonkers. It felt like Steven Spielberg found one of my old movies and made it his next blockbuster.

For this book, Ive taken my favorites from the initial batch and created even more, all new movies. Ive also created new, full-color artwork for all of them (the originals were just quick sketches.) Its been a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them. And if you find yourself subtracting letters from movie titles (I cant even help it anymore), and you think up a good one, please let me know at www.MovieTitleTypos.com.

Kat realizes theres nothing she
hates about her boyfriend, but
a whole lot she doesnt like.

Gerard Butler plays a Spartan
warrior who realizes he cant
eat and party like he used to if
he wants to keep those abs.

Farmer Hoggetts presidential pig
brings home the blue ribbon at the
County Fair oratory competition.

The story of a lonely cashier named
Alen who yearns for something more.
Like eating astronauts.

The mysterious Jigpaw traps a group
of strangers in a house of horrors.
The only way out? Rub his tummy.

After a witch turns her best
friend into a dope boom box,
Belle decides to enter Frances
Got Talent. She crushes it.

A bumbling tow truck accidentally
becomes the new boss of a drug cartel.

With his cool calculator watch in tow,
super spy James Bond goes undercover
as a high school math teacher to root
out a teenage criminal mastermind.

When his owners lock him out
and leave for vacation, Chuck
goes full feral in the back yard.