How about just Machina?
I admire you getting it down on paper. I have a book that’s been floating around in the back of my head for a few years now, and I just can’t seem to get started. Good luck.
I don’t think I gave enough information to cast judgement on the whimsicality factor just yet. In my head it has plenty of upbeat moments. I’ll see how it goes as I write it. If I write it.
I don’t want to come across as all high-falutin’, but these are the movies I have in my head. Son of Rambow, The Descendants, and a foreign film about a postman, though the only one I can find is Il Postino and it doesn’t sound familiar. I think it was a French film.
Added to the list. I like it.
If it was animated, maybe.
That’s actually pretty good.
Thanks, everyone, this thread is really helping me to think about the story in a deeper way.
How about Escape to Everwas. Because he was always brilliant whether everything remained good or not, so he leaves for somewhere else where he can continue to be himself.
Escape to Everwas! Crikey, that’s too good a title to waste on my silly movie. That sounds like a YA book series to me.
Head In The Clouds neatly sums up what everybody thinks of the guy, sure as the sneering idiom of course proves literally true when he eventually succeeds.
I got your ending: The inventor is ostracized like you said. He has taken to live in his workshop, which is on the slope of a hill outside of the village. He is befriended only by a boy of about 10-12, the bastard son of the village prostitute (there’s your sex). The boy is also an outcast. He becomes, despite being warned to stay away from the old man by his mother, a sort of assistant to him. At last the glider is ready. The boy and the old man take it up to the top of a small bluff further up the hill from the workshop. The old man gets in and shoves off. He pretty much plummets to the ground and is badly hurt, barely conscious. The glider is smashed up. The boy runs off and tells his mother. His mother at first scolds him, but then they go up the hill and find the old man, still in his smashed glider. They help him back to his workshop. The woman still does not trust him, and even less so when she sees all the strange stuff in the workshop. Nonetheless, she brings him food until he has recovered enough to take care of himself. She tells him to stay away from her son, and tells her son to stay away from the old man. But the boy returns. He is a little older. The old man now walks with a limp, and one hand doesn’t work too good. From their initially stilted conversation you learn it has been 2 or 3 years since the glider attempt. The old man tells the boy it was a foolish idea and he has given up on it. But the boy sees the repaired glider in a shed behind the workshop. He calls the old man on giving up. The old man says the glider would in fact work, but the problem was he was too heavy. Now, even if he was lighter, he could not fly it because he is too lame from the injury. The boy says he will fly it. The old man refuses. But the boy insists. Then, seeing the excitement in the boy, the old man’s enthusiasm is rekindled, and he agrees. He teaches the boy about the glider, and how to fly it. Then the day comes when they go back to the bluff. The boy climbs in and shoves off. He glides perfectly out from the hill and over the countryside, then over the village. The villagers look up horrified. They think it is the Armageddon. The boy lands hard in a field of sheep and goats near the village. The villagers run out to where he is. They get there as the boy is climbing out of the wrecked glider. They see that he is the bastard child, are instantly convinced he is evil, and beset themselves upon him with clubs and (yes) pitchforks. As he is being beaten to death, the villages are crying for him to confess saying that is the only way he can save himself. Hethen yells out that the old man put him up to it. They finish him off anyway, and head out to the workshop. They get there before the old man, who, having watched the whole flight with joy and pride, is hobbling down the hillside. In the workshop the villagers see all the strange stuff and unintelligible writings and drawings and their horror deepens. Just then the old man comes in. They attack and beat him, then tie him up in his workshop and burn it down. The final shot, as the credits roll, is of the smashed glider, sheep and goats milling around it. Nearby is a small child sitting in the mud. In the midground is the village, church spire dominating the profile. In the background is the hillside, a small column of smoke rising straight up from where the workshop smolders
And I shall call him Icarus, and he shall be mine, and he shall be my Squishy.
Oly, maybe you should write your own movie.
Since I’m not going to write that book, use it if you like it.
I’d like to see the movie.
It’s fun to think about titles, but I don’t think creating a good title should be an end in and of itself. I have worked on numerous short and feature films, in some of them I helped worked on the screenplay, too. I’ve come to believe that while a film is sill in concept, pre-production, or production stage it is better to use a working title instead of getting too wrapped up in coming up with a good final title.
Partly this is because, in my opinion, people sometimes spend too much creative energy trying to think of a good title when that energy would be better spent advancing the project as a whole.
But more importantly, I believe one can not title a creative project until it’s finished because one never knows what they really have until they are done. Things can change a lot along the way and deciding on a title before you’re finished can leave a person so married to their super-duper title that they’re afraid to change the story (even though it might desperately need it) if it starts to deviate from the title they’ve fallen in love with.
Better to use working titles until you are finished (IMO).
A serviceable working title is something I usually come up with early on, so I can dive right in. But in this case, and it’s the first time this has happened, I had no decent ideas at all, even as a temporary idea; everything I came up with was so wrong it distracted me.
I had a look around the web to see what other people think about titles, like what makes a good one and top 20 lists of the best, that kind of thing, and at least one article laid out a good argument for coming up with a title as one of the very first steps to motivate some of the storylines, so that justified my dithering.
Only spending a day or two on pondering a title isn’t that big a deal, all things considered.
(I can’t take full credit for this):
“To Forgive is Human, to Air is Divine”
How about something with ‘Soar’ or ‘Soaring’ in the title - like ‘To Soar Above’ or ‘Soaring Above’?
The Daedalus of Cholet.
I think this is the best title for encapsulating two of the main themes into one. So, for now, Head In The Clouds will be my working title. Thanks Waldo. 
If that matters to you.
I see no mention of flying machines, so I’m good. There’s also about a 1 in a billion odds against my script being finished, seen, accepted, made, and noticed, and even if it did they would probably change the title to The Peculiar Adventures of Professor Pumpernickle.
Gilbert God Freed.
Plus, that was more than eight years ago; eight years before GLADIATOR won the Oscar for Best Picture thanks to Russell Crowe, Cuba Gooding Jr was in a forgettable little movie called – GLADIATOR. And eight years before CRASH won the Oscar for Best Picture, there was an offbeat film called – CRASH.
So by the transitive property, work fast enough and you’re a lock to thank the Academy. 