COMMENTARY You Say Navorski, He Says Navasky
By Victor Navasky
"Dad, quick, turn on Channel 4," said my daughter Miri, who hung up before I could ask her why.
Here was why. There on Channel 4 was a commercial for "The Terminal," the new Tom Hanks movie. A voice-over explained that "Viktor Navorski," played by Hanks, finds himself stranded at the airport when a coup in Krakozhia, his imaginary Eastern European homeland, leaves him without a valid passport or visa. As a result he can't enter the United States and has no country to go back to. So Navorski spends the next nine months living at JFK.
That's all very well for Viktor Navorski, but what about Victor Navasky?
This is not the first time that my name, or a close facsimile thereof, has been taken in vain in a movie. The last time (which incidentally also involved a movie starring Hanks - what's with that guy, anyway?) was "You've Got Mail," Nora Ephron's remake of "The Little Shop Around the Corner." Here the Navasky character, called Frank Navasky, was played by Greg Kinnear, who looks about as much like me as Tom (Mr. Everyman) Hanks does.
Ephron, a friend, did ask permission to use my name. She neglected to mention, however, that her Navasky character was a self-important journalist who believed that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were framed (whereas I, who until recent revelations about Julius was an agnostic on the Rosenbergs, believe that Alger Hiss was wrongfully accused).
As far as I can tell, the only consequence of having my name on the big screen was that shortly after "You've Got Mail" opened, Orso's restaurant in New York, which can be hard to get into, took a same-day reservation and sent a complimentary basket of pizza bread to my table.
This time, however, has been different. Whenever a commercial for "The Terminal" appeared on television, my phone would ring and it would be another attorney assuring me that my ship had come in. Clearly I had a case for "misappropriation of my name and likeness," "expropriation of my right of publicity" and my favorite, "product disparagement." (After all, would a man who dines at Orso's, even if he found himself confined to an airport, eat ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard on saltines? I ask you.)
But I remembered what happened when Warner Bros. tried to change the name of the Marx Brothers' film "A Night in Casablanca" because the studio deemed it too similar to its own "Casablanca," with Bogart and Bergman. Groucho sent off a letter: "You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about 'Warner Brothers'? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were." ("I am sure," Groucho added, "that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo.")
I almost had a better case years ago, before my wife, Anne, and I were married, when an episode of the TV series "The Defenders" featured a Russian emigré princess named Anne Navasky operating as a lady of the night. As it happened, this episode too was written by a friend (some friend, my mother-in-law-to-be said). But David Rintels, the writer-friend, had access to his uncle, the distinguished federal jurist Charles Wyzanski. Besides, there was no real Anne Navasky yet. We ceased and desisted.
Anyway, who, you are probably asking, would mistake a "hapless tourist" from Eastern Europe (as one reviewer called Navorski) for a third-generation New Yorker like Navasky?
I'll tell you who. Google, that's who. I Googled "Viktor Navorski, 'The Terminal' " and onto my screen popped the question "Did you mean to search for Victor Navasky?" Well yes I did, and no I didn't.
I'm only glad that my grandfather, Nathan Navasky, who fled from a real Eastern European country (Kovna, now in Lithuania), is not around to see Navorski get confused for Navasky.
My uncles Abraham Lincoln Navasky and Alexander Hamilton Navasky - I kid you not - changed their last names, but my grandfather (and my father) proudly and stubbornly stayed with the Navasky he was born with. Me too.
Maybe next time Hollywood could get my first name right and learn to spell my last one. Either way, savvy screenwriters now know that Navasky is fast becoming one of the most popular names in Hollywood. Be that as it may, my all-time favorite movies are still "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "Meet John Doe."
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Victor Navasky is publisher and editorial director of the Nation and the author of, among other books, "Naming Names," a history of the Hollywood blacklist. He is the director of the Delacorte Center