He just loves that title, man

When I had lunch with John Hamburg the other day, the writer-director of the upcoming comedy “I Love You, Man” appeared full of anxiety, something of a natural condition, I suspect, since, judging from his work, he is the poet laureate of comic anxiety. Best known in the business as Ben Stiller’s in-house writer, Hamburg’s writing credits include “Meet the Parents,” “Zoolander” and “Meet the Fockers” as well as serving as the writer-director of “Along Came Polly.”

The problem at hand was pretty clear. His new film, which stars Paul Rudd, Jason Segel and Jamie Pressly, had the perfect title and he desperately wanted to keep it.

After all, what else would you call a comedy about a loner engaged to a nice girl who suddenly realizes that he has no male friend to be his best man -- and proceeds to go out on a series of male dates, hoping to find the right guy? I mean, doesn’t “I Love You, Man” say it all? Hamburg thought so too. So did DreamWorks, which produced the film (which is being distributed by Paramount).

There was just one snag: 20th Century Fox had a film coming out at roughly the same time next spring called “I Love You Beth Cooper.” And if there were ever a studio that would attempt to copyright the phrase “I Love You,” it would be Fox.

So even though Hamburg had done a lot of work at Fox, including some key rewrites on the studio’s mega-hit “Night at the Museum,” he was worried. And rightfully so. After all, it was DreamWorks that had a Farrelly brothers comedy called “The Seven Day Itch,” loosely based on 1972’s “The Heartbreak Kid.” At least it was called that until Fox challenged the title, claiming the movie could be confused with the 1955 Billy Wilder film “The Seven Year Itch.” (I only wish Wilder were still alive, since surely he’d have a great quip about the logic of how you’d confuse a 50-year-old Marilyn Monroe movie with a Farrelly brothers comedy.) Fox was so fiercely committed to protecting its title that studio Co-Chairman Tom Rothman personally went before the MPAA title arbitration board to plead the studio’s case -- and won on appeal, forcing DreamWorks to change its title to “The Heartbreak Kid.” (The movie flopped.)

“I have to admit I don’t have a real fall-back position,” Hamburg told me over lunch. “I have a list of other titles in my office and they’re all terrible. ‘I Love You, Man’ is so good because it’s a phrase that’s in the culture. It symbolizes the way men talk to each other, especially the comma and the ‘man.’ And the whole subtext of the phrase really plays out in the movie. I dunno -- isn’t ‘I love you’ a pretty common phrase? It seems like I’ve heard it in movie titles before.”

The good news? Fox likes “I Love You Beth Cooper” so much that it decided to move it into the summer, giving it a July release date. As long as DreamWorks keeps “I Love You, Man” in its early March slot, the studio can retain the original title. “We could still have arbitrated it, but we have a great relationship with John and he’s done some wonderful work for us, so once our movie moved, we felt we could accommodate his film,” Rothman told me last week.

But if it was OK for Hamburg to keep his title, why wouldn’t Rothman let the Farrelly brothers keep “The Seven Day Itch,” since the writer-director team had made Fox a ton of money with hits such as “There’s Something About Mary” and “Me, Myself & Irene”?

“It’s a very different situation,” Rothman said. “One is a current title, the other is a library title. There was an enormously important principle at stake in terms of a threat to the permanent protection of library titles. It’s the same reason you wouldn’t let someone call their movie ‘Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind.’ You have to protect your library value. It’s an important principle, and it’s why we won the case.”

Hamburg isn’t in the mood to quibble. He says he’s happy that Fox was kind enough to let him keep his favorite title. “Our second choice, I guess, was ‘Bromance,’ which isn’t a bad descriptive phrase, but I wouldn’t want to use it as a title.” He laughs. “At least it’s better than ‘Guy Love.’ ”

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patrick.goldstein@latimes.com