This is not me.

This post is just a quickie for a bit of explanation.  As I roam around the blogosphere, I’m well aware that it is the custom to come up with a clever nom de plume and not use your actual name — let alone your full name.  I know this, and I’ve started several blogs with wittier names that never seemed to go anywhere.  Using my full name is no reason to suppose that this blog will be any different, but that’s not the reason I did it anyway.

The reason is that I would like this site to ultimately turn into an author page that is googleable and easy to find — “ultimately” because, to date, I haven’t had anything officially published.  But I’m currently hard at work on a screenplay and have a few other projects in the works, so “ultimately” might not be so far away.

When it does finally happen, I will be faced with a problem, especially if one of my screenplays were to be picked up: there’s already a Steven Weber in Hollywood.  You know him from TV’s Wings and the films Single White Female (remember the scene with the high heel…) and Jeffrey, among many other projects.  The Screen Actor’s Guild requires that no two movie stars have the same name, which is why when a young Michael Keaton was starting out and going by his birth name of Michael Douglas he had to come up with an alternative professional name.

I don’t intend to act or direct, so I don’t know if there would be pressure put upon me to change my name, but, regardless, it’s a branding issue: if I come up with an awesome screenplay, I don’t want everyone to think he did it.  And, conversely, if I come up with some awful stinker that gets picked up and produced regardless of quality, he doesn’t want it associated with his name.

That said, I don’t really want to have to change my name.  It acknowledges my family and speaks of where I’m from.  And anyway, I toyed with the idea but couldn’t come up with anything good.

So, rather than acquiesce and allow Steven Weber to have our name all to himself, or try to make it as a one-named wonder like Madonna, Cher or Ke$ha, I’ll follow in the thrice-appellated footsteps of Joyce Carol Oates, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Stephen Vincent Benet.

Stephen Gerald Weber.

It’s got a ring to it.  (I just hope SAG doesn’t object…)