That's weird. So somewhere out there, there's a Francine Del Mar, and she wouldn't give the OK? But apparently the Jenny Del Mars of the world were fine with it? And Francine would have been a legal risk, even if she wasn't a 20-something woman from Wyoming? Or maybe she was.
Wouldn't they have to make a lot of calls in movies where the characters had fairly common names? If that's the case, I'm amazed movie characters don't all have names like, I don't know, Nightshade Von Tibbleskins or something.
But wait -- Renee Zelwegger's character in
Jerry Maguire is name Dorothy Boyd, which is my grandmother's name. And I don't remember HER getting a call! I don't think anyone would have confused the two, though.
These little moviemaking rules can be strange. A friend owns the prop master's copy of the BBM script. One thing it notes is that the beer and whiskey bottles that Jack and Ennis drink from that first summer all had to have their labels turned from the camera. That's because Jack and Ennis were underage to drink. In their later years, showing the labels was OK.