Die Alan Smithee Die! Did a Marketing Stunt Kill Hollywood’s Worst Director?
As always, I set out on this article with a preformed opinion. An informed hypothesis, if you will, and a desire to prove the rest of the internet wrong. And, as always, it’s folly.
I first had this idea (if it could be called that considering the similarity) from this video, by the YouTuber Hazel.
**[On a side note: she’s my absolute favorite creator on the platform. No one else combines academia with the heartfelt at her level.]
Here, Hazel commits as intrepid of a job as possible in identifying the lost director of an episode of Eiken, an anime beyond the scope of my words, so just watch her video. However, in the search she briefly mentions the movie An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, a film which killed its director.
Rarely does a story which seems too good to be true actually turn out that way, an axiom strong on the mind as I tackled an enduring Hollywood legacy: the death of Alan Smithee, widely regarded as the worst director, well, ever. Except Alan Smithee isn’t a director at all; it’s a shared pseudonym. When a director felt that their work on a film had been replaced or their “vision” compromised, they had the right to petition the Directors Guild of America to replace their credit with the name Alan Smithee. While used sparingly on Studio projects, it became a popular avenue for directors looking to spare themselves embarrassment when their movies were cut down for television, such as the case with David Lynch’s Dune and the majority of Michael Mann’s filmography. As the practice evolved as an in-joke for the industry, screenwriter Joe Eszerthas took it upon himself to ruin the fun. After his disastrous An Alan Smithee Film.: Burn Hollywood Burn (distributed by Disney), the pseudonym disappeared in Hollywood. Funny enough, Eric Idle wouldn’t be the only person pretending to be Alan Smithee on the movie; Burn Hollywood Burn became the last notable use of the pseudonym after Eszerthas, its screenwriter and producer, wrestled the final cut away from director Arthur Hiller. As the title predicted, An Alan Smithee film… is an Alan Smithee film.
… but isn’t that just a little too good to be true? Why would Arthur Hiller, a Hollywood fixture since the 1950s, let Eszerthas follow-up to Showgirls be the last hill he’d die on (no pun intended)? Wouldn’t Burn Hollywood, a raucous satire of the entire industry, benefit from such an absurd publicity stunt as having itself be “Alan Smithee-ed?” Well, the answer, as per usual, lies someplace in the details. And, regardless of contemporary skepticism, what people used to know matters little. When anecdote passes into legend, its authenticity becomes superfluous.
As Hollywood is a town driven by personality, there’s an impact to. Eszerthas and Hiller’s movie beyond its text. Disney produced Burn Hollywood Burn, a move which surely rose eyebrows among those participating in the game of inside baseball. Almost a decade earlier (the blink of an eye for an industry feud), Eszerthas and Michael Ovitz engaged in a blistering war carried out by the trades; Ovitz, then head of the supreme Creative Artists Agency, threatened to destroy his erstwhile client’s career after he decided to change representation. Not to be outdone as the impresario of outrage, Eszerthas circulated a letter exposing Ovitz’s tactics to the Los Angeles Times. Over the next 7 years, Ovitz couldn’t catch a break, culminating in his embarrassing year-long tenure as the president of the Walt Disney Company. So, when Disney agreed to distribute Burn Hollywood- Eszerthas pet project- before Ovitz had officially left the company, it must’ve raised a few eyebrows. I mean, the movie would go on to “win” a Golden Raspberry “Razzie” Award for a song sung by Eszerthas called, “I Wanna Be Mike Ovitz”. Of course, Ovitz might have had the last laugh — Burn Hollywood Burn snuffed the pilot light for what was already Eszertha’s flagging career when it released to financial and critical disaster in November of 1997.
In 1995, blame for the failure of Paul Verhoevan’s Showgirls fell plainly with Eszerthas. After all, Verhoeven put out two more Hollywood flops- Starship Troopers and Hollow Man- before fleeing to his native Netherlands for the rest of his career. With another disaster under his belt, William Friedkin’s erotic thriller Jade, the trades positioned Burn Hollywood Burn as Eszerthas’ last gamble. Roping the respectable Arthur Hiller into his proceedings made the project all the more head-scratching to onlookers. Oscar nominated for 1970’s Love Story, Burn Hollywood attracted Hiller based not only on satire, but its study of a man pushed to the brink by the industry.
At least, that’s how it seems based on Hiller’s comments after removing his name from the movie. When Variety pressed Hiller for his reasonin in May of 1997, he resonded,
“As [Eszerthas] said, he’d taken out a lot of his dialogue, but I felt he’d also taken out a lot of the storyline and human values of the characters,” said Hiller. “As he knows, I feel he’s turned it into an extended ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”
This is corroborated in turn by Eric Idle’s comments, a former Monty Python trooper who started in Burn. When asked in a 2003 interview by IGN about branching into more serious work, Idle responded with,
“I got the opportunity to do some serious acting in Alan Smithee for the director — but he was removed and it was all cut out.”
Yet, Idle also had this to say in a 2013 post on his blog,
“I was playing the eponymous Alan Smithee in An Alan Smithee Film (written by Joe Eszterhas) when the Director Arthur Hiller came up to me.
“I’ve just had a terrible thought” he said. “If they fire me this will become an Alan Smithee film.”
They did.
Joe Eszterhas removed Arthur Hiller, recut the movie and it became a genuine Alan Smithee film.
He changed the name to ‘Burn, ‘Hollywood, Burn!”
So, hang on. Hiller went up to Idle, unprompted, during a smooth shoot, and said that? What would compel Hiller unless he’d already been toying with the idea of leaving the production?
Except, that didn’t not happen either. Eszerthas, who by all rights could have shown anger towards Hiller, was uncharacteristically fair in how he depicted their spat. While he puffed about the testing scores of his cut to Entertainent Weekly (a dismal 26%), Eszerthas also maintains that Hiller assisted with post even after relinquishing his credit. Speaking again to EW, the screenwriter/producer said that,
“Arthur and I were hand in hand throughout the [Smithee] shoot. He did a beautiful job directing, but when he put it together it didn’t move. [When] I cut 22 minutes off it…Arthur felt I had betrayed my own work. But Arthur is the kind of man who the day after he took his name off the picture showed up in the editing room and said, ”I’m here if you need help finishing it.”’
This hardly seems like the actions of an aggrieved man, although he was one bolstered by decades of Hollywood professionalism. Despite the ambiguity laid in these statements, Hiller does seem to have retracted his name from the movie in good faith. His lawyer even commented in that previous EW article that the situation had been, “no laughing matter… But it is ironic”. Hiller further reiterated sincerity during the 2002 AMC Films documentary “Who is Alan Smithee”, years after the movie had already bombed. Ultimately, it’s clear that Hiller felt strongly about the dissolution of his vision.
But…
I can’t imagine Hiller lost sleep once Alan Smithee took the helm. it must’ve been an incredibly easy decision — After all, he’d already floated the idea to Idle months before editing began on the movie. And, while I cannot speak for the man, it would allow both versions of this yarn to remain true. Yes, Hiller has his name taken off the movie in good faith- the DGA allowing it to happen is proof enough- but it was also as earnest as publicity stunt as possible with that consideration in mind.
Speaking of the DGA, what part did they play in the eventual fallout? Theres been scant Alan Smithee films in the decades since Burn Hollywood Burn. Apparently, that’s by design. The DGA officially retired the moniker to escape damnation by association. Well, that’s what reports have said. But look at what Wikipedia has to say about it: taken directly from the entry on “Alan Smithee” (I know, but bear with me),
“Following [Burn Hollywood Burn], the DGA retired the name; for the film Supernova (2000), dissatisfied director Walter Hill was instead credited as “Thomas Lee”,[1] and Accidental Love director, David O. Russell, left the product credited to Stephen Greene.[10][11]”.
While I wouldn’t usually quote Wikipedia, it synthesizes my point better than I could — there isn’t explicit evidence that the DGA retired Alan Smithee. Instead, journalists speculated in the wake of Burn Hollywood Burn that the pseudonym fell out of favor lest filmmakers accidentally tie themselves to one stinker while trying to strike their name off a different one. The last case in which a director applied for Alan Smithee was Ti West for his work on 2002’s Cabin Fever: Spring Fever; as he was not a member of the directors guild at the time, West’s request was denied.
That being said, the Los Angeles Time’s sources claimed in 2000 that DGA board members had discussed- and decided- to retire the name privately. Since then, they’ve remained unmoved. “Alan Smithee” appears from time to time in either animation or independent projects but hasn’t appeared on a studio film since the 1990s.
Sorry to all for the disappointment, but this scandal resolved almost exactly as reported. Although I’ve theorized that Hiller didn’t lose any sleep about slapping Alan Smithee’s name on Burn Hollywood Burn, it’s just a theory. Through several independent accounts, Burn Hollywood is a legitimate Alan Smithee movie, and it was the final nail in the coffin for a practice the Internet had already threatened to expose. It makes sense; as Hazel demonstrated in her YouTube video, today’s technology has rendered the power of a pseudonym almost useless. Now, Alan Smithee no more than an Easter Egg.
Links to sources and interviews:
