An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1998)

[Roonami 11]

Eric Idle plays Alan Smithee, who makes an action movie starring Stallone, Jackie Chan, and Whoopie Goldberg. He knows it's going to be a flop so he tries to disown it by using the Alan Smithee pseudonym. He can't get away with it because his real name is Alan Smithee. Spoiler: the movie-within-the-movie is very bad. This real movie is also quite terrible.

 

The real movie is meant to be an insightful mockumentary on the movie business, but is generally very flat. Most of it is people talking directly to the camera.

 

The funniest thing about the movie is the irony that the director, Arthur Hiller, wanted to disown this movie and used Alan Smithee in the credits! I believe the Directors Guild decided after this movie that you have to keep your name on your projects from now on.

[sillstaw 414]

I believe the Directors Guild decided after this movie that you have to keep your name on your projects from now on.

 

I think they just decided that "Alan Smithee" was too famously a fake name to use anymore. So they decided that, if a director wanted his name off a movie, the fake name used would be decided on a case-by-case basis. The first movie to use this new rule was "Supernova," ostensibly directed by one Thomas Lee but initially shot by Walter Hill, then reshot by Jack Sholder and Francis Ford Coppola.

[CaptainAmazing 127]

I think I remember reading that this movie basically "outed" Alan Smithee as the go-to fake director name and led to the Director's Guild killing off the practice of using it once and for all.

[Roonami 11]

 

I think they just decided that "Alan Smithee" was too famously a fake name to use anymore. So they decided that, if a director wanted his name off a movie, the fake name used would be decided on a case-by-case basis. The first movie to use this new rule was "Supernova," ostensibly directed by one Thomas Lee but initially shot by Walter Hill, then reshot by Jack Sholder and Francis Ford Coppola.

 

I really wanna revisit Supernova now.