«Investigating lives, celebrating creativity, honouring ingenuity.»

The Mysterious Alan Smithee
 

Photo: Martin Adams

MIND MAGAZINE | Is the name Alan Smithee familiar to you? Well he is a movie and TV director that has been in showbiz since the 1960s and he is credited with a lot of material that you have seen. So what’s so mysterious about him? Well although his name appears on the credits of over 50 films, nobody has ever met or seen him; simply because Smithee is a pure invention of the world of cinema. It’s simple, every time a director is not happy about its work, he can go to the American Guild of Directors to have his name replace by Alan Smithee. There is a lot going on in Hollywood that the film industry doesn’t want you to know, and the “Alan Smithee mystery” tells a lot about it.

The famous career of Alan Smithee started in 1967 with the movie Death of a Gunfighter. A bitter fight between the star of the movie and the director got so bad that they had to call another director to finish the rest of the shooting. After the filming, both the original and the replacing directors (Robert Totten and Don Siegel) refused to associate their name with the production, claiming their talent and ideas were wasted because of the star (Richard Widmark) and the film producers. Then a lot of debating started in the offices of Universal Studio.

Both directors were discussed by the turnout of the movie, and they didn’t want their reputation to be tarnished by the incompetence of others, so they did what most people would: they complained. But things didn’t go the way they wanted; Universal Studio refused their demands and basically told them they couldn’t do anything because the contract linked their name to the movie. Totten and Siegel didn’t take “no” for an answer so they asked for help from their union (the American Guild of Directors). After intense negotiations between the studio and the Guild, they decided to withdraw the names of the directors under some conditions: they couldn’t later claim royalties or rights on the movie and they were forbid from making any comments on what happened on the set or about the movie producers. The deal was sealed, but one thing remained unsolved: Who would take credit for the movie?

The Guild decided to pick a name that couldn’t be confused with any other director. They search and after a while they came up with Alan Smith. But it seemed too common so they added an “e” at the end, and just to be sure, they added another one to make “Smithee” and a star was born! Yet the Guild didn’t like the experience of fighting over with movie studios, so they imposed hard rules to allow an Alan Smithee movie.
 

Advertisement

Fearing the director of a movie would show up for an “Alan Smithee” every time a production goes bad, they made it clear that some rules would prevail: Firstly, the director had to be prevented to exercise its art to its full capacity due to a conflict with one of the actors. And secondly, the movie producers made decisions against the line of work the director set for the movie.

These two conditions must be respected for a director to get his or her name replaced by “Alan Smithee.” Furthermore, the claims of the director must be documented, and the Guild will then judge if the conflict was deranging enough to wreck the director’s work. The only way to get this done is to go by the American Guild of Directors, being the only organization owning the name of the now infamous director.

Among the best-known productions by Smithee there is the famous TV series MacGyver, and there is Hellraiser. More recently, the movies Meet Joe Black and American History X requested the services of Mr. Smithee. In 1995, the National Lampoon franchise used a “Smithee” to credit Senior Trips. The career of this very eclectic director is granted with over 50 realizations, some of them well accepted by critics and others that were, well… awful.

The ensemble of Smithee’s work is surprisingly not so bad, as it seems that the quality of Hollywood movies is highly variable. Since moviegoers are increasingly aware of the mysterious Alan Smithee, the Guild is not likely to use this name again. Yet, that doesn’t mean the Guild will never use the same trick but with a new name…


© MindMagazine.com

MAGAZINE E-MAIL SUBSCRIPTION
-----------------------------
Details | Privacy Policy