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The Mysterious
Alan Smithee
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.
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…
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