Who is Alan Smithee?

Podcast Transcript

If you look at the Internet Movie Database, one of the most prolific directors over the last 70 years has been Alan Smithee.

He has been credited with directing over 156 feature films, shorts, and music videos, with several more projects in the works.

Despite his prodigious output, Alan Smithee has never been nominated for an award, appeared on a red carpet, or conducted an interview.

This is because Alan Smithee doesn’t exist.

Learn more about Alan Smithee and why he was created on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The story of Alan Smithee begins with the union system in Hollywood.

The union system in Hollywood emerged during the 1930s as film workers organized to protect wages, working conditions, and creative rights in an industry dominated by powerful studios.

During the early decades of the American film industry, major studios such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., and Paramount Pictures operated under a vertically integrated system in which they controlled production, distribution, and theater operations.

Employees worked under long-term studio contracts and had little bargaining power, often facing long hours and strict studio oversight. Inspired by the broader American labor movement and encouraged by New Deal labor protections in the 1930s, film workers began forming guilds and unions to represent different crafts, including actors, writers, editors, technicians, and directors.

Directors initially organized under the Screen Directors Guild, which was founded in 1936. One of its major leaders was Frank Capra, who helped push for collective bargaining and professional recognition of directors as creative leaders rather than studio employees.

The guild sought to establish rules governing director credit, working conditions, and creative authority, including protections over the final cut of films. In 1960, the organization was renamed the Directors Guild of America as television became a major part of the industry.

Over time, the DGA became one of the most influential unions in Hollywood, negotiating contracts that cover directors, assistant directors, and production managers across film, television, and streaming productions.

For the purpose of this episode, one of the major things that the DGA sets standards for is film credits.

One of the guiding principles behind the Directors Guild is the Auteur Theory of cinema.

The Auteur Theory is the idea that the director is the primary creative force behind a film, functioning much like the author of a novel. According to this theory, even though filmmaking is a collaborative process involving writers, actors, editors, and producers, the director’s personal vision, style, and thematic concerns shape the finished work in a recognizable way.

It is this theory that guides the credit rules established by the DGA.

One of the most important rules is the “one director credit” principle. In most situations, only one individual director may be credited for a film, even though filmmaking is collaborative. The DGA established this rule to reinforce the idea that a film should have a single creative voice.

The major exception is when the directors are an established team that has been formally recognized by the guild. These are usually sibling teams such as the Cohens, the Wachowski, the Farrelly’s, and the Russo’s.

Another key rule is that a director must receive credit if they directed the majority of the film’s footage. If a director is replaced during production, the guild may conduct an arbitration process to determine who directed the largest portion of the completed film.

The director responsible for the majority of the finished footage normally receives the sole credit. In rare circumstances, shared credit can be granted, but only after a formal guild review.

Another rule, and the one which is the basis of this episode, is that a director’s name, if they are a guild member, must appear on a film and they cannot be credited as a pseudonym.

This rule was created to protect directors as a studio or a producer might attempt to deny a director credit for their work.

While this rule seems very reasonable, what if the final product did not fit the director’s vision for a film? What if a studio hacked and changed a film so much that it is no longer the vision of a single person?

According to the rules, the director was stuck having to take credit for something that they didn’t want to take credit for. This wasn’t really a problem for decades.

The issue came to a head during production of the 1969 Western Death of a Gunfighter.

During the production of the film, director Robert Totten clashed repeatedly with the film’s star Richard Widmark over creative decisions and directing style, which eventually led the studio to fire Totten before filming was completed.

The producers then brought in Don Siegel to finish the movie. By the time the film was complete, however, the final cut contained substantial material shot by both directors, creating a hybrid production that neither of them felt truly represented their own work as auteurs.

Because the Directors Guild of America normally allowed only a single director credit, and because both men were dissatisfied with the mixed authorship of the final film, each requested that his name be removed from the project.

To resolve the dispute, the guild created the pseudonym “Alan Smithee,” which was used as the credited director instead.

The original plan was to use the name Al Smith, but that was considered to be too common. They finally settled on Alan Smithee because no one in the film industry was known to have that name.

Oddly enough, Death of a Gunfighter wasn’t a horrible film. It currently has a 6.2 out of 10 rating on IMDB, which is OK but not terrible.

Moreover, no one outside of the small circle of people working on the film knew who Alan Smithee was.

The New York Times review of the film said it was “sharply directed by Allen Smithee, who has an adroit facility for scanning faces and extracting sharp background detail.”

Roger Ebert gave the film 3 ½ stars out of four and said, Director Allen Smithee*, a name I’m not familiar with, allows his story to unfold naturally. He never preaches, and he never lingers on the obvious. His characters do what they have to do.

With the creation of Alan Smithee, the next use was on the film Fade In starring Burt Reynolds. The film was shot in 1968, before Death of a Gunslinger, but wasn’t released until 1973. Director Jud Taylor requested the pseudonym after disputes over editing

The Directors Guild officially adopted the Alan Smithee pseudonym for directors who didn’t want to be credited for a film. To use it, a director had to go through a formal arbitration process with the DGA.

The director had to demonstrate that the film had been substantially altered without their consent, they no longer had meaningful creative control, and the final product no longer represented their work.

Over the next several decades, Alan Smithee appeared as the credited director in several dozen films, some of which were applied retroactively going back to the 1950s.

There were a few notable cases. The Twilight Zone movie, released in 1983, had multiple directors, including John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller.

The first segment’s director removed his credit following the tragic on-set helicopter accident that killed actor Vic Morrow and two child actors. The segment ultimately carried the Alan Smithee credit.

The theatrical film Dune was directed by David Lynch. When the movie was later re-edited into a much longer television version, Lynch strongly objected to the changes.

He removed his name from the TV cut and replaced it with Alan Smithee. He even replaced his screenwriting credit with another pseudonym, “Judas Booth,” a clear expression of his frustration.

The 1990 film Catchfire was a crime film starring Dennis Hopper and Jodie Foster that underwent heavy studio editing. Hopper, the director, disliked the theatrical cut so much that he replaced his directing credit with Alan Smithee.

Later, when Hopper regained control and re-edited the film for a home-video release, the new version was issued under his real name, and the film was retitled Backtrack.

Up until the mid-1990s, Alan Smithee was known only to Hollywood insiders. It wasn’t a secret per se, but it was inside baseball that only someone in the film business would know.

That all changed in 1997 with the release of the film, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn.

The movie’s plot is about a director named Alan Smithee, played by Monty Python’s Eric Idle, trying to remove his name from a terrible film. However, he can’t remove his name because his real name is….Alan Smithee.

Hilarity ensues.

The director of the film was Arthur Hiller, and this is where things get weird.

Hiller believed that the producers and distributors had significantly altered the film from the version he intended, reshaping the story and tone in ways he did not approve. Because the final cut no longer reflected his creative vision, he appealed to the Directors Guild of America to remove his credit.

So, in one of the greatest ironic twists in film history, the guild allowed him to replace his name on the film Alan Smithee with the pseudonym Alan Smithee, even though the film itself was a satire about a fictional director named Alan Smithee who tries to remove his name from a movie to get it credited to….Alan Smithee.

It was Alan Smithee inception.

The film was indeed horrible. It grossed only $40,000 at the box office on a $10 million budget, and it regularly appears on lists of the worst movies of all time. It won the 1998 Razzie Award for Worst Motion Picture.

Arthur Hiller was nominated for Worst Director, which passed up a brilliant opportunity to actually nominate Alan Smithee.

While very few people saw the film, the story about it spread widely, and now the cat was out of the bag about Alan Smithee. Because the film drew massive attention to the pseudonym and its meaning, the DGA concluded that the device no longer worked.

In 2000, the Directors Guild of America officially retired Alan Smithee.

Even though the DGA officially stopped using it, it continued to be used outside the guild, and it has become a cultural shorthand for someone disavowing a project. Alan Smithee still appears in comic books, television scripts, video games, and music videos.

For example, writer Daniel Chichester had his credit on the Daredevil comic book changed to Alan Smithee when he was removed from the title.

While Alan Smithee was retired, the Directors Guild continues to allow directors to request removal of a directing credit using the same appeals process. The only difference is that, instead of using a single pseudonym, they can now choose from several.

We don’t know all of the pseudonyms that have been used, but we do know of several.

One of the first was “Thomas Lee,” used on the 2000 science-fiction film Supernova after director Walter Hill left the production following major studio recutting and reshoots.

Another example is “Stephen Greene,” credited as director of the romantic comedy Accidental Love after director David O. Russell abandoned the project due to financing and production disputes.

While Alan Smithee may have officially retired, his legend still lives on. If you are ever stuck on a project that you don’t want any part of and don’t want to take public credit for, just as that, instead, credit be given to Alan Smithee.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Research and writing for this episode were provided by Cornelius Mountweazle.

Today’s review comes from listener theosnewmama on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write:

Timely and essential information

Gary has always chosen interesting topics that I never would have thought to learn about, but the topics he’s covered lately have felt especially relevant and important for listeners to hear for historical context on current events. Whether his topic choices are intentional or I’m just primed to notice historical parallels, I’m glad he’s doing it.

Thanks, newmama! While there are lessons from history that we can learn, I’m never trying to subtly make some contemporary political point. Everyone is free to draw their own conclusions from past events and how they apply to the world today.

Remember, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you too can have it read on the show.