How many movies are attributed to ‘Alan Smithee’?
No director wants to have their name on a bad movie.
Not only is it bad for one’s ego and creative confidence, but it can also cause serious damage to one’s professional career. Nobody wants to hire the turkey who made a turkey. If you’ve made a bad film, however, then surely you have to own up to it? Well, not if Alan Smithee has anything to do with it.
The Director’s Guild of America (DGA) used to offer a get-out clause for anyone who couldn’t face the shame of being attached to a stinker. If they wanted to withdraw from a project, then it would be released with the name ‘Alan Smithee’ on the poster. Smithee, who was entirely fictional, would take all the blame, while the anonymous real director could ride off into the sunset with their reputation still intact.
The first film to employ this tactic was the 1969 western Death of a Gunfighter. Star Richard Widmark frequently clashed with original director Robert Totten and fought to have him replaced. He eventually got his wish, and Don Siegel took over. Even though he worked on the project for fewer days, an equal amount of Siegel’s footage was used in the final cut.
Neither man wanted to take sole credit for the film at the expense of the other, and since DGA rules only allowed one person to be named ‘Director’ on a movie, the ‘Smithee’ name was conjured up as a compromise. The original name they were going to use was ‘Alan Smith’, but it was decided that it was too likely that a real person would have that name and suffer the consequences forevermore.
The Smithee pseudonym quickly took off. There were four examples of it being used in 1990 alone, as directors both famous and unheard of scrambled to scrub their names from various doomed projects. But how many movies has this fictional filmmaker actually been credited on? That’s actually a harder question to answer than you might expect.
How many movies are attributed to ‘Alan Smithee’?
According to IMDb, Smithee is credited as the director of 154 projects. Interestingly, that includes four movies that are still in production, which is strange considering that the alias was effectively retired by the DGA in 1997. If you take out the TV series and the shorts, this number is somewhere around the 50 mark, but that’s still not the end of the story.
Some directors originally had their names on the finished movies, only to later request that their names be removed. David Lynch was given the Smithee treatment for the TV version of his much-hated version of Dune, even though his name was on the theatrical release. He also had his screenwriting credit amended to say ‘Judas Booth’, a nod to two men responsible for the deaths of messianic figures. If you sat down to watch Michael Mann’s classic thriller Heat on NBC in 1999, you’d be surprised to see Smithee’s name at the start of the film. That’s because Mann was so bloody upset with how the network had cut his movie that he refused to be associated with it.
Unfortunately, the answer to this question isn’t as goddamn straightforward as it would seem. However, isn’t that incredibly fitting for one of the biggest fucking enigmas in film history? Alan Smithee continues to live on in Hollywood folklore, even though he never actually set foot on a single film set.
