What was the first movie credited to Alan Smithee?
Many Hollywood productions have been plagued by turmoil and controversy, whether it be Hal Ashby’s final film, the spitting drama surrounding Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling or Spielberg’s troubles with shooting nearly every picture at the start of his career. There are many moving parts in coordinating a film, with hundreds of elements that fuse together in order to create complete magic, sometimes defying the laws of the universe through serendipitous moments that make or break a film.
But while there are some productions that are enhanced by the wonderful chaos of creating, there are others that are irrevocably harmed by the many moving parts, with some directors denouncing their credits on films that become so disastrous they want nothing to do with them. It might sound like a rare occurrence, but funnily enough, it’s become a common enough phenomenon that there is now a specific alias given to these projects.
Whenever a director is so unhappy with their film that they no longer want to be associated with it, the name Alan Smithee is put as a placeholder instead, with the true creator behind the film being wiped from the credits. It was a solution created in 1968 by screenwriter Joel Eszterhas, and while it might go unnoticed by many, to the trained eye, it reveals the turmoil behind a production that went sour.
It’s a credit that has appeared on an episode of The Twilight Zone and the airline version of Scent of a Woman, with studios even growing worried over the years that the name would immediately tarnish the reputation of any film it was attached to, concerned that the fake director would be associated with flops and failures.
What was the first movie credited to Alan Smithee?
However, while it has appeared on our screens many times since its inception, it was first created to solve an issue that arose on the production of Death of a Gunfighter. The film follows the dramas of an old-style lawman called Frank Patch in a small Texas town, with the film beginning with one director attached and being completed by someone else.
Neither of the directors involved wanted to be credited on the project, believing the finished product to not be an accurate reflection of their work and creativity. It created enough of a conundrum that the Directors Guild of America had to get involved, with Universal worrying that running the film without this key credit would stain the films reputation and undermine the hierarchy of filmmaking itself.
And so, in order to rectify this, something suggesting using the pseudonym of Alan Smith, with one of the board members protesting idea for the reason that Smith is a very common surname. As a counter-solution, somebody suggested they add two E’s and use Smithee instead, which eventually became common practice for abandoned projects.
The TV version of David Lynch’s Dune, Michael Mann’s Heat and Martin Brest’s Meet Joe Black were all given the same pseudonym, leading Smithee to have an unexpectedly prolific body of work. While the name isn’t used now, perhaps a retrospective is in order, with audiences unknowingly loving many of his films despite not being a real person.
