Hacker Cinema
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn
1998 · Film · 86 min
Directed by Alan Smithee, Arthur Hiller
Filmmaker Alan Smithee finds himself the unwilling puppet of a potentially bad big budget action film, for which he proceeds to steal the reels, and leaves the cast and crew in a frenzy.
2 neutralfrom 2 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
2 comments on Hacker News
Amusingly, it mostly died off because of a film called An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. In that film, a man called Alan Smithee couldn't get his named removed from the film because the only available pseudonym matched his own name, with said film being so terrible that it's own director wanted his named removed from it.
So a film about the use of Alan Smithee as a pseudonym was credited to Alan Smithee, which in turn made it incredibly hard to take the name seriously any more.
Wow.
The film's creation set off a chain of events which would lead the Directors Guild of America to officially discontinue the Alan Smithee credit in 2000. Its plot (about a director attempting to disown a film) eventually, and ironically, described the film's own production; director Arthur Hiller requested that his name be removed after witnessing the final cut of the film by the studio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Alan_Smithee_Film:_Burn_Hollywood_Burn