#90 An Alan Smithee Movie: Burn Hollywood Burn (Wes)

#90 An Alan Smithee Movie: Burn Hollywood Burn

For those of you out there who don’t know what an Alan Smithee movie actually is, I shall give you a quick explanation. Sometimes a director makes a movie that is interfered with by the movie studio so much that they no longer wish to be associated with it. If this happens then they could have made the choice to request the directors credit to go to Alan Smithee (this practice was formally discontinued in 2000). If you want to see a list of these movies then you can do so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_smithee

This however just leaves me with two questions... 1) Why aren’t more of the movies that Colin and I are having to endure “directed” by Alan Smithee? 2) When Arthur Hillier (who was also the director of Love Story) asked to credit this movie to Alan Smithee did the studio worry just for one moment that they really did have a pile of steaming excrement on their hands, or did they see this as some sort of clever marketing angle?

The premise of this movie is pretty simple really. What if you make a movie that’s absolutely diabolical, but you can’t credit it to Alan Smithee as that’s actually your name? Alan Smithee (Eric Idle), makes an action movie called Trio, which brings the talents of Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg and Jackie Chan together (all played by themselves). The studio keeps interfering with the movie and eventually Smithee steals the only copy of the final cut and goes on the run threatening to burn it. Whilst in hiding Smithee meets, and is eventually aided, by the Brothers Brothers (Coolio and Chuck D), two independent filmmakers who try to help him negotiate with the studio so he can re-edit it.

Now this actually sounds like a good premise for a movie and bring filmed in a mockumentary style really could have worked quite well. Add to this actors, and even producer Harvey Weinstein parodying themselves and their industry and you have to question what went wrong.

I quite liked this film at the start of the movie. Stallone, Goldberg and Chan were all brilliant parodying themselves and the script actually starts off quite funny, but unfortunately this doesn’t last very long. If this was a Comic Strip style TV special, then it could have worked so much better, but what was about half an hour of good material was stretched into nearly an hour and a half and it just gets pointless and dull very, very quickly.

The script was written by Joe Eszterhas, famous for writing Basic Instinct and Showgirls, which if I’d known beforehand, may have given me more of an idea of the level to expect. In the movie Smithee refers to his movie as being “worse than Showgirls”, and I for a moment was taken in by this self-deprecation (but only for a fleeting second, as I'd already sat through over an hour of this crap before this line). Unfortunately the script is really too up its only arse to be very good.

The person who gets the worst of the script is Idle. Whenever he’s onscreen you just end up cringing at exactly how bad his lines are, none of which are helped by Idles awful performance, at the end of the movie him turning his cap around and saying “cool” is more embarrassing to watch than watching the legs uncrossing scene in Basic Instinct with your mum. You’d think somebody of his comedic talents would be able to spot a terrible script a mile off, but then again you’d also expect that of most of the other actors in this movie.

The Directors Guild of America officially retired the Alan Smithee pseudonym after this film was released, as the name became more widely known amongst the movie-going public (although for a film that only grossed $45,779 in the US, you have to wonder how). I can only assume that Arthur Hillier was thanking his lucky stars that he was able to distance himself from this movie just in time.

If you want to watch a decent mockumentary, then watch This Is Spinal tap. If you want to watch a movie that satires Hollywood and the film industry, then watch The Player. Just do yourselves a favour, if someone gives you a copy of this movie, then take Eric Idles lead and burn it, you’ll thank me for it later.