Alan Smithee: The Director Who Wasn’t

What do you do when you’ve directed a movie… but you don’t want your name on it?

This week, Michael explores one of Hollywood’s strangest traditions: Alan Smithee, the fictional film director created by the Directors Guild of America for filmmakers who had lost creative control of their projects. Along the way, you’ll hear how one Western accidentally created a decades-long Hollywood secret, why critics unknowingly praised a man who didn’t exist, and how a movie about Alan Smithee ultimately brought the entire system to an end. Then we chat with Emmy-Winning Writer and Educator, Joe Janes!

Did you know The Internet Says It’s True is now a book? Get it here: https://amzn.to/4miqLNy

Everybody has probably wished they could take their name off something at least once. Maybe it was a group project where one person did all the work and everyone else still got credit. Maybe it was a home improvement project that looked a lot better in your imagination than it did when you finally stepped back and looked at it. Whatever it was, you’ve probably had that moment where you thought, “I’d really rather people not know I was involved.”

Most of us don’t have to worry about those moments lasting forever. A bad haircut grows out. A terrible presentation gets forgotten. That embarrassing social media post from college is hopefully buried beneath years of newer content. Movies don’t have that luxury. Once they’re released, they’re part of history, and so are the names attached to them.

If you’ve ever sat through the closing credits of a movie, you’ve seen hundreds of names scroll by. Some belong to people you’ve heard of, while most belong to talented professionals whose work you recognize far more often than their names. Every one of those credits represents months or even years of work, and for many people in Hollywood those credits are their professional reputation.

No credit carries more weight than the director’s. Audiences may remember the actors, but within the film industry, directors are generally viewed as the creative leaders who pull everything together. They decide where the camera goes, how scenes are staged, how performances are shaped, and how the story ultimately unfolds. A great director can elevate an average script, while a troubled production often lands squarely on the director’s shoulders whether the problems were actually their fault or not.

Of course, filmmaking has never been as simple as one person calling every shot. A studio is spending millions of dollars. Producers answer to investors. Executives want changes after test screenings. Sometimes actors demand rewrites. Sometimes an ending is reshot months later because audiences didn’t like the original version. By the time a movie reaches theaters, it may look very different from the film the director thought they were making.

That tension has existed almost as long as movies themselves. Directors want creative control because their name goes on the finished product. Studios want commercial success because they’re the ones writing the checks. Most of the time those interests line up pretty well. Every once in a while they don’t.

The organization responsible for protecting directors in the United States is the Directors Guild of America, usually called the DGA. Among its many responsibilities is deciding who receives directing credit on productions covered by Guild agreements. That might sound like an administrative detail, but it’s actually one of the Guild’s most important jobs because a directing credit can determine future employment, awards eligibility, and an entire career. Before 1968, Guild rules did not allow directors to use pseudonyms because the Guild wanted to prevent producers from stripping directors of their professional identities or forcing fake names onto them. 

That policy worked well until Hollywood encountered a situation nobody had really anticipated.

In 1968, production was underway on a western called Death of a Gunfighter. The film starred Richard Widmark, one of the biggest stars in westerns and crime films during that era. The original director was Robert Totten, an experienced television director whose résumé included shows like Gunsmoke and The Legend of Jesse James. 

As filming continued, Totten and Widmark developed serious creative disagreements. Accounts differ on exactly how every argument unfolded, but the conflict became significant enough that Totten was replaced before the movie was finished. The studio brought in another accomplished director, Don Siegel, to complete production. 

Siegel later estimated that Totten had directed roughly twenty-five days of filming while he directed only nine or ten. He also said Widmark exercised considerable influence over the production, making the final movie feel like the work of several different creative voices rather than one unified vision. When the film was completed, neither director believed the finished product truly represented his own work. 

That left the Guild with an unusual problem. Totten didn’t want sole directing credit because he hadn’t finished the film. Siegel didn’t want sole credit because much of what audiences would see had been shot by Totten. Under Guild rules, simply listing both names wasn’t considered the right solution because the production hadn’t been conceived as a true co-directing effort.

The Guild needed another option.

One early suggestion was simply to invent a generic name. “Al Smith” was proposed first, but someone pointed out there was already an Al Smith working in the film industry. The name evolved into “Smithe,” then finally “Smithee,” making it distinctive enough to avoid confusion while still sounding perfectly ordinary. The earliest screen credit actually used the spelling Allen Smithee, although the Guild later standardized it as Alan Smithee, which became the version most people recognize today. 

When Death of a Gunfighter opened in 1969, audiences didn’t think twice about the unfamiliar name in the credits. If anything, critics assumed Alan – or rather Allen – Smithee was simply an up-and-coming director they’d never encountered before. Roger Ebert wrote that “Director Allen Smithee, a name I’m not familiar with, allows his story to unfold naturally,” while Howard Thompson of The New York Times complimented the direction as “sharply directed.” Neither reviewer realized they had just praised a filmmaker who didn’t exist. 

The experiment had solved the Guild’s immediate problem. More importantly, it had created a solution that could be used again if another director ever found themselves trapped in a similar situation. The Guild formally adopted Alan Smithee as its official pseudonym for directors who could demonstrate to a Guild panel that they had lost meaningful creative control over a project. The rules were intentionally strict because the Guild wanted to protect directors, not create an easy escape hatch for every disappointing movie. A director also wasn’t supposed to publicly admit using the pseudonym or explain why it had been granted. 

For movie audiences, none of this was public knowledge. Alan Smithee looked like any other working director trying to build a career in Hollywood. Over the next three decades, that fictional filmmaker would quietly accumulate one of the strangest résumés in entertainment history, appearing in movie theaters, on television, in music videos, and even on commercials, all without ever setting foot on a film set.

When the Guild approved the use of Alan Smithee, it wasn’t handing directors a free pass to walk away from bad reviews. The standard was much higher than simply making a disappointing movie. A director had to convince a panel of fellow directors that the finished work had been altered enough that it no longer represented the film they had set out to make. If the Guild agreed, the director’s real name disappeared from the credits, Alan Smithee took its place, and everyone involved generally kept quiet about why it had happened.

That last part was important. The system only worked if audiences didn’t know what Alan Smithee meant. The name wasn’t supposed to become a joke or a warning label. It was intended to be invisible, allowing the director to move on professionally while avoiding a public fight between the filmmaker and the studio. For quite a while, that’s exactly what happened.

As the years went by, Alan Smithee quietly built a résumé unlike any other director in Hollywood. The name appeared on theatrical films, television movies, episodes of television series, and even music videos. Most viewers never noticed because directors rarely receive the same attention as actors, and Alan Smithee sounded perfectly believable. Unless you worked in the industry or paid close attention to the credits, there was no reason to suspect anything unusual.

One of the more widely discussed examples involved the television version of David Lynch’s Dune. Lynch directed the 1984 theatrical release under his own name, but when an extended television version was assembled using footage he hadn’t approved and was edited without his participation, he asked that his directing credit be replaced. The television version carried the Alan Smithee credit, while the screenplay was credited to the equally fictional “Judas Booth.” Lynch has never been shy about his disappointment with how that production evolved, making it one of the better-known examples of why the pseudonym existed in the first place.

The name also found its way onto television projects that most viewers have long since forgotten. A few TV movies, episodes, and other productions ended up bearing the Alan Smithee credit after directors successfully argued that the final versions no longer reflected their work. Because the Guild reviewed each request individually, there were also directors who asked for the pseudonym and were denied. Simply losing an argument with a producer wasn’t enough. The Guild wanted evidence that meaningful creative control had been taken away.

That distinction made Alan Smithee relatively rare. Despite the mythology that has grown around the name, only a modest number of directors were actually granted permission to use it. The legend grew much larger than the list of approved credits because every new Alan Smithee project attracted curiosity inside Hollywood. Industry publications began mentioning the name whenever it appeared, and eventually journalists started asking the obvious question: who exactly is Alan Smithee?

Once that question started getting answered publicly, the secret became much harder to keep. By the 1990s, movie magazines, newspapers, and early internet discussion boards were explaining the joke to audiences. Film fans began watching credits specifically to see whether Alan Smithee showed up. The pseudonym had gone from being invisible to becoming a trivia answer, and that completely undermined its original purpose.

The final blow came from an unlikely source. In 1997, Hollywood released a comedy called An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. The movie itself was directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Joe Eszterhas. The plot centered on a fictional director named Alan Smithee who desperately wanted his name removed from a movie after losing creative control, only to discover he couldn’t use the Alan Smithee pseudonym because that was already his real name.

If that sounds like an inside joke stretched into an entire feature film, that’s because it was. Ironically, the production itself ran into creative disagreements during post-production. Arthur Hiller became unhappy with the final cut and successfully petitioned the Directors Guild to replace his own name with Alan Smithee. As a result, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn became the only movie about Alan Smithee that was officially directed by Alan Smithee.

The irony didn’t end there. The film was a commercial and critical failure. It earned overwhelmingly negative reviews, performed poorly at the box office, and later won multiple Golden Raspberry Awards. Joe Eszterhas would later publicly criticize the finished product, while Hiller distanced himself from it through the very system the movie had been satirizing. Reality had somehow become stranger than the script.

After that, the Directors Guild found itself facing a problem that couldn’t really be fixed. Alan Smithee had become too famous. The pseudonym no longer protected directors because audiences immediately understood what it meant. Instead of quietly removing someone’s name from a troubled production, the Alan Smithee credit now announced to everyone that something had gone badly behind the scenes.

The Guild quietly stopped using the pseudonym after Burn Hollywood Burn. While there has never been a formal public rulebook declaring Alan Smithee permanently retired, the Directors Guild has acknowledged that the name effectively became unusable because its meaning was now widely understood. When later disputes arose over directing credits, other solutions were generally found instead of returning to the once-secret alias.

Even after its retirement, Alan Smithee occasionally refuses to disappear completely. Every so often, people claim to spot the name in television listings, DVD credits, or online databases. Sometimes those are legitimate older productions. Other times they’re simply references, jokes, or errors that have been copied from one website to another. The legend has taken on a life of its own, which seems fitting for someone who never actually lived.

Alan Smithee also became part of the language of Hollywood. Mention the name to filmmakers, and they’ll immediately understand the reference. It’s shorthand for a project that went off the rails, for creative battles fought in editing rooms, and for the complicated relationship between art and commerce. Every film represents hundreds of people trying to create something together, and not every collaboration ends happily.

It’s also worth remembering that Alan Smithee was never meant to shame anyone. The pseudonym wasn’t created because directors were embarrassed by failure. It was created because filmmaking is collaborative, and sometimes the version that reaches audiences is fundamentally different from the one the director actually made. The Guild recognized that a director shouldn’t necessarily own decisions made entirely by other people after creative control had been taken away.

Today, streaming services and social media have made those behind-the-scenes disputes much more visible. Directors openly discuss studio notes, alternate cuts, deleted scenes, and projects that changed dramatically during production. In some ways, audiences have become fascinated by the process almost as much as the finished films themselves. If the Alan Smithee system were proposed for the first time today, it probably wouldn’t stay secret for a week.

There’s something wonderfully human about the entire story. Hollywood, a town famous for carefully crafting appearances, solved an awkward professional problem by inventing a person. For nearly thirty years, that fictional filmmaker quietly accumulated credits across the entertainment industry while critics reviewed his work, audiences watched his movies, and almost nobody questioned whether he was real.

The Internet says it’s true.

Review this podcast at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-internet-says-it-s-true/id1530853589

Bonus episodes and content available at http://Patreon.com/MichaelKent

For special discounts and links to our sponsors, visit http://theinternetsaysitstrue.com/deals