AND THE OSCAR DOESN’T GO TO…
The Most Famous Man in Hollywood You’ll Never Get to Meet
In 1969, the movie Death of a Gunfighter debuted. Starring Richard Widmark and Lena Horn, it received a mixed response, viewed as mediocre at worst—“extraordinary” at best; IMDb gives it a viewer-powered 6.4 stars out of 10, while Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 stars out of 4. Ebert made special mention of Gunfighter’s director in his review, writing, “Director Allen Smithee, a name I’m not familiar with, allows his story to unfold naturally. He never preaches, and he never lingers on the obvious. His characters do what they have to do. Patch gradually gets in deeper and deeper. There’s another killing. The county sheriff is called in. The town council finds its self-respect threatened by this man who will not bend. The film ends in an inevitable escalation of violence, and in a last sequence of scenes that develops with horrifying understatement.” The New York Times also noted in its own review that the film was “sharply directed by Allen Smithee who has an adroit facility for scanning faces and extracting sharp background detail.”
This was high praise for the director; there was only one problem: Allen Smithee isn’t real. During the making of Gunfighter, the actual director (Robert Totten) and lead actor (Widmark) had what you might call “creative differences.” In the middle of the shoot, Widmark successfully stumped for Totten’s removal, and he was replaced in the director’s chair by Don Siegel. Siegel did not want to take credit for directing the film, having worked on less than half of it and, in his eyes, being something of a yes-man to Widmark (Siegel believed Widmark was the de facto director). Totten, for his part, also refused to take credit for a film he was cast off from. The Directors Guild of America (DGA) agreed, and instead associated the film with a made-up director, “Al Smith”—a name quickly revised to “Allen Smithee” in order to avoid confusion with real people of that common name.
The DGA continued to use the name (more commonly spelled Alan Smithee) officially through 2000, in order to disassociate directors and films whenever a situation called for it. Most of the situations involved movies you probably haven’t heard of as they didn’t turn out all that well, but Alan Smithee also has credits in some well-known TV shows. He’s officially the director of an episode of both The Twilight Zone and The Cosby Show, as well as two episodes of MacGyver (including the ninety-minute pilot). Whether it was poor ratings or creative differences between the director and other members of the cast and crew, the Smithee name gave directors a way to disassociate with work that they didn’t think was up to their standards.
Credit for the ultimate retirement of the Smithee name went to another movie: Burn Hollywood Burn. In the film, the protagonist is a director named Alan Smithee. The movie was a critical failure and subsequently received a lot of negative press. With the “Alan Smithee” name now a punch line, the DGA believed the moniker had outlasted its value, so they stopped using it. But don’t worry: A director can still disassociate from a film if circumstances warrant doing so. The DGA is more than willing to use other pseudonyms, deciding on a case-by-case basis.