Finally Giving Some Credit to Alan Smithee

Alan Smithee is alive and well and scheduled to make an appearance in Philadelphia this month.

Movie fans familiar with the name Alan Smithee may find this not only highly unusual but somewhat unsettling.

That’s because Alan Smithee does not exist--it is a phony name, the official pseudonym sanctioned by the Directors Guild of America for use by a filmmaker who wishes to remain anonymous on a film or TV show. The decision to waive directing credit is usually triggered by creative differences between the director and the project’s producer or studio.

Despite his anonymity, Alan Smithee will be given a rare spotlight Sept. 27 when the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia will host a seminar called “Specters of Legitimacy: A Retrospective and Graduate Conference on the Films of Alan Smithee.” And, even though he doesn’t exist, director Alan Smithee--or a reasonable facsimile of him--is slated to make an appearance.

To hip cinephiles, this may seem funny; to directors who have had to substitute the “Alan Smithee” moniker for their names, it may be depressing. But the college professors, film critics and graduate students involved in this conference seem to be taking their subject pretty seriously.

Witness the schedule: Papers to be read include “Smithee and Censorship,” “Smithee: The Challenge to Auteurism,” “Smithee and Popular Culture” and “Smithee and Ghostwriting.” Also attending will be Andrew Sarris, the film critic and professor of film studies at Columbia University, whose book “American Cinema: Directors and Directions” and writings in the Village Voice in the 1960s sparked American cinephiles’ interest in auteurism and the belief that directors are the true authors of their films.

“The conference grew out of a class I taught on auteurism,” says Craig Saper, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. “We looked at different stages of auteurism in film and other fields like literature and asked how Alan Smithee changed the equation of the classical tradition of auteurism.”

Alan (sometimes Allen) Smithee’s name has appeared in about 50 films and TV movies since 1969’s “Death of a Gunfighter”--his first official credit, according to the Directors Guild--a western that started shooting with Robert Totten behind the camera but was finished by Donald Siegel after the original helmer sparred with star Richard Widmark. For the release of the film, according to DGA spokesman Chuck Warn, members of the guild held a brainstorming session for a name that sounded both generic, yet unlikely to be the name of a real director; they settled on Alan Smithee.

The fictitious filmmaker has an eclectic oeuvre, including “Let’s Get Harry” (1987) with Robert Duvall and Mark Harmon; “Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home” (1987), a comedy with Jon Cryer; the extended TV version of “Dune” (1988); the edited airline version of “Scent of a Woman” (1992); “Solar Crisis,” a big-budget 1990 science-fiction epic with Charlton Heston; and “Hellraiser: Bloodline” (1996), the latest entry in that popular horror series.

The conference seems particularly timely because the Alan Smithee name has been in the entertainment news lately. At least two films tentatively scheduled to carry the Alan Smithee seal of disapproval are awaiting release: “Sub Down,” an action thriller starring Stephen Baldwin that doesn’t yet have a U.S. distributor, and “An Alan Smithee Film,” the Hollywood satire for Disney that Arthur Hiller removed his name from after he clashed with writer-producer Joe Eszterhas.

But can the auteur theory be applied to a director who doesn’t exist?

“We’re not doing this on purpose, but it’s been easy finding similarities within Smithee’s films,” says Jeremy Braddock, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student who will present a paper called “Smithee and the Law.” “Sometimes you’ll even see things in his films that relate to the director himself. For example, ‘Death of a Gunfighter’ is a Sergio Leone-styled western about a sheriff whose tough, no-nonsense style makes people want to take control out of his hands and remove him from his position of authority. This parallels the whole notion of Alan Smithee, a person who does things in his own style but has control wrested from him.”

Since there is no true auteur in a film directed by a totally fictitious person, one may look at the conference as an assault to the theory that places all emphasis on a director as a film’s guiding force. One wonders what Sarris, who has championed auteurism for 37 years, thinks of taking Alan Smithee so seriously.

“This idea strikes me as being very faddish,” says Sarris. “If you look at something long enough, you’ll find something. People misinterpreted what I said about directors in the first place. They took it as holy writ. I’m not a theorist--I was and still am trying to find the essence in things. Movies are romance, fantasy, illusions and fairy tales that entertain but can also be high art. But you can’t deny that it’s the director who’s the true spirit of a movie.”

Smithee-philes participating in “Specters of Legitimacy” seem to have found spirit and more in such disparate (some may call them “desperate”) Smithee offerings as “Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh” (1991), “The Birds II: Land’s End” (1994) and “The O.J. Simpson Story” (1995).

Lisa Spagnoli, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who will present a paper at the conference focusing on specific themes found in the Smithee efforts, claims the phony filmmaker has even had a profound effect on her.

“This project started in a tongue-in-cheek way, but became more and more serious as it went on,” says Spagnoli, whose paper is titled “Movies on a Stick: Alan Smithee--Hollywood and Films for Cannibalized Cultures.” “I now find Smithee fascinating. Thanks to him, I now watch movies in an entirely different way.

“One thing I’ve found is that Smithee uses food to explain different types of cultures. For example, in ‘Let’s Get Harry,’ Gary Busey plays a character who goes to Colombia with his friends and identifies the culture by talking about eating iguana on a stick or monkey on a stick. And in ‘I Love New York,’ Scott Baio’s overprotective Italian mother leaps out of a Polly-O cheese van. I discovered the name Polly-O is actually the partial name of a real Italian family.

“In Smithee movies, people travel to different countries, but all of the countries look similar. In ‘Shrimp on the Barbie,’ Cheech Marin gets off the plane in Australia and says, ‘This looks just like Bakersfield.’ I noticed that most of the countries in Alan Smithee’s films, no matter how remote or exotic they are supposed to be, look like Bakersfield.”