The Hollywood Director Who Doesn't Exist

For over three decades a notoriously bad filmmaker was allowed to have a prolific career in Hollywood until he was eventually revealed to be a made up personality in 1997. You may have come across the name of Alan Smithee and he doesn't actually exist.

Even though Hollywood is the land of make believe it is filled with real people with real careers. How was it possible that a made up director was able to have a full career? It all actually starts with the Directors Guild of America.

The way studios operated was that they had a stranglehold on what they produced and directors had little authority over the final product. Most of the time, the general public had no idea who directed the films, but only which studio produced it.

In an effort to change that, King Vidor and a few of the leading directors at the time formed the Directors Guild of America in 1936 to collectively negotiate with the studios and guarantee the right to be actively involved in all aspects of the filmmaking process.

The Directors Guild's main goal was to protect not only the legal rights but the creative freedom of its members. This gave directors more bargaining power and more control over the creative vision of their films and leading to the auteur era of the 1960's.

But in 1969, a situation happened which the DGA had to step in to fabricate the personality of Alan Smithee. On the film, Death of the Gunfighter, the director was fired because of conflict with the main star & another director was brought in to finish it.

When the film was done, neither director wanted to take credit for the film because the final film didn't reflect either one's creative vision. The DGA stepped in to create Alan Smithee to take the credit & it was a critical success.

But from there, the name would begin to be associated with films that the filmmakers wanted to distance themselves from. The process consisted of the filmmaker going before the DGA & had to prove that they lost creative control of the film.

If the DGA approved the director's name being replaced with Alan Smithee, the condition was that the change had to remain inside the industry. This went on for three decades until the meta comedy film titled, "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn" revealed it.

The film revealed the secret of this fabricated filmmaker to the general public & only a few films were approved to use the name after that. Alan Smithee has been associated with over 150 projects to date & some wonder if the practice is now associated with a different pseudonym