Original photo by Jeremy Yap/ Unsplash
Even if you’ve never heard of Alan Smithee, there’s a chance you’ve seen one of his movies. Well, kind of. For decades, directors followed guidance from the Directors Guild of America by using the pseudonym when they didn’t want their actual name on a film. That most often occurred when the finished product was far removed from the director’s original vision due to studio interference or other issues. Most films carrying this dubious distinction aren’t well known — you probably haven’t heard of The Barking Dog, Let’s Get Harry, or Ghost Fever — but there are exceptions, including a Hellraiser sequel and one segment of a Twilight Zone episode.
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It's a factJoel and Ethan Coen have been writing, directing, producing, and editing movies together for decades, but they haven’t always used their real names. In order to avoid repetition, they’ve given editing credit to the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, who has received multiple Oscar nominations.
Perhaps the most revered and well-known filmmaker to be credited as Alan Smithee is David Lynch, who disowned his ill-fated 1984 adaptation of Dune due to studio meddling; he has since insisted on having final cut on all his projects in order to avoid a repeat of that experience. (Lynch has called the film a “huge, gigantic sadness,” and though his name appears on the theatrical version, Alan Smithee is credited on subsequent editions.) Sometimes the reason for the pseudonym was less dramatic, as when movies such as Michael Mann’s Heat or Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman were edited for television or airlines and the director didn’t agree with the changes in those versions. Smithee officially retired in 2000 following a decision by the Directors Guild of America, though nonmembers have continued to use the name on occasion.
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The first movie credited to Alan Smithee was “______.”
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The first movie credited to Alan Smithee was “Death of a Gunfighter.”
A made-up screenwriter was nominated for an Oscar.
When Charlie Kaufman set out to write Adaptation (2002), his follow-up to the mind-bending Being John Malkovich, he “honestly did not think [the] movie would ever see the light of day.” But the beguiling metafictional drama about writing, orchids, and twin brothers did indeed get made — albeit with a little help from Kaufman’s fictional twin Donald, who appears as a character in the film (played by Nicolas Cage) and also received a co-screenwriting credit. “Their” script went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, making Donald the first fictional screenwriter to be so honored. Kaufman later won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2004 for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a feat he achieved without the aid of his cinematic, and entirely made-up, sibling.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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