CULT HERO: Despite numerous phone calls, a flurry of e-mails and promises of a glowing write-up, veteran director Alan Smithee declined to be interviewed
Despite numerous phone calls, a flurry of e-mails and promises of a glowing write-up, veteran director Alan Smithee declined to be interviewed. In fact, Smithee proved an exasperating and elusive quarry. To cadge a phrase from the current Coen brothers movie: the more we looked, the less we saw. When was he born? Nobody knows. Where does his live? Opinions differ. How did he break into film making? Anybody's guess. Our unease deepened when a laborious trawl of the Internet failed to uncover a single photograph of the prolific auteur.
What is indisputable is that Smithee ranks among the most industrious directors in tinseltown. With more than 100 features, innumerable screenplays and a raft of production credits to his name, he makes trojans such as Robert Altman and Woody Allen look like dope-addled slouches.
Alas, quantity has far outstripped quality. A warmly received 1967 début Death of a Gunfighter ("Smithee has an adroit facility for scanning faces and extracting sharp background detail" gushed the New York Times) remains a rare aberration in a CV strewn with cinematic car-wrecks.
Smithee's career is a nightmare ride along the grass verges of the motion picture industry, a bedraggled patchwork bereft of theme or consistency.
Some of his best-known work has emerged from collaborations with more celebrated peers. When art-house darling David Lynch disowned a half-cocked revamp of his bleary Dune adaptation, Smithee graciously affixed his name to the project. He repeated the favour after horror filmmaker Kevin Yagher distanced himself from the still-born Hellraiser IV. Smithee even assumed Hitchcock's mantle, helming the lamentable 1994 sequel, The Birds II - Return to Land's End.
A shameless tart, Smithee has found time to oversee countless television movies. We can thank him for obscure dreck such as Call of the Wild, Bay City Story, Gypsy Angels, City in Fear and the lost student-party classic, Bloodsucking Lepers in Pittsburgh.
In 1992, he belatedly turned his hand to "adult entertainment", cranking out several episodes of the quasi-pornographic Red Shoe Diaries (starring a pre-X Files David Duchovny).
Among Smithee's most fanatic admirers is Basic Instinct screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas. In 1997, the Hungarian tyro penned a tribute flick, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. The feature was such a wretched mess director Arthur Hiller insisted Eszterhas remove him from the credits. With a devastating irony possibly lost on those involved, poor old Smithee gallantly steeped up into the breach.
That Lifetime Achievement Oscar is surely long overdue.