And the Oscar Doesn’t Go To…

In 1969, the movie Death of a Gunfighter debuted.  Starring Richard Widmark, Lena Horn, and Carroll O’Connor, the movie was generally believed to be mediocre at worst — IMDb gives it a viewer-powered 6.4 stars (out of ten) while Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 (out of 5).  The New York Times made special mention ofGunfighter‘s director, noting that the film was “sharply directed by Allen Smithee who has an adroit facility for scanning faces and extracting sharp background detail.” Ebert also lavished praise on Smithee:

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.

All of this is high praise for the director.  Only one problem: Allen Smithee isn’t real.

During the making of Gunfighter, the actual director — Robert Totten — and lead actor Widmark came to creative differences.  In the middle of the shoot, Widmark successfully stumped for Totten’s removal; he was replaced in the directors 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 (who Siegel believed was the de facto director).  Totten, for his part, 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 used the name (and more commonly, Alan Smithee) officially through 2000, in order to disassociate directors and films as need be.  (Here’s one tragic example.)  Credited with the disuse of the Smithee name goes to another movie, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, in which the protagonist is a director named Alan Smithee.  The rarely seen and poorly received movie managed to attract enough attention to the Smithee legend such that the DGA believed the Smithee moniker had outlasted its value.

Bonus fact:  Edward Norton earned an Academy Award nomination (Best Actor) for his role in American History X in 1998.  But the movie’s director, Tony Kaye, was unhappy with the film, and specifically, with Norton’s alleged re-editing of the movie, resulting in Norton giving himself more screen time than Kaye had called for.  Kaye requested that the DGA make his credit anonymous but the DGA refused.  In refusing, the DGA cited a rule which prevents directors from revealing why they request a name removal; Kaye violated that rule via ads placed in Variety.  Kaye ended up suing the DGA and the studio, New Line Cinema, for more than $200 million — and requested that if he couldn’t get “Alan Smithee,” he be credited with the pseudonym “Humpty Dumpty.”  (That latter request was also rejected.)

From the Archives: Admit Two: A movie which, to say the least, didn’t win any awards.