Directed by Allen Smithee
edited by Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock
University of Minnesota Press, 312 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Allen Smithee boasts more than 30 films to his name, ranging in genre from B-grade horror to revisionist Western, from soft-core skinema to Hollywood blockbusters starring Brad Pitt and Al Pacino. Smithee also holds the distinct honor of being the only veteran member of the Directors Guild of America who doesn’t actually exist, having been invented in 1969 as a pseudonymous dumping ground for directors who refused to be associated with films they felt had been ruined by forces beyond their control. Smithee’s reign as the only pseudonym the DGA approved for filmmakers fleeing their own films finally ended in 1999, when a growing notoriety among movie buffs finally forced his retirement.
The abysmal quality that defines Smithee’s output — and even the director’s pathetic inability to meet basic standards of physical existence — didn’t deter the University of Pennsylvania’s “Allen Smithee Group” from holding a conference in his honor, though, or from collecting the results in the playful postmodernist goosing that is Directed by Allen Smithee. Portraying Smithee as a casualty of the “auteur theory” — the idea that the director creates every aspect of a completed film — the AS Group argues that his ghostly presence points to the disconnect between the DGA-approved image of the Lone Director and the realities of massively collaborative productions-for-profit.
Like all such postmodern spit-balling sessions, Directed by Allen Smithee advances theories both thrilling and depressing in their attempts to demolish romantic notions of authorship while reveling in the expanded possibilities for art. A few especially snide (or oblique) moments aside, though, the volume’s prevailing tone of cheeky irreverence makes it an uncommonly fun read for an academic tome. Its most seamless dovetail of provocation and revelation comes in a beautiful essay in which Robert B. Ray invokes Cahiers du Cinema founder André Bazin while celebrating a cherished tenet of “so-bad-it’s-good” cinema: A terrible film (say Smithee’s Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh) can sometimes be even more exciting than a great film (say Welles’ Citizen Kane) due to the inclusion of just one moment of surreal hilarity or one accidental unveiling of truth. Ray argues that these transcendent moments when the movie camera (bereft — like Smithee — of consciousness) automatically captures and consecrates little bursts of real life are priceless to film studies because they briefly give a share of artistic participation back to the audience, fundamentally undermining the illusion of the director as an omnipotent force attempting to control vision itself.
This article appears in December 28 • 2001.