Features

It is a rare rainy day in Los Angeles. At his request, I meet Allen Smithee at a bistro of the generic sort Hollywood directors like to frequent. He orders a salad. Allen—some spell it Alan; he doesn’t mind—lives in Malibu, or Santa Monica, or maybe even Brentwood.

The films of Allen Smithee are—I use the word advisedly—awful, but he is nevertheless prolific. Smithee isn’t the kind of director you’d invite back to your trailer for a friendly cup of coffee, nor the kind you’d expect to see blubbering graciously on the Oscar dais. He is certainly not the kind typically featured in celebrity profiles such as this one.

 The first film credited to Smithee was Death of a Gunfighter, a Western released in 1969. When I ask him about it, he performs a quick calculation in his head. “I guess I’m getting old.”

The direction of Smithee’s debut was praised by both Variety and Roger Ebert, who prefaced his comment thusly: “Director Allen Smithee, a name I’m not familiar with…” Since then, his directorial oeuvre has spanned comedy, horror, and drama, on both film and television. There is nothing he can’t do, and nothing he can do well.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says.

A waitress comes to our table with a fresh bottle of Pellegrino. He flirts with her, not too aggressively, as she fills his glass. “You really haven’t heard of me?” he asks.

She hasn’t, but Smithee can’t really blame her. He, after all, does not exist.

Sanctioned by the Directors Guild of America, “Allen Smithee” was a pseudonym that a director could petition to use if he felt—and could conclusively prove—that his creative control over a film had been irrevocably compromised.

“I was perfect. ‘Smith,’ too obvious. ‘Smithee?’ Sort of chic.” He offers a glowing smile and spears a leaf of radicchio.

Although pieces on Smithee have surfaced in The Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly, he has not broached the mainstream consciousness. But in lesser cultural estuaries, Smithee’s work has spawned not only an annual awards ceremony—The Smithees, which celebrate the worst films on video—but also a fledging field of academic scholarship. In 2001, the Allen Smithee Group of the University of Pennsylvania published the critical anthology Directed by Allen Smithee.

For many such theorists, the name “Allen Smithee” invites a brisk stroll through the historical authorship dialectic. The New Critics, perhaps exhausted by the tedium of extra-textual research, claimed the author’s intent had no place in literary criticism. To liberate the text, Roland Barthes killed the author. Michel Foucault summarily filled the void with his nebulous “author-function.”

I look up from my notes. Smithee is blowing bubbles in his Diet Coke. “Barthes is dead, Foucault is dead,” he says, “I’m alive.” He pauses. “Foucault is dead, right?”

He has a point. A century of scholars have implored us to sacrifice the author to preserve the sanctity of the text—laboring under the assumption that the text possesses a certain measure of sanctity to begin with. Smithee’s films are no more than the labors of a golem, onto whom Hollywood has projected its capitalist sins.

*** 

Smithee takes me to see his house—in Beverly Hills, it turns out. The seven-bedroom mansion he shares with his third wife has a screening room in the basement. It is there that we watch several of his films together.

Smithee’s characteristic style is, necessarily, a complete lack thereof. Plot, character, and setting strain against the bonds of logic, defying all structural intuition and narrative principles. The result is often unwatchable. Yet, impervious to the desperate remediations of director, editor, and screenwriter alike, it is as though the film has achieved sentience. This is the genius of Allen Smithee.

The Shrimp on the Barbie, released in 1990, is one of the longest eighty-six-minute films ever made. It was a vehicle for Cheech in the absence of Chong. Cheech Marin plays Carlos, who leaves Los Angeles for Australia and becomes romantically entangled with an uptight, inexplicably British-accented heiress. 

“Emma Samms, real sweet gal, was looking for work after Dynasty. She couldn’t get the Aussie accent down, but when I heard she used to do ballet, I was sold.”

“Why?”

“Flexibility. It’s key to acting; Robert Evans told me that.”