There's Probably a More Dignified Way to Commemorate Ryan O'Neal's Death Than By Re-Running This Piece on An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn But It's the One We're Going With
The unstated intention of many a movie world comedy is revenge. Countless filmmakers have lustily composed what they imagine are devastating satires to punish the movie industry for its venality and all-around evil.
That was more or less the stated intention of Joe Eszterhas and Arthur Hiller’s 1997 flop An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. Estzerhas was REALLY gonna stick it to those Hollywood phonies who paid him millions of dollars for garbage scripts and made him one of the most famous, hated and over-compensated screenwriters in film history.
And he was going to do so by making a movie that FINALLY revealed the TRUTH about Hollywood, how the executives were sleazy and movie stars had big egos and women of ill repute practiced the world’s oldest profession with a wide array of film world talent.
Instead Eszterhas made a movie so bad, so unwatchable, so endless and utterly abysmal that it doesn’t just make Eszterhas and Hiller look bad; it reflects terribly on the movie world comedy as a sub-genre.
It goes further than that. An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn reflects terribly on film as an art form and human beings as a species though you cannot look at a man like Eszterhas and tell me there is not some lion in his DNA.
The one-joke premise of An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn isn’t strong to support a throwaway gag yet Eszterhas somehow expects it to support eighty-five minutes of dire inside jokes, rank misogyny, artless profanity, some of the worst songs ever to afflict a motion picture audience and vitriolic bitterness.
That one flimsy semi-joke is laid out in the muddled words that open the film: “If a director feels that the movie has been so badly changed that he or she wants their name off of it…they can only use the Director’s Guild pseudonym: Alan Smithee. If the director’s real name happens to be Alan Smithee and he wants his name off a movie..then he is…Fucked.”
That’s not just the film’s one quasi-joke; it’s also its plot. A clearly embarrassed, but not quite embarrassed enough Eric Idle plays the title character, a revered veteran editor who gets his big chance to direct with a 200 million dollar cop movie starring Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Chan and Sylvester Stallone.
The director feels that the movie has been so badly changed that he wants his name off of it but discovers that he can only use the Director’s Guild pseudonym: Alan Smithee. Since the director’s real name happens to be Alan Smithee and he wants his name off the movie..then he is…Fucked.
How gentlemanly of Eszterhas to not only let us know EXACTLY what will happen in the movie, but also that it will fucking suck.
That opening burst of clumsy exposition is the film in a nutshell, a clumsy, self-satisfied mess that mistakes profanity for hilarity and sour misanthropy for satire.
Eszterhas fails to understand the essence and mechanics of comedy in a way that’s oddly poignant. He’s like a ten year old who wants to write for Mad magazine when he grows up but couldn’t hack it at Crazy because he’s stupid and hateful and utterly devoid of talent.
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn is about as timeless as an issue of Variety from the week it was just barely released in empty theaters to vitriolic reviews. It’s aged about as well as bottle of Crystal Pepsi left out in the sun for a quarter decade.
It’s targeted at an audience that it imagines will reflexively collapse into helpless laughter at the mere mention of Hollywood powerbroker Michael Ovitz’s name.
Goldberg, Chan and Stallone are three very different performers with a single shared stereotype to play: the arrogant, power-mad and entitled superstar.
Watch closely and you can see the celebrity trio visibly regret choosing to participate in the film. Alan Smithee is so mortified with what the studio has done with his film that he takes the only existing print and goes on the lam with it, becoming one of the most famous men in the country in the process.
Of course there is zero chance that a studio would only have one print of a 200 million dollar movie starring three movie stars willing to collaborate with Joe Eszterhas. That would not matter in a movie that was not utterly worthless, and an endurance test even at 85 minutes but I was not willing to suspend disbelief at all here because I knew that the film would not reward that disbelief in any way.
In a sense of the film’s caveman simple and middle-school bully nasty approach to comedy and the film industry, Jerry Glover, an executive played by the late Richard Jeni, is introduced as the President of Challenger Films but also a “Moron”, “Liar”, “Wimp” and a man nicknamed “The Dwarf.”
In Eszterhas’ mind those are scathing gags. In our world they barely rise to the level of schoolyard taunts. That similarly applies to Eszterhas specifying that every woman in the film is a “feminist”, a phrase that, to Eszterhas at least, seems synonymous with a rude slang term for female genitalia that begins with C and ends with T.
Eszterhas really seems to hate women, who he depicts as a sleazy aggregation of sex workers and philanderers, narcissists and empty, vacuous schemers. Sandra Bernhardt is in many scenes as Jerry Glover’s wife but has almost no dialogue, which would be perverse, counter-productive and nonsensical for an ostensibly edgy, boundary-pushing comedy if the movie did not so transparently hate women and have no interest in what any of them might have to say.
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn ran out of money for music late in the production so Eszterhas asked unknown, unsigned bands to submit music that he would pay for personally.
Even in a movie where everything is egregiously awful, the songs stand out for being particularly dreadful. Hiller and the cast, which includes Hiller’s Love Story leading man Ryan O’Neal, may be veterans but Eszterhas’ script reduces them to rank amateurs.
In a development that recalls John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented, if Waters’ movie was made by people who hate rather than love movies, Alan Smithee accidentally turns into an icon of pure cinema, an idealist willing to destroy his career and waste hundreds of millions of dollars of his employer’s money rather than compromise his creative vision.
He hooks up with the Brothers Brothers, a pair of rebel black filmmakers played by Chuck D and Coolio. Where Eszterhas’ attitude towards the film industry is bratty and irreverent, puerile and scatological his attitude towards the Brothers Brothers is hilariously reverent, even worshipful.
The fifty-something multimillionaire and sixty-something director of Love Story badly attempt attempt hip, young satire with a savage edge but their attitude towards young black filmmakers is that they’re all super cool “soul brothers” like that Snoop Dogg fellow with rapping or The Hughes Brothers, and consequently above reproach.
Considering how rancid and nasty the rest of the production is, I suppose we should just be grateful that the movie isn’t overtly racist towards its black characters, but its deeply superficial conviction that black guys are the epitome of hipness feels juvenile and reductive.
Eszterhas wanted big stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis for his deeply personal labor of love/hate but had to settle for industry figures like Arthur Hiller, Shane Black and Harvey Weinstein.
Hiller and Black play themselves but Weinstein, inexplicably ACTS in this nightmare, channeling Jack Webb as a deadpan detective in a rare supporting turn as someone other than himself.
He’s a puzzling addition to the cast but he does not make anywhere near as much of an impact as Robert Evans, who plays himself as a sleazy horndog into incest play with the many sex workers he employs.
It’s sordid self-deprecation that’s also oddly moving. Even in the nastiest, ugliest and most regrettable of contexts, Robert Evans can’t play Robert Evans without a whole lot of sadness, melancholy and bittersweetness seeping in.
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn is a movie about Hollywood that seems to despise not just the industry but film as an art form but Evans’ glamorous romance with celluloid can’t help but inform the proceedings, lending it an element of old Hollywood glamour despite itself.
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood Burn performed an invaluable service by ending its screenwriter’s career. It was a true mercy killing. Movie lovers everywhere should be grateful.
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