An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
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 The biggest box office bomb of the '90s.
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An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn is a 1998 comedy mockumentary film starring Eric Idle as the title character and was directed by Arthur Hiller (under the Alan Smithee pseudonym).
Plot
A director named Alan Smithee (Eric Idle) is hired to direct a big-budget action film titled Trio and hires Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan to star in it. For some reason, the film gets recut and he isn't pleased with the film since it's the pseudonym used by Hollywood when someone doesn't want anything to do with the film, Alan takes off running, and decides to burn the film since he isn't pleased with the results.
Why It Should Burn
- Boring and nonexistent story.
- Outlandish jokes that fall flat.
- Unlikable characters (especially Alan Smithee).
- Pointless appearances by Shane Black, Harvey Weinstein (which did not age well because of the you-know-what), and Billy Bob Thornton.
- Stupid and nonsensical in-jokes regarding Hollywood.
- Plot hole: If Alan Smithee stole the original cut of Trio before any prints could be made, then how were the critics able to see the film and say that they loved it?
- The mockumentary aspect of the film is nonsensical.
- Poor attempts at satirizing the Hollywood industry.
- For some weird reason, the title cards at the start of the movie's "acts" play the Woody Woodpecker theme, which isn't owned by Disney.
- The film wrecked the careers of its cast and crew.
- Director Arthur Hiller (the director of the 1970 film Love Story), who used to direct at least one film per year, essentially retired, except for National Lampoon Pucked.
- Writer Joe Eszterhas has never written another big Hollywood film, as his career was already damaged after his work on Showgirls.
- Eric Idle only makes cameos in live-action movies since the failure of this film.
- Production studio Cinergi Pictures shut down months before the film's release.
- Last but not least, the Directors Guild of America retired the Alan Smithee pseudonym in 2000 as they were worried that no one would ever again see a movie with that name attached to it because this movie had tarnished its reputation.
- Hiller had his name removed from the credits, so he was literally credited as Smithee. Star Eric Idle has disowned the film and described it as "rather dreadful".
- Every single song on the soundtrack (except the songs by Public Enemy) is awful. Especially "I Wanna Be Mike Ovitz!"
Reception
The film was reviled by critics and audiences alike including Roger Ebert who gave it a rare zero-star rating and described the film as "a spectacularly bad film--incompetent, unfunny, ill-conceived, badly executed, lamely written, and acted by people who look trapped in the headlights." It currently holds an 8% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average of 2.7 out of 10 and a critic consensus statement that reads "A witless Hollywood satire whose hammy, obvious jokes are neither funny nor insightful of the movie business."
Box Office
The film was released on February 20, 1998, with a budget of $10 million and bombed heavily after getting a box office return of $52,850.
Awards and nominations
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn received nine Golden Raspberry Award nominations and it won five awards including Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay. It also won Worst New Star for Joe Eszterhas as himself and was tied with the same award to Jerry Springer in Ringmaster. The film was later nominated for the Worst Picture of the Decade in the year 2000, but it lost to Showgirls, another movie written by Joe Eszterhas.
Videos
Trivia
- Alan Smithee is a pseudonym used by a director who doesn't want to own the final cut of their film, the term was used from 1968 until it was discontinued in 2000, largely because of this movie.
- "Alan Smithee" states that the movie is "worse than Showgirls", which was also written by Joe Eszterhas.
- This ended up being the final film to star Billy Barty until he died in 2000. Billy was the original voice of Figment for the Disney ride "Journey into Imagination." Star Eric Idle portrayed Professor Nigel Channing for the second and third incarnations of the ride.
External links
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn at the Internet Movie Database
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn on Rotten Tomatoes
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn on Letterboxd
Comments
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- 1990s films
- Comedy films
- Buena Vista
- Razzie Awards Worst Picture winners
- Box office bombs
- Sylvester Stallone films
- Worst Screenplay winners
- Films that inspired a Roger Ebert book review title
- Live-action films
- Movies that killed their studios
- Movies that killed careers
- Films aware of how bad they are
- Boring films
- Hollywood Pictures films
- Featured on TV Tropes' So Bad, It's Horrible
- Obscure films
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- Creator regrets