Actually Never

I watched one good movie. Got it out of my system.

What I knew

I read Spy magazine in the 90s. I don’t really know why. It offered nothing for a teenager from Saskatchewan, other than you could occasionally see a boob sometimes. I think I was just the kind of kid who would read/watch/listen to anything that people said was funny, even if I had zero context. “They say this is hilarious satire and by god, I’ll figure out why eventually.”

I guess not entirely dissimilar from reading old Mad magazines, with their jokes about politicians, celebrities, and cultural trends that stopped being relevant before I was born.

I feel like I was largely done reading Spy by the time Burn Hollywood Burn came out in 1997, but who can remember, really. It just feels very Spy-adjacent. Not just a send-up of celebrities, but behind-the-scenes people like directors and producers that I wouldn’t have really known then. I don’t remember much from Spy (“No gouda? That is too badda” being a notable exception) but I will give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it was actually funny, unlike this movie.

I suppose I’m burying the lede here: I also know that Burn Hollywood Burn is notoriously terrible – a friend who watches way more movies than me said it was the worst he’d ever seen – so I’ve always had a perverse curiosity about it.

What I know

I mean, it’s absolutely awful. I don’t know if it lived up (down) to my imagination, but that doesn’t mean it had any redeeming qualities.

Here’s the premise: if a director wants to take his name off a movie he’s unhappy with, he can only replace it with the approved pseudonym “Alan Smithee.” What happens when the director is actually named Alan Smithee?

That’s it.

I feel like the Director’s Guild would just say “wow, this is a weird deal, guess we’d better pick a second fake name,” but that wouldn’t make for much of a movie. Neither did this, though, and my version would be short enough to fit into Burn Hollywood Burn‘s endless opening credits.

I also figure anyone who worked in film and was named Alan Smithee would be well aware of its use as a pseudonym in the same way that a person who was named John Doe would be really sick of your shit already.

Director Arthur Hiller didn’t like this movie after he saw the final version (fair enough), so he took his name off it, making An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn an actual Alan Smithee film. Irony? Failed desperate marketing gimmick?

If you didn’t know about the Alan Smithee thing before now, 1) they don’t do it anymore, in large part because of Burn Hollywood Burn, and 2) there’s a full paragraph of on-screen text explaining it at the start of the movie. That’s how you know a joke is good.

There’s plenty of text in the movie. Every character gets a pop-up with their name and some facts about them. Half the time, one of those facts is “feminist.” I think we’re supposed to not like that.

While the movie really dislikes women, it seems to quite like Black people, but in a way where I’m still uneasy about it. I guess “every Black person is the coolest person alive” may be reductive but could be a lot worse.

You want jokes? We got OJ jokes, complete with a cameo from Robert Shapiro. Heidi Fleiss jokes. Hugh Grant jokes. Or at least we got references. Not so much the joke part of jokes.

My favourite part was during a montage of headlines, there’s a newspaper called The New York Slimes. The camera zooms in tight on “Slimes” to make sure you know that’s the good part. It’s followed up by a magazine called – and this is pretty clever – Rolling Phone. See, because it’s like Rolling Stone. But… phone. And then they zoom in on “Phone.” That got a laugh. The one good joke in the movie is them calling undue attention to a bad joke. And I don’t know if they knew that’s what they were doing.

Really, the best joke in the whole movie (or adjacent to it, anyway) is that the poster art above lists only Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan – three people who have less than five minutes of screen time combined.

Harvey Weinstein is in this. Which, okay fine, it came out almost 30 years ago and it’s a movie about filmmaking, it’s not that big a deal that he’d make a cameo. Except he’s not in it as himself, he’s playing a detective. That’s far from the weirdest choice this movie makes. And honestly not the worst performance of the film either.

Richard Jeni is also in this, RIP. I watched his Platypus Man standup special many times as a young lad. I thought that guy was on the verge of being a big star. I have zero recollection of it now and no idea if it will hold up but the whole thing is on the Internet so here you go.

There was a pet boarding place in my hometown named Happy Dog Acres that we renamed Richard Jeni’s Sad Dog Acres. I’d write a paragraph explaining the joke but there’d need to be a joke there to explain.