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| Director Alan Smithee (Eric Idle)'s Hollywood dream project turns into a nightmare. |
Release Date: Feb. 27, 1998. Running Time: 86 minutes. Screenplay: Joe Eszterhas. Producer: Ben Myron. Director: Alan Smithee (Arthur Hiller).
THE PLOT:
Trio looks on track to be the biggest of summer blockbusters. Headlining stars Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan, producers James Edmunds (Ryan O'Neal) and Jerry Glover (Richard Jeni) anticipate a financial windfall. As director, they hire Alan Smithee (Eric Idle), a respected British film editor who eagerly accepts this ticket to Hollywood.
Smithee soon realizes that he was selected not for his ability, but because he lacks the clout to resist the "suggestions" of either the producers or their egotistical stars. The resulting film is, predictably, a mess, and upon seeing it, Smithee labels it "a piece of ****."
Since the DGA credit used when a director removes his name from the credits is "Alan Smithee," he is left with no way to disown it. So he does the only thing he can: He steals the negative before any copies can be made and threatens to burn the movie if he's not given final cut!
So it's basically the same plot as Blake Edwards' S. O. B., only presented as a mockumentary and minus the Third Act tragedy. Or any of the actual laughs...
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| "Whoopi, Sly, and Jackie": The egotistical stars are allowed more control over the project than the director. |
CHARACTERS:
Alan Smithee: Eric Idle was almost certainly the wrong choice for Smithee. While Idle is capable of being funny when he's given decent material (meaning: not here), he's at his best in supporting roles, bouncing off the main characters or dropping one-liners in the background. As a lead actor, he lacks screen presence. This story needs someone who can project real anger. Even in his big blowup scene, in which he snaps at producer James Edmunds for destroying the movie, he mainly seems to be a bit petulant. Most of the rest of the time, he just looks beat-down and bewildered.
Michelle: The Hollywood formula requires a romance, no matter how unconvincing or tacked-on. Enter Michelle Rafferty (Leslie Stefanson), a prostitute hired by Edmunds to keep Smithee pliable - and, potentially, to give him blackmail material. A movie director (even a married one) sleeping with a pretty young woman was the stuff of scandal in the late 1950s; not so much the late 1990s. Naturally, she develops actual feelings for him. Since most of her scenes consist of her talking to a camera about events that are never shown onscreen, there's zero chance for the actors or written relationship to ever convince, and this whole subplot doesn't end up amounting to anything.
The Brothers Brothers: Rappers Coolio and Chuck D. appear as urban filmmaking brothers Dion and Leon, who become Smithee's allies in his criminal quest for final cut. Likely modeled after The Hughes Brothers, whose Menace 2 Society and Dead Presidents had received a lot of attention in the mid-'90s, they agree to hide Smithee and Trio as they negotiate with the producers for final cut - and a three-picture deal for themselves, of course. The two rappers actually aren't bad, and I got a chuckle out of their reaction to Smithee exclaiming that Trio is "worse than Showgirls!" - but, like most of this movie's elements, it feels like a lot of potential is left on the table to rot like three-week-old bread.
Sam Rizzo: The private detective hired to track down Smithee and the film. He is played by Harey Weinstein. Yes, that Harvey Weinstein. Because if your natural screen presence roughly matches that of a Cave Troll, of course you want to appear on camera. I think Weinstein is going for a Jack Webb vibe with his line deliveries, but he ends up sounding like what he is: a non-actor robotically reading lines from cue cards. His face also seems to be permanently fixed into an expression that says that he just smelled a particularly noxious fart. He who smelt it, Harvey...
"Whoopi, Sly, and Jackie": Though prominently billed on virtually all promotional materials and on both VHS and DVD covers, their roles amount to little more than cameos. I doubt any of them worked much more than a single day. Stallone and Goldberg come across as stilted and uncomfortable, and I suspect their performances are so artificial because they're afraid viewers will mistake this for their actual personalities. Jackie Chan, by contrast, manages to have a tiny bit of fun sending up his own image. When we're told that his character was originally meant to die, he ever-so-calmly explains that this is impossible. Even if he did die, as a Buddhist, he would simply be reincarnated. Later, when the script is changed to accommodate his ego, we see him working out hard while exulting, "No die! No reincarnation!"
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| Ryan O'Neal as the sleazy producer. Don't let his Razzie nomination fool you: O'Neal is actually really good. |
"SAY SOMETHING NICE":
This is a bad movie, filled with uninteresting and unconvincing characters, many of them played by actors who look like they'd rather be anywhere else. There is one big exception to that, however: Ryan O'Neal.
O'Neal was an actor capable of good work within his range - though at the same time, his range could be politely described as "narrow." He is absolutely perfect, however, as sleazy Hollywood producer James Edmunds, the movie's primary villain. Edmunds presents himself as an affable guy. He's always well-dressed, he speaks softly, he rarely shows any strong emotion. This is a man who chats amiably in his car while the bottom frame of the camera catches the top of a young woman's head (it's a Joe Eszterhas script, so you can guess the context). He seems to have a plastic smile permanently affixed to his face - yet that smile never touches his eyes, and he always seems to be sizing up the person on the other side of the camera, searching for any advantage.
I have little doubt that O'Neal met variations on this type of person many times over his long career. He knows Edmunds, and he presents him perfectly as a snake in human form. The Razzies, ever incapable of separating bad films from bad performances, nominated him as Worst Actor. Though this film is every bit as bad as its reputation, I would personally rate this among O'Neal's better later performances. Certainly, he's the best thing in this movie by a considerable margin.
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| Just when you think the film can't get any worse, Harvey Weinstein appears on camera. Just... why? |
OTHER MUSINGS:
"It's worse than Showgirls!"
-I'm sad to report: Yes. Yes, it is.
Writer/co-producer Joe Eszterhas is out of his depth with Burn, Hollywood, Burn. His successes, such as Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct, weren't exactly noted for their keen humor. His failures, such as Sliver and Showgirls, were only funny by accident. This type of satire requires genuine wit. Since it's an "inside Hollywood" story, it also requires an ability to make itself feel relevant to general audiences, most of whom don't work in Hollywood. Eszterhas fails on both counts, making a movie that's unfunny and that has a story likely to be incomprehensible to people who don't know at least a bit about the American film industry.
Compounding the problem is that this film is a mockumentary. This is a format that can be effective, as famously shown with This Is Spinal Tap. But it's not an easy format to make work. Not only does a mockumentary have to be funny; it also has to convincingly present itself as if it was a documentary. Spinal Tap aces this test. If its story was real, it would have stood as a fine document of that band's rise and fall. If the story of An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn was real... then this would still be an incredibly poor documentary.
The vast majority of the tale is told to us by talking heads, describing a narrative that we rarely get to actually witness. Look at real documentaries. As a rule, if footage of an incident is available, it will be used. Talking heads fill in information, viewpoints, and emotional reactions. But if it's possible to show us what's being described, actual documentaries do so. That rarely happens here - we're just told what happened by the talking heads.
The nature of the story makes that particularly bizarre. Trio is a film shoot. That means that licensed behind-the-scenes people would be shooting their promotional companion pieces, presumably capturing some of the clashes and a few tantalizing bits of the movie itself. There would be appearances by the stars on talk shows, and interviews with Entertainment Tonight (this was the '90s). We don't get so much as a still photo of Smithee failing to direct his stars. The only glimpse we receive is in the opening scene, with everything else related after the fact.
Midway through, the movie itself seems to realize that the mockumentary format isn't working. At this point, we start to get full dramatic scenes. This isn't billed as either security footage or re-enactments. No, we just somehow get to see certain bits even though no camera is apparently present, which makes it all the more jarring when the movie insists on returning to the talking-heads format.
I might understand this sort of thing in a cheap indie film... this was a $10 million production. Not a huge budget, even in the '90s, but enough that I can't make excuses for the sloppiness.
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| Edmunds negotiates with the Brothers Brothers. If this is a documentary, I have one question: Who's filming this? |
A RANT:
"If we believe in film - and we do - don't we have a responsibility to protect the world from bad ones?"
-Alan Smithee reflects to the Brothers Brothers.
The movie wants to make Eric Idle's Smithee into a heroic figure, repeatedly telling us that he is doing a good thing by stopping the public from being forced to witness the cinematic abomination that is Trio. This just isn't something I can get behind.
It's a misjudgment on the part of this movie that the project in question is not some personal pet project of Smithee's, but instead a late 1990s Sylvester Stallone action flick that was already moving forward before he signed on. I personally enjoy a lot of Stallone's movies, but his late 1990s output... Well, let's just say that our "hero director" must have been smoking something pretty strong to think there was any soul for Edmunds and his studio machine to eviscerate in the first place.
Beyond that, I'm just not in favor of making art inaccessible, not even bad art. No one really loses anything for spending 90 minutes or so watching a crappy action flick. When works are shut away, whether because they have become culturally inappropriate (Song of the South) or because a studio wanted a tax write-off (Batgirl or Scoob), or because a streaming service wanted to focus on big studio works (Paramount Plus's Australian mini-series One Night), it diminishes the cultural landscape when stories are shut away in a vault, never mind actually destroyed. If this were a real story, I wouldn't care how bad Trio was - I would resent the hell out of Mr. Smithee deciding I shouldn't have the option to waste my time viewing it.
I mentioned Blake Edwards' S. O. B. earlier, noting how similar the story was. There's one big difference, though (besides S. O. B. being, y'know, good): In that film, Richard Mulligan's Felix Farmer is trying to rescue his movie from being recut, so that the "proper" version is what hits theaters. He has no intention of destroying his work, he instead wants to save it. In this movie, Alan Smithee is ready and willing to destroy Trio, and he's just as full of phony self-justifications as Ryan O'Neal's loathsome producer, and he's every bit as smug and phony at the end. This is the guy I'm meant to root for?
Burning a film is like burning a book: Once you do it, you're officially not the good guy anymore.
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| Smithee with the Brothers Brothers (Coolio, Chuck D.). Not pictured: Anyone who looks like they want to be here. |
THE OTHER NOMINEES:
Armageddon is the quintessential Michael Bay film: too long, too dumb, and too loud. It's also quite a lot of fun for a while, with Bruce Willis in good form as a miner tapped by NASA to lead his crew into space to drill a hole into an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. At a certain point, "too much" really does become too much, and I was mostly just exhausted by the end - but there's no way this belongs on any "Worst Picture" list.
The Avengers: Not the superhero film. No, this is much sillier. An update of the classic 1960s British television series, this stars Ralph Fiennes as John Steed and Uma Thurman as Emma Peel, British spies trying to save the world from a mad scientist (Sean Connery) in the most English way possible. This was a victim of deep post-production cuts, with about forty minutes disappearing into the ether, and the story's often incoherent as a result. It absolutely is a bad movie - and yet, I have to admit to finding a certain amount of charm in it despite its problems.
Godzilla: Godzilla comes to America, and only Ferris Bueller can stop him! Director Roland Emmerich's reboot of the Japanese monster franchise was instantly ridiculed by critics and Godzilla fans. I've only seen isolated clips, but those are remarkable in that the very expensive Hollywood Godzilla looks much worse than the cheap "man in a monster suit" Godzilla from the old black-and-white films.
The last of the nominees was Spice World, which I'm happy to say I haven't seen a second of. It was successful at the box office and seemed to please fans of the group, however, which means it's almost certainly less painful than An Alan Smithee Film.
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| Alan Smithee, smug in victory. He's supposed to be better than Edmunds in what way, exactly? |
OVERALL:
An Alan Smithee Film's biggest sin is that it's boring. The characters are bland. We're told the entire story in the opening minutes, leaving the rest of the film an exercise in recreating that story via oral history. With mostly talking heads describing even those events that should exist on camera, and with multiple scenes breaking away from the format, this becomes a textbook example of how not to make a mockumentary.
And did I mention? It's incredibly boring. At a little over 80 minutes, including credits, this feels far longer than The Postman's three hours ever threatened to.
Rating: Flushable Wipe (Used).
Worst Picture - 1997: The Postman
Worst Picture - 1999: Wild Wild West
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