Trivia / An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn

• Alan Smithee: The film itself was a Lampshade Hanging on the very concept of using "Alan Smithee" as a pseudonym: the titular in-movie director who wants his name out of the film really is named Alan Smithee. Veteran director Arthur Hiller was unhappy with the film's script and end result, and requested that his name be removed from the final product (and, sure enough, he got credited as Alan Smithee — no, really). The awkward scenario that this caused — along with a very public spat over the director's credit on American History X — actually led to the Director's Guild discontinuing the practice, and unique fake names have now been given on a case-by-case basis ever since.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget: $10 million. Box Office: ...$52,850. Disney decided to dump it in to only 19 theaters, where it became the fourth-lowest performing movie in the history of Disney. ^{What performed lower?} The War at Home with $44,722 total at 6 theaters, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies with $39,075 at only one theater, and Walt & El Grupo with only $20,521 at only 4 theaters. It also earned a place on Roger Ebert's most hated film list, and won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture of 1998.
• Creator Backlash:
  • In a case of Life Imitates Art, the director of the film, Arthur Hiller, was so dissatisfied with the film that he got his name removed, meaning that a film where the main character is a director named "Alan Smithee" had its actual director credited as Alan Smithee.
  • Eric Idle himself said in various interviews meant to promote this movie that "this is rather dreadful".
• Creator Killer:
  • The film killed the career of respected director Arthur Hiller, who was known for making Love Story and being one of the hardest-working directors in the industry (to the point that he had at least one project being released every single year until 1997). Just before Burn was released, Hiller had his name removed from the credits, which resulted in the unintended irony of "Alan Smithee" (the alias used for an anonymous director) directing a film that starred a character named Alan Smithee. Hiller's career was left in shambles. The only thing he directed afterwards, until his death in 2016, was the 2006 film Pucked (starring Jon Bon Jovi), which ended up being rebranded under the National Lampoon banner and released Direct to Video.
  • Writer Joe Eszterhas was, in the early '90s, the most powerful screenwriter in Hollywood. He received record amounts of money for his screenplays, which included hits such as Flashdance and Basic Instinct. His career took a hit with the ill-advised Showgirls, but that received a significant cult and ironic following. The same year, however, he also had another film of his, Jade, bomb, which was one of two movies that permanently derailed David Caruso's attempt at being a movie star and got Eszterhas picked apart by Gene Siskel at the end of the year. And then Eszterhas wrote, produced, and acted in Burn, which was such an unmitigated disaster and complete flop that it all but ensured he would never sell a script to Hollywood ever again. Since then, his only output worth mentioning is the 2006 Hungarian film called Children of Glory. Of course, that's not to say he hasn't tried writing another Hollywood script; he wrote one about Judas Maccabeus that went into turnaround, to say the least.
  • It even managed to kill the "career" of Alan Smithee! The "Alan Smithee" pseudonym for embarrassed/discontented directors had been in use for over 30 years, but the bad publicity given to the name by this film — plus a simultaneous spat over the director's credit on American History X — caused the DGA to retire the pseudonym in 2000.
  • The film was one of the last pictures released by Hollywood Pictures before it, along with others, convinced Disney to shut the banner down and use Touchstone Pictures as their sole mature label. Disney briefly revived it in 2006 as a genre label much in the vein of Dimension Films (which the Weinsteins took back from Disney after leaving them), but nothing successful came out of it.
  • This is the final film to involve Cinergi Pictures, who never recovered from two false start projects for the label: Medicine Man, and Super Mario Bros. (1993) (the latter of which thwarted a move by Disney to introduce Nintendo into their theme park business). Disney had ended their deals with Cinergi months before this film was released.
• Life Imitates Art: The film (in which a film within the film is recut without the director's permission into an incoherent mess that the director then tries to disown and finally sabotage) almost turned into a documentary about itself. Most notably, the director was so dissatisfied with the film that he got his name removed, meaning that a film where the main character is named "Alan Smithee" had an actual director credit for Alan Smithee because at the time, it was the only name directors could use to distance themselves from their projects. This led to the Director's Guild discontinuing the practice of using that name as a pseudonym; aliases are now selected on a case by case basis.
• Star-Derailing Role: The actor who played "Alan Smithee" in this film, Eric Idle, got this trope thanks to Burn Hollywood Burn and Dudley Do-Right from Universal the next year. The nuclear meltdown of both movies led to Idle's future live-action roles in cinema being reduced to mere cameos.
• Stock Footage: The explosion scenes from the Trio trailer are actually taken from Die Hard with a Vengeance.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Mick Jagger and Michael York were considered for Alan Smithee.
  • Mickey Rourke was considered for James Edmunds.
  • The original script specified Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.

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