great_badir
Posts: 4178
Joined: 6/10/2005
From: A breaking rope bridge in the middle of the jungle
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 An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn!, Arthur Hiller (1998)
Budget - approx. $15million
Worldwide Box Office - Approx. $50000
Subsequent takings (rentals etc) - unknown "My name's Arthur Hiller. No, I didn't direct Bonnie & Clyde - that was Arthur Penn. But I've had what you might call a fairly solid directing career - Love Story, Plaza Suite, Silver Streak, The In-Laws, The Out Of Towners, The Lonely Guy - good solid and reliable comedies. Sure, I've had a couple of slumps lately, but you can't argue with the $70-odd million I made with See No Evil, Hear No Evil! This time, I've got a great pitch for a film that CAN'T lose - it's gonna be a Hollywood satire written by Joe Eszterhas and I've already signed up Sly Stallone, Jackie Chan, Whoopi Goldberg, Eric Idle, Ryan O'Neal - RYAN O'FUCKING-NEAL!, Larry King, Coolio and Chuck D. Hell, even Bob Evans and the fat Weinstein are up for appearances. We did have Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger, but they were a bit TOO expensive. Which brings me onto the best bit - all it's gonna cost you is $10million in chump change!! Whatsay?"
"......................okay, we'll do it."
"Of course you will. And you won't regret it, not for a second." "What's it called? "An Alan Smithee Film!" "...............oh." Oh indeed. Except it wasn't An Alan Smithee Film at that point, I just threw that in for a cheap punch line. No, the film was just Burn, Hollywood, Burn!, and on paper it sounded like nothing short of genius - a long in the tooth editor is finally given the chance to direct a big Hollywood action blockbuster called Trio. After the shoot, the studio wrestles the film away from the director and re-edits it without his permission. When he sees the studio cut he's appalled, calling it "worse than Showgirls", and wants his name removed from the credits. Except he can't do that because the only pseudonym that can be used in place of his name in such cases is Alan Smithee. And the director's name? Alan Smithee. It's easy to scoff with the benefit of hindsight, but even now the basic premise sounds tasty enough for a Christopher Guest treatment, especially seeing as how the end product of Hiller's Burn was a mockumentary itself. It was supposed to be the career saving grace of curmudgeonly dirt-disher Joe Eszterhas, once the scriptwriting darling of Hollywood who's ideas drew critical and/or (at least) commercial acclaim, sometimes in equal measure. But by the end of the 90s he was a laughing stock who had witnessed his last five projects fail dismally, one after another. Burn was both Eszterhas' excuse and apology, an honest, rough and ready account of how to get burnt (if you'll pardon the pun) in the dream factory, partly autobiographical and wholly bitter. With low-level backers Hollywood Pictures and Cinergi Pictures putting up most of the film's meagre budget, and Eszterhas himself contributing as well as footing the entire bill for the score and soundtrack, Burn was almost an independent, a massive far cry from the gloss that both director and writer were previously used to. Despite what some saw as a restrictive budget, Eszterhas called favours on friends and colleagues to make up the cast and crew, managing to pull together the talent role-call at the top of this little essay. To latter-day film fans, the words Stallone, Goldberg and Chan scream box office disaster, but back in 1997/98 they still had pulling power and semi-successful careers. Jackie Chan had finally broken Hollywood after years of trying, with a string of money-making Hong Kong imports intended almost solely for the US market, Stallone was fresh from a critically acclaimed turn in Cop Land and more box office hits than misses and Whoopi...well, she was still working as solidly and reliably as she had been since the mid 80s. Besides, they were all game and it was probably as good as Eszterhas and Hiller were going to do such a tight wallet. Not that the project was without its gambling elements, though - Eszterhas (surrounded by abject failure), star Eric Idle (who was still trying to make it as a leading man) and the surprise casting of Ryan O'Neal, who had spent the last twenty-odd years desperately resuscitating his career (his last box office hit was 1979's The Main Event) all seemed like dodgy choices, but for $10million no one was worrying too much. What's the worst that could happen? It gets bad reviews, maybe turns a small profit and then everyone forgets about. No biggie. Over the course of its shoot, Burn gathered much scrutiny from the industry and its players and Variety magazine barely went an issue without some mention of the film. It was all going relatively smoothly on set with cast getting along famously, and they were sticking to their budget like glue, but stories quickly leaked about numerous scenes Eszterhas had written at the last minute that were...shall we say a little too close for comfort for some. Actors, producers, writers, directors and studio heads Eszterhas had worked with in the past were all fair game for attack and even the meek Hiller threw in some of his own gripes about past experiences. None of it was close enough to the truth to be libellous, but those who were making the film and those merely close to the project all knew what was aimed at who. Not that any of this caused many problems, amazingly - for a film so close to Hollywood reality, few people stood in its way. Presumably cos they knew it would all go spectacularly tits up. Hiller wrapped on time and on budget and Burn was squirreled away (after having its title expanded to An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn!) for editing in early 1998. And here's where things go a bit screwy - in one of the most unusual coincidences in cinema history, Hiller's own cut of the film was met with disdain from producers and studio reps and it was immediately "removed" from his clutches, only to be re-edited by the studio. With real life mirroring celluloid, Hiller, upon seeing the studio's version, called it a piece of shit and demanded the studio release his own cut. With no final cut guarantee drawn up, the studio called no dice, at which point Hiller requested that his name be removed from the film entirely. An Alan Smithee Film had literally become an Alan Smithee film. Ho ho. Quick on the rebound, Hiller went on the road accepting every interview he was offered, punctuating them with something along the lines of "in all that crap up on screen, my decent film is struggling to get out". No one was convinced, though - poor Hiller had misjudged his timing (Burn had yet to be released) and few believed the words of a man who's last film was Tom Arnold starring straight-to-vid tosh Carpool. Hiller was branded the villain in the whole saga, whilst everyone waited, some even with anticipation, to see Burn on the big screen. It didn't take long for the backlash. Within weeks of the studio re-edit, Burn had a preview screening. You can guess what the reviews were like. Opening in the US swiftly after its preview, Burn bowed to audiences. On 19 screens. That's NINETEEN screens. Savaged and brutalised by every person who saw it at preview stage (not one favourable review had been written), distributors feared a monumental disaster so (it is claimed) engineered a very small release, on which they could blame any box office failure. It was even worse than they predicted - nineteen screens ain't much, but most people would expect a couple of hundred thousand return at least. Burn made a little over $45000 at the US box office and a further $5000-odd elsewhere, making it even less of a money earner than Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space. Hiller felt justified as Eszterhas and the studios suffered the worst financial disaster of their combined careers, whilst Hiller himself was all but blacklisted from Hollywood and didn't work again for eight years. Ryan O'Neal was dealt yet another blow after Zero Effect looked like it might put him back in the public eye, Eszterhas pretty much dropped scriptwriting in favour of books, Eric Idle notched up another disaster, Stallone's success took an enormous nose-dive, whilst Whoopi and Jackie managed to escape with only minor bruises. As for the film, well it was nominated in all the major Razzie categories (won five) and signalled the end of yet another career - Alan Smithee's. Smithee was "retired" after Burn's failure (enormous even for a Smithee film), with Thomas Lee being chosen to take over the pseudonym reigns. Unfortunately, there were already several people in the business with the same name and, after the Walter Hill/Jack Sholder/Francis Ford Coppola fiasco Supernova, Lee was replaced again with Smithee, who's still hard at work, pounding out four or five pieces of shit a year, but most of it for TV. Any good? Burn is fully deserving of its Razzies, detractors, bad reviews and industry finger pointing, moreso because it COULD have been so much better. In terms of potential it was right up there with Chris Guest's The Big Picture, but with Joe Eszterhas behind the typewriter (subtlety is NOT his middle name) it was never going to live up to that potential. Oh well - as Donald "Duck" Dunn would say "If the shit fits, wear it".
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RE: Great Badir celebrates those Box Office bombs - 
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Nothing But Trouble, Dan Aykroyd (1991) 
Get Carter, Stephen T. Kay (2000) 
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