Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time we’re looking at An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, nominee for nine Razzies, winner of five including Worst Picture, and killer, not only of multiple once-flourishing careers, but of the concept of “Alan Smithee.”
The Razzies feature a regular cast of recurring characters. Aside from a wide range of pretty actresses in leading roles, juvenile comedians, and loony political figures, they also have some individual favorites who are almost bound to show up in the nods when they produce something in a given year. And today, it’s time to introduce one of the greatest(?) Razzie legends of them all: self-described “screenwriter and penile implant” Jozsef Antal Eszterhas.
The result when mad scientists fused a lion with Gunnar Hansen.
Joe Eszterhas is a writer. In his case in particular, that’s a loaded word. In his early career, he was a journalist, and in 1974 his book Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse, an account of the aftermath of a shooting and standoff in small-town Missouri, was a nominee for the National Book Award. Supposedly, a studio executive read Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse and called Eszterhas to tell him that it was “cinematic” and he should consider writing for the screen. In the film world, he first came to prominence in 1983 when he wrote the final script for Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, a movie that set the tone in many ways for the man’s entire career. In that it featured a lot of female breasts and buttocks in constant motion, and in that he made silly amounts of money from it.
Eszterhas spent the 1980s and early 1990s making bank on this formula. Of the screenwriters who become rich, most of them don’t do it through writing alone, but Eszterhas was a major exception. Jagged Edge (1985) brought him more fame and fortune. He sold the screenplay for Big Shots (1987) for $1.25 million; Basic Instinct (1992) netted him an unprecedented $3 million. But then Eszterhas wrote the screenplay for a little movie called Showgirls (1996), and while Showgirls has earned some defenders in its old age (see Tim’s review, for example), such was decidedly not the case at the time of its release. Critics (and Razzie voters) flung a staggering amount of bile in the direction of Showgirls, and Eszterhas began to feel the tide of Hollywood turning against him.
So Eszterhas decided he was going to stick it hard to those nasty Hollywood producers who had oppressed his creative spirit by making him absolutely stinking rich. He was going to make a devastating satire of the greedy producers who wrestle power and creative agency away from the real talent, writers and directors. (Eszterhas already fancied himself the great champion of downtrodden screenwriters, something screenwriters opposed on the grounds that they did not wish to be championed by a misogynistic narcissist like Joe Eszterhas.) His film would be a behind-the-curtain “mockumentary” about one director’s fight for justice. And it would use, as its central conceit, the official pseudonym of directors wishing to disown their films: Alan Smithee.
The “snuff film” aesthetic in the marketing was certainly a choice.
A cast of stars was assembled. A promotional puff piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times. And Eszterhas wasted no time at all becoming exactly what he claimed to hate. While he brought in 75-year-old Arthur Hiller to sit in the director’s chair, Hiller became so frustrated with Eszterhas’s cutting of the film that – get this! – he had his name removed from the film and replaced with Alan Smithee. So An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn really was an Alan Smithee film! Ha ha! This was, to quote Nathan Rabin formerly of the AV Club, “very transparently not a stupid, stupid gimmick to raise interest in a terrible film.”
Once the film came out, not only did it fail to make the bigwigs of Hollywood fling themselves to the feet of Joe Eszterhas and beg for forgiveness, it also failed to make literally any money. You thought Showgirls was a flop? Burn Hollywood Burn had a budget of about $10 million, and made an estimated $53,000 at the box office. It opened in 19 theaters. And it made an absolute wreck of Joe Eszterhas, who did not see another screenplay produced for almost a decade. Normally a notoriously bad film will have at least one vocal defender among its makers; even Eszterhas seems to realize that would be foolish in this case.
But we believe in second (and third, and seventeenth) chances around these parts. Will we defend Burn Hollywood Burn where no one else will?
THE STORY
Look, I’m always on the hunt for diamonds in the rough here at Raspberry Picking. Nothing would bring me more joy than to tell you that everybody got it wrong and Burn Hollywood Burn is actually brilliant. But Burn Hollywood Burn is not interested in bringing me, or anyone else, joy.
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn opens on a title card that explains the concept of “Alan Smithee:”
If a director feels that the movie has been so badly changed that he or she wants their name off of it, they can only use the Director’s Guild pseudonym… “Alan Smithee.” But if the director’s name is Alan Smithee, then he is… Fucked.
Pro tip: if you don’t want to hate your own movie, don’t let Harvey Weinstein act in it.
Alan Smithee (Eric Idle) is a respected film editor who has dreamed of being a director. A big studio with very high risk tolerance has agreed to give him his first big break with a $200-million detective thriller called Trio, starring Jackie Chan, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sylvester Stallone (all playing themselves). Pulling the strings behind Smithee are slimy bigshot producers Jerry Glover (Richard Jeni) and James Edmunds (Ryan O’Neal). Every creative decision Smithee makes, Glover and Edmunds undermine it.
When Smithee sees the final product, he hates it so much that he wants to disown it – but he can’t because his name is Alan Smithee! So he’s fucked! Do you get it!? The movie needs to make sure you get it, because it needs this single, solitary joke to sustain it for 87 minutes, and it also needs you to care a great deal that Alan Smithee can’t take his name off a crappy movie. These are the stakes presented to you. Have fun.
Someone may as well have fun, because the cast sure didn’t.
So Smithee, in an act of desperation, steals the negatives and goes on the lam, pledging to burn the movie and all its potential profits if Glover and Edmunds don’t give him the privilege of final cut. We’ll just skirt past the fact that no $200 million movie would ever have a single copy of the negatives, because the stakes are already down in the sewers. Through his act of larceny, Smithee becomes an overnight celebrity, making appearances on Larry King Live and the cover of Rolling Phone magazine to stick up for all film industry talent whose muses have been snuffed out by greedy producers.
No, I do not know what “Rolling Phone” is supposed to mean, other than they couldn’t use “Rolling Stone” or think of a second workable gag.
Smithee seeks solace and shelter indie film gurus the Brothers Brothers (Coolio and Chuck D) and by the time we get here, my standards are so deep down in the sewer that I’m just relieved the Brothers Brothers are only very mildly racist caricatures. The Brothers Brothers take a liking to Smithee and agree to represent him in negotiations with Glover and Edmunds, leading to the Ultimate Showdown over…whether a bad blockbuster will be released. Truly it is a mystery, the failure of this film to clean up in theaters full of non-Hollywood insiders.
THE BAD
Film is a visual medium. So let’s use the visuals as our guides. Take a good long gander at the page image. Its shot composition. Its quality. The degree to which the people in that picture look like they care about anything that is happening around them. Based on what you see, does Burn Hollywood Burn appear to be a movie into which any tender loving care was invested? Does it look like a movie that inspired anything other than dead-eyed indifference?
Eric Idle, not caring enough to be humiliated.
As a proud moviegoing raccoon, I’ve consumed garbage way more pungent and vile than Burn Hollywood Burn. But what Burn Hollywood Burn lacks in outright incompetence, it more than makes up for in…um….it doesn’t, actually. It’s utterly without vision, passion, or substance from anyone except Joe Eszterhas, and at least in this movie, Joe Eszterhas has abandoned his usual passion for psychotic naked women in favor of a passion for pathetic 4chan taunts that would make middle school boys roll their eyes.
Arthur Hiller may have objected to the final cut of the movie, but what he thought he was going to make of the script in the first place is beyond me. Joe Eszterhas, for all his faults, was sometimes a good writer, but in Burn Hollywood BurnHere is an example of what Joe Eszterhas considers to be cutting, biting, ego-shattering commentary on Hollywood insiders:
Is “slept in the White House” supposed to be a Lewinsky joke or…?
And if that doesn’t make those Hollywood bigshots dissolve in inconsolable tears, how about when the same intro cards describe every female character in the movie as – you won’t believe your eyes – a “feminist”? Oooooh, burrrrn! Or when the movie refers to the media as “maggots,” “hyenas,” and – if you can even imagine such a thing – “sluts?” Mr. Eszterhas, sir, welcome to the esteemed company of Swift and Voltaire.
On a side note, there’s also a bizarre amount of gay panic in the script. Yeah, it was the ‘90s, but there’s a lot of it here, and none of it can even make an argument for being necessary. When Smithee yells “No, no, no! You’ve sodomized it!” after viewing the producers’ cut of Trio, Edmunds prissily snaps back “Sodomized! What!? I don’t do that shit!” as if the real insult here was that Smithee might think he’s into dudes. During Smithee’s interview with Larry King, Smithee hysterically demands to know why King once kissed Marlon Brando. In the delightful world of Burn Hollywood Burn, the only thing worse than being a producer or a woman is being one of The Homosexuals.
Or a movie star, but y’know, they’re all part of the gay agenda too.
So the script is a war crime. The transfer to screen fares no better. Hiller, the poor unfortunate soul, gave up somewhere between leaving his car in the parking lot and stepping onto the set, so he simply throws out medium shot after medium shot with the occasional tracking shot thrown in to keep us awake. Over in the cast, Jeni and O’Neal are playing identical nondescript jerks, so they come off, shockingly, as identical nondescript jerks. Goldberg and Chan, not playing themselves so much as playing generic spoiled movie stars, spend their bits smiling bemusedly and delivering their lines like parents who have been strong-armed into playing soldier by their small children. (In their defense, I too would be at a loss for what to do with lines like “I’m Whoopi Goldberg! I don’t die!” or “The director controls everything, but he’s not in control of me!” or, in a solid contender for worst line of dialogue in film history, “I could play Alan Smithee because I understand oppression. I’s a black woman in Hollywood!”)
Whoopi, also not caring enough to be humiliated.
And then there’s the music. Sweet God, the music. The Razzie for Worst Original Song, prior to its retirement in 2002, usually went to bland, inoffensive songs that happened to be on the soundtracks of hated movies. The music in Burn Hollywood Burn, on the other hand, will make you wish to erase the concept of a “song” from your memory, Eternal Sunshine-style. Take the actual Worst Song winner, “I Wanna Be Mike Ovitz!” by a group called Magic Kingdom that has done nothing notable before or since. The lyrics in full are as follows:
MIKE OVITZ!
MICHAEL S. OVITZ!
MIKE OVITZ!
I WANNA BE!
WHY CAN’T I BE!
MICHAEL OVITZ!
I WANNA BE!
MICHAEL OVITZ!
Michael S. Ovitz, a talent agent and former president of The Walt Disney Company with whom Joe Eszterhas had a falling-out and whom Joe Eszterhas apparently believes is a household name.
These lyrics are snarled atonally over a generic thudding bassline by what sounds like a low-rent Dead Kennedys cover band. It might be the worst song I’ve ever heard in a movie, or maybe that’s “Who’s the Man,” performed by T-Bone, with such classic lyrics as “Go on! Go on! Fuck the bastard, trade sex!” Or maybe it’s Gary G-Wiz’s minor-key arrangement of – I am not making this up – “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” You would think a movie with Coolio and Chuck D in supporting roles would have some decent music, but the soundtrack to Burn Hollywood Burn makes The Room sound like Almost Famous.
Oh, and because I need to take one more dig at the script: Robert Evans, playing himself, at one point says to his trophy girlfriend (Leslie Stefanson), who has just called him “Daddy,” “Lucky Daddy. Good thing incest turns him on.” This is the exact point at which I needed to interrupt the film to take a shower.
THE GOOD
So there are many, many, many bad things in Burn Hollywood Burn. The good things are not so much “good” as they are “functional.” No one’s doing a good job here, but some people at least aren’t active threats to themselves and others.
Of the Three Big Movie Stars Playing Themselves, only Stallone seems to have a clue what’s going on. While Goldberg and Chan float along, adrift but clutching firmly to the life jackets of their well-established careers, Stallone gamely goes along with the half-baked parody of himself in Eszterhas’s script, dutifully playing up his accent and making silly faces for the camera. It’s still hopeless, but hey, the man was a good sport and that deserves some plaudits.
Joke’s on you! I already HAVE eight Razzies!
Speaking of good sports, Eric Idle scrapes by with his dignity only somewhat in tatters by pretending he’s in a Monty Python movie. He’s trying really really hard to eke laughs out of this pathetically unfunny central gag. By the time he is reduced to prancing around the Keith Moon Psychiatric Institute (uggggh) bugging his eyes and singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” most viewers will have stopped feeling anything whatsoever, so we might be able to move beyond disgust and summon a little respect for the man’s dedication out of the void.
Let’s see…in one brief scene, an actor named Gabriel Casseus plays an associate of the Brothers Brothers named “OB Ta-No-Bee.” I can’t tell you anything else Gabriel Casseus has done, but his single monologue was the only time the film made me smile, because he turned OB Ta-No-Bee into its single likable character. Well done, Mr. Casseus. I hope you got to be on Broadway or something when this was over.
Sly, Whoopi, and Jackie all look pretty snazzy in their cop costumes, I guess. Ah, screw it. I’m done here.
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. A bunch of people, every last one of whom had previously done film-related things well, gathered together, dug a giant hole, filled the hole with liquefied pig feces, glanced at each other, shrugged listlessly, and said “we might as well all jump in!” I had very few nice things to say about Freddy Got Fingered, but at least Tom Green had some panache, distasteful as it was. Burn Hollywood Burn just sits there existing painfully, like a tumor. It makes you wonder what the point of movies even is. If this isn’t the bottom of the Razzie barrel, Robert Jarosinski will soon be assuming financial responsibility for my bar tabs.
Quality of Movie: 1 / 5. ½ is reserved for true technical and artistic incompetence, but there’s very little good to be found here.
Quality of Experience: ½ / 5. Recommended only for coprophagic insomniacs.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.