
Alan Smithee - luu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee
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CM30
Amusingly, it mostly died off because of a film called An Alan Smithee Film:
Burn Hollywood Burn. In that film, a man called Alan Smithee couldn't get his
named removed from the film because the only available pseudonym matched his
own name, with said film being so terrible that it's own director wanted his
named removed from it.

So a film about the use of Alan Smithee as a pseudonym was credited to Alan
Smithee, which in turn made it incredibly hard to take the name seriously any
more.

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ghostbrainalpha
Normally I enjoy "meta", but I've finally found my limit.

It took me two entire minutes to understand your comment, even though it was
written about as clearly as it could have been.

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theoh
Well... the comment in question could have been written a lot more clearly.
It's not immediately clear to which film the clause beginning "with said film"
refers to. That is needlessly confusing.

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SOLAR_FIELDS
The Wikipedia article itself explains it a lot more clearly - I didn’t have
any trouble understanding what was going on when reading that compared to
great-grandparent comment.

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klenwell
This is great:

 _When the film was finished, Siegel did not want to take the credit for it
and Totten refused to take credit in his place. The DGA panel hearing the
dispute agreed that the film did not represent either director 's creative
vision.

The original proposal was to credit the fictional "Al Smith", but that was
deemed too common a name, and in fact was already in use within the film
industry. The last name was first changed to "Smithe", then "Smithee"...
Critics praised the film and its "new" director, with The New York Times
commenting that the film was "sharply directed by Allen Smithee who has an
adroit facility for scanning faces and extracting sharp background detail,"
and Roger Ebert commenting, "Director Allen Smithee, a name I'm not familiar
with, allows his story to unfold naturally."_

Shame the Eric Idle film couldn't make hay with this.

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sitkack
I'd like to use this for my commits.

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netsharc
A few days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487441)

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mcguire
Including ome versions of _Dune_ and _Meet Joe Black_?

