Announcing AN ALAN SMITHEE BLOGATHON!

Alan Smithee, blogathon, film blogathon, movie blogathon, Summer 2019 blogathon 2 Minutes

We figure it’s long past time to pay tribute to Hollywood’s most ubiquitous director with

AN ALAN SMITHEE BLOGATHON

Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of him. From 1968 to 2000, Smithee presided over some of the most notorious movies ever made. The only thing that would have further enhanced his legend is if he’d been a real person!

Actually, “Alan Smithee” was the pseudonym used by the Directors Guild of America whenever a movie director, dissatisfied with the final product, claimed that he or she had not been allowed to exercise complete control over the movie. So let’s have some fun with this, and investigate the wide varieties of movie stories and styles used by Mr. Smithee!

(We think you’ll be surprised at some of the big names involved here. Directors and actors as varied as John Frankenheimer, Dennis Hopper, and Kiefer Sutherland have resorted to the “A.S.” technique.)

However, before you commit to this blogathon, please carefully read the rules below. The name “Alan Smithee” has been applied to an awful (and I do mean awful) lot of Hollywood projects. So if we don’t establish some ground rules, we could be writing about Alan Smithee all year!

Do’s and Don’t’s

  1. Please, write only about a theatrical, direct-to-video, or TV movie in which Alan Smithee is credited as the main director. No Second Unit Directors, no music videos, no TV network- or airline-edited movie versions, and no other media such as video games or comic books. (And frankly, the only reason I’m allowing any exceptions to be reviewed is that I’m just dying to read someone’s review of The Birds II: Lands End.)
  2. If you need a starting point to find an Alan Smithee movie, click here to go to Wikipedia’s listing about Alan Smithee, or here to find a similar listing at the Internet Movie Database. Or Google “Alan Smithee movies,” and a listing of them will appear at the top of your computer screen.
  3. No duplicate entries, please. The listing of blogathon entries is below and will be continually updated. Be sure to check the list so that you don’t choose an entry that is already taken.

Instructions

  1. In the “Comments” section at the bottom of this blog, please leave your name, the URL of your blog, and the movie you are choosing to blog about. The one and only banner for this blogathon is at the top of this blog entry. Please display it on your blog, and link it back to this blog. (Sorry, I didn’t see much point in creating elaborate banners since Alan Smithee is not as familiar a director as, say, Alfred Hitchcock.)
  2. The blogathon will take place from Fri., Aug. 30, through Sun., Sept. 1, 2019. When the opening date of the blogathon arrives, leave a comment here with a link to your post, and I will display it in the list of entries (which I will continually update to the beginning of the ‘thon, so keep checking back!).
  3. I will not be assigning particular dates to any blog posts. As long as you get your entry in by the end of the day on Sept. 1, I will be satisfied. (That said, the sooner the better!)

Again, be sure to leave a comment below and grab our banner, and have fun with your blog entry! Here’s the line-up so far:

Movie Movie Blog Blog II – An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1997)

Movierob – Death of a Gunfighter (1969) and Solar Crisis (1990)

The Midnite Drive-In – Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh (1991)

Realweegiemidget Reviews – Catchfire (a/k/a Backtrack) (1990)

Published by moviemovieblogblogii

So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am? One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account. When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account. And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”) So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog. Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog. If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog. Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.

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9 thoughts on “Announcing AN ALAN SMITHEE BLOGATHON!”

  4. Pingback: The Alan Smithee Blogathon – The Death of a Gunfighter (1969) | MovieRob
  5. Pingback: The Alan Smithee Blogathon – Solar Crisis (1990) | MovieRob
  6. Pingback: FILMS… Catchfire / Backtrack (1990) – Realweegiemidget Reviews Films TV Books and more

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