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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Alexandra and I’m from Los Angeles, California.

Hi Alexandra, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind today?

Well, sometimes you put out a call for folks who know of unique words in the industry in which they work.

And I’m an actress here in Los Angeles and I have a couple fun sort of phrases that we use that I thought would be of interest to you and to your listeners.

Okay, sure.

Well, the first one is Alan Smithy. Have you ever heard of that?

Oh, Alan.

Alan Smithy.

Yes.

Your old friend?

I don’t know Alan. Tell us about him.

Alan Smithy is a pseudonym on a lot of films when directors feel like their film has been taken away from them and recut and they don’t like what the end product is and they don’t want to have their own name on it.

So the pseudonym Alan Smithy goes up on it.

It was a term that came into being in 1968 when Richard Widmark fired a director.

He was a star back then, and he fired a director, hired another one.

They finished the film, and neither director wanted to take credit because they thought that Richard Widmark had basically done all the directing and things.

So the Directors Guild came to an agreement that they would put the pseudonym Alan Smithy.

First they thought Alan Smith, and then they thought that was too common, and there were already Al Smith in the Directors Guild, in the industry.

So Alan Smithy is the name that was used up until 2000 when directors didn’t like their films.

It’s not an easy pseudonym to get.

You have to go before a board in the Directors Guild, and you have to prove that your film was wrested away from you, not that you just were a terrible director if you don’t like the end product.

And you also have to keep the reason that you’ve disavowed the film a secret.

Oh, interesting. Interesting.

This kind of reminds me of when I was writing for Glossy New York magazines a few years ago.

And every once in a while, my fellow freelancers and I would get so upset with an editing job that we would threaten to yank our bylines.

And I almost had a piece published under the name Dot Matrix.

And can you do that just whenever you want?

You can just choose your name because you can’t do that with the Director’s Guild.

Good point, good point.

Yeah, you can choose your name, but I think as soon as I threatened to do that, they backed down a little bit and left some stuff in that I wanted in.

Well, they no longer use that pseudonym. If a director is unhappy with the film and can show that it wasn’t because he was a bad director, that it was wrested away from him by the studio, then the director can come to another name.

Because what happened was that in 1999, a film came out called an Alan Smithy film, Burn Hollywood Burn.

Yeah, this was this terrible thing with Eric Idle, right?

Yes, it was a terrible film, and ironically, the director didn’t want his name on it, so it was going to be a film called an Alan Smithy film, Burn Hollywood Burn, and then the director was going to be Alan Smithy, because Arthur Hiller hated the final edit so much.

And I guess there was a lot of publicity about it, so then the term Alan Smithy became too well-known. People knew that that meant it was a pseudonym.

That’s probably where I learned it.

So now there’s not just one pseudonym.

There can be, I guess, a bunch of different pseudonyms.

It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

And even writers actually, Martha, occasionally use variations on Alan Smithy.

Oh, really?

Yeah, like what’s the female Alan Smithy?

Alana.

Alana.

Alana, okay.

Very good.

Yeah.

That’s great.

And you said you had another one?

We also had something called the Eastwood Rule.

And, yes, it’s because of Clint Eastwood.

In 1976, he was the star of the film The Outlaw, Josie Wales, and he got the producer to fire the director, Philip Kaufman, who’s a very respected director now.

But the producer fired Philip Kaufman, and Clint Eastwood took over the directing.

And the Directors Guild of America decided that they could not have powerful producers and actors firing directors and then putting themselves as directors.

And so it became a rule that you couldn’t do that.

You couldn’t fire a director and then put yourself in the director’s place.

So that was known as the Eastwood rule.

Complicated. Hollywood looks easy from the outside.

You guys do a great job of making it look simple for the rest of us.

Well, it’s not boring. Let me put it that way.

There we go. There, that’s a perspective I like.

Well, thank you so much for your call and all this amazing information.

I know you’ve got tons of this.

Maybe we’ll do like a 10-hour show one time and you can be our guest.

Yeah, I’d love to talk to you about it sometime.

It would be fun.

Take care now.

Well, thanks so much for calling.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear the slang and jargon that fills your ears every day.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.