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On the March 14th show, the topic of movie director Alan Smithee was raised. That's the name used (at least until recently) when a director insists on having his own name removed from a film because someone else has edited it to the point that he no longer claims it as his own work.
A few years back, I found an entry for Alan Smithee on the Internet Movie Database, complete with a biography written by contributor "George Spelvin". George Spelvin is the similar name used when an actor plays a second role in the same movie, dating from the days in silent pictures when you could get paid twice if you could somehow appear as two or more characters without anyone noticing that it was the same guy. There was also a biography for Spelvin at IMDb, this one authored by contributor "Alan Smithee".
(And just to show how nobody works in a vacuum, the name "Alan Smithee" showed up in this week's Co-Optitude, where Felicia and Ryon Day play old computer games. The reference is about ten minutes into the video.)
The movie industry seems to have its own arcane jargon, probably more so than many others. I always wondered what the job of "best boy" seen in the credits was all about. When the son of a friend got a job at Disney Studios, I finally had a chance to ask. This was before the internet, where one could simply do a search for the term and find this.
I always wondered what a foley operator's function was. One night, ewatching the credits on a rented movie, I asked my wife what a goley was. "It's a catheter you leave in."
My father, who liked to make fun of people talking about snow blowing "on off" the road, once commented to me that they must need a lot of crowd control in filming PBS show, and they used fencing, probably snow fencing, for it. I assumed he was right, and asked him how hew happened to learn that. Oh, he said, on regularTV,they never mention it, but on PBS shows, they usually have 3 or 4 people credited with "post production."
The thging about Alan Smithee is that multiple people used that name. Writers commonly use multiple names. Anne Rice, for instance, used the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure when she wrote her Sleeping Beauty trilogy, so as to avoid offending her other readers. The trilogy was so kinky that it makes 50 Shades look like a Little Golden Book by comparison. And Harlan Ellison fought to keep others from mangling his writing by stamping the Cordwainer Bird name of anything that had been FUBAR against his wishes. I know it ended up on a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea script and a Starlost script. He had a knock-em-down-drag-em-out with Gene Roddemberry, who heavily rewrote City on the Edge of Forever. and then refused to let Ellison use the Bird name; that Star Trek episode is considered one of the best, by critics and fans alike. That credit also appeared on am episode of Flying Nun. (The very notion of Flying Nun's producers approaching Ellison to write a script boggles my mind. Sorta like the Pope hiring Ed Gein to design new garb for him to wear.)
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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