this is not a 'directed by alan smithee' joke
From the late 60s to the late 90s, Hollywood knew who to call when a movie was in trouble. Let's go back and revisit the curious life of Alan Smithee, and take a closer look at the man that murdered him.
I have wanted to make a video about this movie since long before I've been making YouTube videos. It's such a fascinating failure, it straddles the line between genuine disaster and self-parody so closely you'd surely believe it was on purpose, if you didn't know any better. This is a movie that needs to be seen to be believed, and I was astounded to find that almost no one had seen it. Case in point: the film's Wikipedia article did not have a full plot synopsis (just a premise) when I started working on this video, over two decades after its release (I ended up writing one.)
This video was going to be a lot longer, and I did have a more elaborate conclusion planned, but I wanted very badly for this to be my last video of 2022, rather than my first of 2023 (for a multitude of reasons, from my moving far from home, to a desire to make a clean break into my next batch of videos, to a simple deadline to ensure I would finish the thing.) As such, there's a lot of stuff I have left over from this video. Sounds like a blog post to come!