YMMV / An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn

• Audience-Alienating Premise: While the Alan Smithee pseudonym was a bit of interesting trivia at the time, it wasn't really enough to base a whole film around, considering that it usually ended up being attached to relatively low-profile films — its highest-profile usages until that point were on Hellraiser: Bloodline and the TV edit of Dune (1984) — meaning that the film really needed a strong storyline to hang its hook on. However, the story's format as a (mostly) retrospective mockumentary instead ends up making for a story that falls far too much under Take Our Word for It, and ends up being hard to follow for anyone who isn't knowledgable about Hollywood politics.
• Award Snub: Eric Idle said he was disappointed that he didn't get a Razzie nomination for this film.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • At one point, an agent mentions representing top action directors such as Richard Donner, Mel Gibson and Stuart Baird. All three directors would find their careers tanked within the next few years — in Gibson's case because of controversies around his personal life, and in Donner's and Baird's cases because of Timeline and Star Trek: Nemesis respectively. Subsequently, Donner only really worked as a producer prior to his death, Baird had to revert to his former career as an editor, and while Gibson eventually recovered with Hacksaw Ridge, his career as both an actor and director remains a pale shadow of what it was when this film was produced.
  • The Horrible Hollywood overtones of the movie take a turn for the truly awful when you remember that Harvey Weinstein, who would later be revealed to be (and convicted for being) a serial sexual harrasser and rapist, plays a character in this film. Extra points for his character being a PI, as it was revealed that Weinstein hired PI agencies to intimidate his victims into silence, and even more for one of the captions introducing Weinstein's character calling him a "Friend To The Stars".
  • Robert Evans's appearance Adam Westing as a film producer who insists on his much-younger partners calling him "Daddy" gets (even more) wince-inducing in light of Ryan O'Neal appearing on the film (also playing a producer), after an incident in which O'Neal, following the funeral of his long-time partner Farrah Fawcett, tried to hit on a younger woman, only to discover from the horrified woman that she was his own daughter Tatum O'Neal (with whom he had been estranged from years at the time).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The last line of the film's trailer has the Brothers Brothers asking "is this movie really that bad?" to which Smithee replies that it's "worse than Showgirls". In-context they're referring to the Film Within a Film, Trio, but it ended up humorously foreshadowing this film's reception and historical legacy, with Showgirls going on to become a Cult Classic, and this film being (and continuing to be) regarded as just irredeemably bad.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: While the film itself received a negative critical and commercial reception, it did spark internet discussion around the Alan Smithee pseudonym, which spread public awareness of who "Alan Smithee" really is, leading to the DGA retiring the alias in 2000.
• So Bad, It's Good: The song "I Wanna Be Mike Ovitz", winner of the Razzie Award for Worst Original Song. The instrumental is serviceable punk with a cool bassline. But unfortunately it's ruined by Looped Lyrics on top of it, including an inexplicable whispered part. It has to be heard to be believed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The film within a film, Trio, actually sounds like it could have been a fun romp regardless of what Alan Smithee thought about it in-universe. Who wouldn't want to see a Badass Crew consisting of Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone, and Whoopi Goldberg? That being said, this could easily have been the intention, as it could be seen as a commentary of how real life audiences will go to see a terrible movie because it has big named stars attached, and that people who feel Trio might have worked better as an actual film due to the casting, with no idea of what the story of the film within the film is like, may have comically missed the point.
  • The whole premise of the film — a director seeing his work ruined by in-universe Executive Meddling and unsuccessfully attempting to disown the finished product — could've made for a genuinely good satire of the film industry, but in practice the concept isn't really used for much except as a way for Joe Eszterhas to vent his spleen at the industry higher-ups.

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