Will the real 'Allen Smithee' please rise?

What do the movies Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh, Return of Satan's Cheerleaders and the television version of the cult classic Dune have in common? To those unfamiliar with the genre, they might be called eyesores, nothing more than bastards of the film industry -- in a word, worthless. But to a group of Penn students and faculty, these films and dozens of others were the starting point for a conference this weekend on the elusive yet prolific director "Allen Smithee." "Allen Smithee" is a pseudonym frequently assumed by directors who do not want to take responsibility for the finished product. The Director's Guild does not normally permit its members to withdraw their names from film credits. But if a movie is recut or altered against the director's wishes, the director then may appeal to the Guild and request that "Smithee" become, in effect, the creative scapegoat. Smithee's name, for example, appeared on the "severely cut airline version" of the 1992 film Scent of a Woman, starring Al Pacino. The "sPecters of Legitimacy" conference included film screenings on Thursday and Friday -- including Smithee's "premiere," 1969's Death of a Gunfighter -- preceding the conference. Several film scholars also delivered papers Saturday in Houston Hall analyzing and interpreting the role of Smithee in film studies. The Allen Smithee Group at Penn, in an effort to examine the role of the director as auteur -- French for author -- discussed and in some cases argued about how the imaginary "Smithee" fits into that theory. The group designed the conference as a first step to critically evaluating Smithee's obscured role in film culture, inviting authorities such as Columbia University Film Professor Andrew Sarris -- a film critic for The New York Observer -- and Robert Ray, director of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. Labeling Smithee a "mark of failure" and "shorthand for 'bad movie'," Ray gave the conference's keynote address, entitled "The Automatic Auteur." But Ray insisted that Smithee connotes not "failure but? the unexamined," using the premises of an "insistence on authorship" in the arts and media and the "au courant idea of responsibility" to justify his position. Laura Spagnoli, a Romance Languages graduate student, presented a paper entitled "Movies On a Stick: Allen Smithee, Hollywood and Films for Cannibalizing Cultures." "Auteur-ism assumes that a film's meaning revolves largely around the director? his or her subconscious as it would be manifested through a body of work," she said. "Allen Smithee films provide an ideal way of testing the limits of auteur-ism since there is in fact no single 'auteur' behind these films," Spagnoli added. "[They] highlight the artificiality of studying films according to their director." English Professor Craig Saper, who helped organize the conference around his film studies classes, added that "[Allen Smithee is] the artificial auteur? it's like the director as figure of speech." With the upcoming release of Disney's An Alan Smithee Film, a satire of Hollywood's creative license in altering a director's work, the conference offered a timely look at the theoretical debates surrounding Smithee films. Although he technically doesn't exist, Smithee -- or an unknown individual posing as the unnamed director -- provided the conference with a lighthearted finale when "he" appeared at the conference to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Penn Group.