How bad is An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn? Every bit as awful as you might have heard. This wannabe mockumentary tries to send up Hollywood in a tale that has director Alan Smithee (Eric Idle) hijacking his own film and destroying it because it's so bad, because he can't use the pseudonym Alan Smithee because (duh!) that's his real name! Har har! Joe Eszterhas is responsible (of course) for this mess, which is so unfunny the only laughs are during the outtakes that run during the credits. And that's the actors laughing, not the audience. Widely panned as one of the worst movies ever made, life imitated art when director Arthur Hiller took his name off this train wreck and used... of course... Alan Smithee.