An Alan Smithee Film--Burn Hollywood Burn

I'm guessing that An Alan Smithee Film--Burn Hollywood Burn began life as an insider satire of Hollywood excess, stupidity, ego and power-mongering. If so, the end result ranks as one of the most spectacularly ironic unintentional jokes in film history. Ostensibly Joe Eszterhas' script is a pseudo-documentary account of a director named Alan Smithee (Eric Idle) who loses control of a big-budget action film starring Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg and Jackie Chan (all of whom appear as themselves), then steals and threatens to destroy the film's negative when his only recourse is the Directors' Guild-mandated pseudonym Alan Smithee. It's bad enough that Burn Hollywood Burn has not a single laugh for its entire, blissfully brief 84 minutes. What makes it even worse is Eszterhas' insistence upon telling every bad joke not once, but twice or even three times, most offensively in the mock documentary captions which identify every single female character as "feminist." Not content to stick any Hollywood type with only one jab from his rapier wit, Eszterhas fills the screen with inane bullet points every time a new character appears. It's a petulant schoolboy's idea of satire--pictures of Hollywood insiders to which Eszterhas has taken a pen to draw little mustaches and black out the teeth. It's too bad that only director Arthur Hiller could remove his name from this excessive, ego-driven "satire" of excess and ego. Otherwise, you might have seen end credits overflowing with Alan Smithees. Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)