Jennifer Love Hewitt and Alec Baldwin on the set of The Devil and Daniel Webster
There's a scene in Seinfeld in which wheedling George Costanza claims that the last US president to have a beard was Artemis N Falkmore. When told that there was never any such president, he shoots back, "Yeah, I know. But it kind of sounds like a president's name, doesn't it?"
By that reckoning, Harry Kirkpatrick kind of sounds like a movie director's name - at least in the opinion of the Hollywood establishment. Having forcibly removed his own name from The Devil and Daniel Webster, Alec Baldwin now finds himself in the unhappy position of seeing his film overhauled, slapped with a new title (Shortcut to Happiness) and credited to a phantom director. So disguised, it belatedly prepares to parade itself before the US public this weekend.
In the meantime it remains to be seen whether Harry Kirkpatrick will go on to become the new Alan Smithee - the all-purpose Hollywood front whose fitful, largely unimpressive career stretched from the late 1960s to the century's end. According to film folklore, everyone from Don Siegel to William Friedkin, Michael Mann to David Lynch has resorted to the ignominious "Smithee" alias at one stage or another (most, admittedly, to disassociate themselves from bowdlerised TV edits of their films).
Paradoxically Smithee's greatest success also marked his Waterloo. The name was officially retired by the Directors Guild of America following the release of the 1997 satire Alan Smithee: Burn, Hollywood, Burn, presumably because it had grown too big for its boots. These days I like to picture Smithee on a golf course somewhere, resplendent in sun visor and roll-neck as he lines up for a putt and reminisces about the good old days.
But why Smithee and why Kirkpatrick? Why pick these names in particular? The first, we are told, is an anagram of "the alias men", but the second has no obvious satirical roots. Both sound a little Waspy and anodyne, hinting at some distant family connection with the old country (Kirkpatrick is Scots-Irish, while "Smithee" was a common census-taker's corruption of Smith). Both could conceivably crop up as comic characters in a Sinclair Lewis novel. Alan Smithee and Harry Kirkpatrick: the interchangeable junior salesmen at an obscure midwestern insurance firm.
Both names, finally, manage to be at once anonymous and ludicrous. I can't help feeling that this somehow exposes what the Hollywood establishment really think of the directors they hire to make their movies. These directors are likeably anonymous when they stick behind the camera. They are irritatingly ludicrous when they start to play the precious artist. Ergo, they are an Alan Smithee or a Harry Kirkpatrick: bland little clowns with the name to prove it.
(Incidentally, I've always thought that the name that really sounds like a Hollywood director is Brad Silberling in that it makes me think of someone young, bright and vaguely insincere. And yet - would you credit it? - Silberling turns out to be real).
