For 32 years, every director who disowned a film became Alan Smithee

For three decades, a Hollywood director who wanted to disown a film could take his name off it and replace it with one man: Alan Smithee. According to Wikipedia, the name was "an official pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project," coined by the Directors Guild of America in 1968. A director who used it had to prove to a guild panel that he had lost creative control, and was then required "not to discuss the circumstances leading to the move or even to acknowledge being the project's director."

It was first used on the 1969 western Death of a Gunfighter, after star Richard Widmark engineered the replacement of the original director. Critics, not in on the joke, praised the newcomer: The New York Times called the film "sharply directed by Allen Smithee," and Roger Ebert wrote, "Director Allen Smithee, a name I'm not familiar with, allows his story to unfold naturally."

A persistent legend holds that the spelling is an anagram of "the alias men," but Wikipedia notes "this is apocryphal." The DGA retired the name around 2000, after the flop An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn drew too much attention to it.