Yes and yes, but only because both Cordwainer Bird and Alan Smithee were official pseudonyms, sanctioned by the Writer's Guild and Director's Guild, respectively.

The Writer's Guild allows individual writers to choose their pseudonyms, whereas the DGA used to have a policy of any director who wanted his name off a movie to be credited as "Alan Smithee".    But the DGA doesn't do that any more, because it became public knowledge that Alan Smithee meant "the real director didn't want his name on this trainwreck".    I think - tho I'm not sure - the DGA now allows for individual pseudonyms the same as WGA.

But the use of pseudonyms only happens after a grievance process, writers or directors have to appeal to their union and show that the end result of their work is so compromised that they shouldn't have to be associated with it.   If their union agrees, the union backs them up and demands the producers use the pseudonym.   However, all residual rules still apply in either case.

For non-union projects, though, it's all about whatever contract you signed, and whether the producers even bother to honor it or not.    Without a union to back you up, you have no choice but to try legal action on your own, if you want to try going down that road.  And most likely by the time anything comes of the suit, the project's been in release for years already.  At least residuals aren't an issue here, because non-union projects don't pay residuals anyway.

Yeah, I watched this one as a direct result of Teague and another DIF-er (Michael maybe) Twitter-ing about it.   "Hmm, it's on Netflix Instant, might as well see what this is abou - "  BOOM.

Two things about it that especially struck me - first, the sorta-main character (who isn't Zachary, but it'll all make sense if you see it) was a guy just like a lot of us here - he made fan-films for pete's sake.    I related to the story on a very personal level that way.

The other thing - and I give the filmmaker credit for this, even though I can't say I ENJOYED it - is that even though it's a real-life story, the way the story gets told makes it a perfect example of the "surprising yet inevitable" conclusion.   I didn't see the ending coming at all, but then immediately realized that I should have.   And it was the same for the people who actually lived it, so the movie actually gives you a sense of what it was like for them.   

So in the end, DZ is just a filmmaker telling a very personal story because he simply had to get it out somehow.    You don't come away from it thinking "Yes, that's a messed-up thing and we need to do something about it!"  because there really isn't anything to be done in this case.    It's just a documentary in the purest sense of the word - a visual document, a record of a thing that happened.  But damn, that's all it needed to be.

Is it another of those "animal things"...?

There was talk of me appearing on this page, but unfortunately I am unable to appear because of a scheduling issue.

There were originally no plans to have a second page, but there was such a demand that we felt compelled to add one.