Burt Reynolds (1936–2018)
"I think I'm the only movie star who's a movie star in spite of his pictures, not because of them," Burt Reynolds told The New York Times in early 1978. "I've had some real turkeys."
At that moment, Burt Reynolds was as big a star as anyone has ever been. Smokey and the Bandit had been the second highest grossing film of 1977-bettered only by Star Wars-and Reynolds reportedly got 20 percent of the gross. Over the previous few years in movies such as White Lightning, Gator, and The Longest Yard, he had defined a character audiences loved: The cocky southerner with a big heart, a devilish charisma, and the good sense to never take himself too seriously. A guy who loved to drive fast and show off, it was a character that became indistinguishable from Reynolds himself. And the world loved him.
Reynolds passed away September 6 at the age of 82 in Florida, his manager told The Hollywood Reporter. He leaves behind his adopted son Quinton, and a couple generations of boys who wanted to sort-of grow up and show off in a black Trans Am like he did.
Born Burton Leon Reynolds, Jr., on February 11, 1936, in Lansing, Michigan, he moved with his family as they followed his father's military career. Finally settled in Riviera Beach, Florida, he established himself as a gifted athlete at Palm Beach High School and attended Florida State University on a football scholarship. But an injury ended his football career, and while attending Palm Beach Junior College he tried out for a theatrical play and found a new passion.
Soon after that he moved to New York City to pursue an acting career. He appeared on the Broadway stage in Look, We've Come Through, which ran for a total of five performances. He picked up small parts on television and in 1959 earned a regular role on the short-lived NBC series Riverboat. He left that job after a year with some bitterness and spent the next few years taking guest shots on TV series no one remembers now. He seemed destined to be a working actor; a sidekick, but hardly a star.
That frustration was apparent in an interview with Dan Jenkins as Reynolds was settling in for a stint as blacksmith Quint Asper on the CBS western Gunsmoke between 1962 and 1965. Alone in Los Angeles, he told Jenkins, "I'd drive down to the Skid Row section, walk into a bar, wait for the inevitable crack, belt the guy in the teeth and go home feeling much better."
Reynolds got noticed with Gunsmoke, however. He had title roles in the short-lived TV police series Hawk and Dan August but wasn't a major star on stage or screen.
Then came the 1972 film Deliverance in which he played the role of cocksure Atlanta businessman Lewis Medlock, who leads his friends on a calamitous canoe trip down a Georgia river. Directed by John Boorman, Deliverance was raw, intense and, at times, terrifying. It proved that Reynolds could act, and that movies could be built around him.
Throw in a sensational appearance as the not-quite-revealing-all centerfold in Cosmopolitan magazine's April 1972 issue, and the world was suddenly fascinated by Burt Reynolds. From the bottom of his lifted shoes to the top of his toupee, both of which he admitted wearing.
Reynolds' stardom grew quickly, particularly when he was paired with high-powered cars and loads of stunts. In 1973's White Lightning he created the character Gator McClusky, who drove a brown 1971 Ford Custom 500 four-door with a bench seat, a four-speed, and a big V-8 under the hood. He returned to the character three years later in Gator. He'd become bankable.
Hal Needham, a legendary stunt man and stunt coordinato-and often Reynolds' roommate-worked on those films and during their production came up with the kernel of an idea that would become Smokey.
"You're right, it was Gator," Needham recalled in a 2007 interview with Car and Driver. "The driver captain brought some Coors beer down from out in California and, hell, I didn't know it was illegal to sell Coors beer east of the Mississippi. Anyway, he came by and he said, 'Hey Hal, I put a couple of cases of Coors in your room.' And I said, 'Oh, thanks.' Anyway, I put it in my fridge and it kept disappearing. So I thought, ‘What the hell is going on?' I set a trap and caught the maid stealing my Coors beer. So I asked her why and she said that, well, her boyfriend likes it and so on and so forth and then I realized you couldn't take Coors beer east of the Mississippi. It would be bootlegging. So, anyway, I thought about it for a while and I said, 'Hell, that's a pretty premise for an action movie.' And the rest is history."
"It was a bit of a lark when I agreed to do it," Reynolds recalled in his own 2016 interview with C/D about deciding to do Smokey and the Bandit, "and I knew we'd have fun if we could get Jackie Gleason. But then we got Sally Field onboard and it changed the entire dynamic. About a third of the way into filming, I was in the car with Sally and there was this little moment where we kind of looked at each other, and then we both turned and looked over at Hal. He gave us a thumbs up and said, 'Yeah!' And we kind of knew there was some magic going on."
For many of us, Reynolds is Bo "Bandit" Darville. It's not how he saw himself. "I'm really much more like Phil Potter from [the 1979 film] Starting Over," he told C/D. "People do think I'm the Bandit, and I'm a lot more serious than that. But he helped me lighten up a little bit. He loves country, and I love jazz. He is a scofflaw while I totally respect it since my dad was the chief of police when I was growing up."
"Smokey and the Bandit," wrote The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby during its initial 1977 run, "[is], among other things, a good deal of benign if brainless fun, something that represents a dramatic change in mood from most of the post-Easy Rider country movies . . . There are still red-neck cops all over the place and they are still bigoted, like the one in Smokey played by Jackie Gleason with a series of Edgar Kennedy–like slow-burns, but now the villains have been defused. They are joke-cops, forever destined to be outwitted, led astray, out-maneuvered, out-driven, and at the climax-in the unkindest cut of all-to have their vehicles mangled or their tires shot out from under them, which, of course, renders a man impotent when a man and machine are recognized as one."
Canby's psychologizing may be pretentious, but he's right. Smokey truly found comedy-amazingly popular comedy-at the primal level of American automotive culture. And decades after its release, it remains beloved. Often beloved by people who were themselves born long after the film's release. It also sold an amazing number of Pontiac Trans Ams. Pontiac sold 46,701 Trans Ams in 1976, then 68,745 in 1977, and 93,341 in 1978. Sales peaked in 1979 at 117,108 Trans Ams. That's a simply astonishing number of cars with a giant cartoon chicken on the hood. Trans Am sales nosedived to 50,986 a year later when Pontiac replaced the 6.6-liter V-8 with a fragile, turbocharged 5.0-liter V-8.
Smokey proved to be the pinnacle of Reynolds' popularity. He was a frequent and usually hilarious guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, he showed up on virtually every magazine's cover, and his romantic conquests were popular topics of conversation. He had high-profile relationships with Dinah Shore and Sally Field and briefer romances with actresses Adrienne Barbeau, Lucie Arnaz, and Lorna Luft, among many others. He was married twice; first to British Laugh-In comedienne Judy Carne from 1963 to 1965, and then to actress Loni Anderson from 1988 to 1993.
But he may have taken his massive stardom for granted, often choosing projects that lazily played upon his established image instead of reaching for new heights.
While he'd star in the first sequel to Smokey and collaborate with Needham again in Hooper and the two Cannonball Run films, most of his movie projects didn't quite gel. Some, like 1977's Semi-Tough, based on Dan Jenkins' book about pro football, came close to capturing Reynolds' appeal, but didn't quite channel it.
Most of Reynolds' films were worse. That includes the Needham-directed, incredibly dopey, sloppily constructed 1983 film Stroker Ace, which NASCAR somehow survived.
In fact, Needham and Reynolds partnered on a race team. From 1981 to 1989, "Hal and Burt's" Mach 1 Racing Skoal Bandit #33 won nine NASCAR Winston Cup races with driver Harry Gant behind the wheel. Not an unsuccessful team, but not a dominant one either. He dabbled in other enterprises as well, taking an ownership stake in the USFL Tampa Bay Bandits.
By 1990, Reynolds' career had faded to the point where he was starring on television in the successful series Evening Shade. His role on that series earned him an Emmy award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 1992. It ended its four-season run in 1994.
Never one to save when there were things to spend on, Reynolds faced financial difficulties after divorcing his second wife, Loni Anderson, in 1993. In 1996 he declared bankruptcy and faced foreclosures several times through the early 21st century. "There are a hell of a lot of other people worse off than I am," he told ABC News in 2017, "and my heart goes out to them. I will do like I've always done, keep my head up high and continue to move on down the road."
The last great hurrah of Reynolds career came in the 1997 film Boogie Nights, in which he played a porn producer misnavigating the transition from film to videotape in the late 1970s. It was an astounding performance that earned him accolades from critics, many awards, and his sole nomination for an Academy Award. But he has never loved the film or working with its director, Paul Thomas Anderson.
In 2010, Reynolds underwent quintuple-bypass surgery, and his physical decline was obvious after that. But he still had that spark, showing up on interview shows like Conan O'Brien's and still delivering his wry wit with a matter of fact self-deprecation.
Reynolds' stardom was overwhelming. It wasn't generated by social media posts, but by the sheer force of his personality and charisma. He was a larger-than-life movie star in those waning years when it was still possible to be that. He defined the type of person that those of us who watched him as we grew up hoped to one day be. But as hard as we've all tried, no one will ever be a better Burt Reynolds than Burt Reynolds.
The great sportswriter Dan Jenkins, in that long-ago interview during Gunsmoke and before he wrote Semi-Tough, seemed to get Reynolds way back then. "Reynolds, who treats indifference as a mortal enemy and praise as a warm friend," he wrote, "best sums up both himself and his role: 'I don't care how good or bad I am as long as I'm not dull.'"
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