‘Star Wars’ vs. ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ (Remembering Burt Reynolds)

“I was Number One at the box office five years in a row, which I don’t think anybody has done since. In 1978, I had four movies at once playing nationwide. If I met you then, I’m sorry.”
Actor/director Burt Reynolds (reflecting on his unchecked ego)

It wasn’t a fair fight. Star Wars vs. Smokey & the Bandit that is.

When both of those movies opened during the same week in May 1977, who do you think won coming out of the gate?

The one featuring a cocky driver in a black Trans Am or the one featuring a cocky pilot flying an X-Wing Starfighter?

Keep in mind that Burt Reynolds was the biggest box office star throughout the late ’70s, that legendary comedian and actor Jackie Gleason was Smokey (the cop), and co-star Sally Field was well-known for her Tv show The Flying Nun. That Star Wars movie had a bunch of then-unknown actors in a space genre that not many people believed in. (Granted in time, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Darth Vader would become bigger than any superlative I can come up with.)

Smokey & the Bandit won—at least that opening week. And according to Burt Reynolds in his book  But Enough About Me. Other sources back that up, others say it was a tie, and one I found even said Star Wars edged out Smokey. (Box office data appears to be spotty from more than 40 years ago.) It was close either way.

But even if the numbers $1.6  million (Smokey) vs. $1.5 million (Star Wars) were the final numbers, Smokey may have won the first round, but it definitely lost the fight. Star Wars finished the year number one ($460 million) and Smokey second or third ($126 million) depending on how counts the revenue for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then the Star Wars franchise went on to crush everyone in movie history.  (I don’t count the Marvel universe as one franchise film.)

And, as the saying goes, a number without a reference is meaningless. Star Wars had a limited release in its first week opening in only 43 theaters. Smokey opened in 726 theaters. So even if Smokey did win the box office that first week, Star Wars was killing it in per theater. But, according to IMDB,  Smokey did finish in the top ten of all movies in the 1970s.

Oddly, one of the fans of the movie was the director Alfred Hitchcock. His daughter says it was one of his favorite films in the years before he died, and that he watched it repeatedly.

When I heard that Burt Reynolds died yesterday a zillion thoughts went through my mind. One was I don’t know that there would be this blog without Burt Reynolds. I was 16-years-old when Smokey and the Bandit hit the theaters.  My three biggest interests then were sports, girls, and cars. The fact that I’m talking about Reynolds in the same breath as Star Wars is amazing when you consider he was essentially a jock from a small town in Florida who only became interested in theater when a drama teacher at Palm Beach Junior College encouraged Reynolds to audition for a school play.  Within two years he was in a play on Broadway. (A reminder of the power of one person to give others a sense of direction in life.)

While I was in high school I knew that Burt Reynolds was once a star football player in high school, briefly played football at Florida State University, and then found fame and fortune as a Hollywood actor. For a kid growing up in central Florida, he made that path seem possible.

I was a good enough football player in high school to earn All-Conference honors my senior year, and then walk-on to the University of Miami football team. UM is where I first studied film history and made my first 8mm and 16mm films in the film school there. (Emmy winning Game of Thrones director David Nutter was the Jim Kelly of the film program while I was there.) It’s also where I dislocated my shoulder in practice, got operated on, and walked off.  (Having only dressed for one JV football game—I think I had the shortest football career of any Hurricane player ever.)  Then I set off to finish film school in Los Angeles the next year.

Fame or fortune did not follow, but in tracking Reynolds’ career (and others like him) over the years I realized that path has its own pitfalls. But I’ve had the opportunity to work in production my entire creative career, so I’m thankful to Reynolds for giving me hope and planting that dream.

And that’s the part of the unlikely roots of this blog. Mix in Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville album also coming out in 1977, getting my driver’s license that year—then a few months later scoring three touchdowns in a game, seeing the swagger and laugh of Burt Reynolds on the big screen, and you had one optimistic young fellow.

Hold on to sixteen as long as can
Changes come along real soon
Make us women and men
—Jack & Diane/ John Mellencamp

I once produced a video for someone who was fond of saying, “The one thing I’ve learned is every day the world rolls over on top of someone who was just sitting on top of it yesterday.” Burt Reynolds knew what it was like to be at the top and then have the world roll over on top him—then have it back up and roll over him again.  As he reached his 80s, he said his final role was “survivor.”

Fifty years from now, when people think back to the coolest actors of the ’70s I’m sure Burt Reynolds (and specifically his performance in Deliverance) will be on the shortlist. (All the bad choices he made in life and in roles will be forgotten. In time, ideally, artists are judged on only their best work.)

I flipped through his autobiography last night and found a few odd connections that show what a small world it is. Reynolds briefly studied at the Actors Studio in New York. One of the acting teachers I had in L.A. was Tracey Roberts who also studied at the Actor’s Studio so I wonder if she ever worked with Reynolds. Turns out they were both in a movie called Sam Whisky (1969).

One of the writers on Smokey and the Bandit was Charles Shyer, and one of my professors in film school was Bruce Block who’s worked as a producer on a few films with Shyer, including Father of the Bride I & II. (Two great resources by Block are his book The Visual Story, and his DVD commentary on the collector’s edition of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.)

One of the players I played high school football with (Billy Giovanetti) and the starting wide receiver when I was at Miami (Larry Brodsky) both played for the short-lived USFL pro-football team the Tampa Bay Bandits which Reynolds was a part owner.

Reynolds continued working as an actor and director over his lifetime and was involved with his own theater in Jupiter, Florida. His various personal, financial, and physical struggles were well documented in the press, but when I think of Reynolds I remember how he entertained me in movies like Gator, Semi-Tough, White Lighting, and The Longest Yard.

One last little bit of Burt Reynolds trivia is Oscar-winning writer/director Quentin Tarantino was named after Renyold’s Gunsmoke character Quint. Tarantino was born the same year I was so I imagine he also enjoyed Reynolds and his ’70s films when he was a teenager.

If Quentin Tarantino hadn’t become “Quentin Tarantino,” I’m not sure what he’d be doing for a living since video stores faded away—but he’d probably have a movie blog and write a post about Burt Reynolds the day after he died

P.S. I’m grateful for a teacher in school who had us read Irwin Shaw’s classic short story, The Eighty-Yard Run. It made you want to make sure you had a life once the glory days passed you buy.  A few years later I saw the documentary Hoop Dreams about a pair of Chicago basketball phenoms starting in eighth grade and follows their dream until they get to college. It should be required viewing for every high school athlete.

Since 2009, ESPN’s  30 for 30 series of sports-centered documentaries have done a great job of showing how athletics intersects with life outside of the games themselves. Three of them have featured the University of Miami football team—The U ,The U Part 2, and Catholics vs. Convicts. 

And if ESPN wanted to do a fourth documentary on UM football they could. There are so many storylines to explore. There’s former QB Jim Kelly and his struggles with cancer, and there’s former QB Mark Richt’s long journey from Hurricane QB to current head coach. The struggles and triumphs of life. It was sad when I learned of the passing of two great players who were at Miami when I was there who also briefly played in the NFL. Rocky Belk was a prime target for Jim Kelly’s passes and died after an illness at age 50,  and Stanely Shakespeare who died in a boating accident when he was 42. I always thought Stanley Shakespeare was the coolest name of anyone who ever put on a football uniform.  He was also starting wide receiver on the 1983 team that won Miami’s first National Championship. And in the final odd connection in this post, both Stanley Shakespeare and Burt Reynolds died in Jupiter, Florida.

Scott W. Smith

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Screenwriting Quote of the Day #70 (James Dickey)

“I don’t believe the American public will believe, itself, what comes up on that panavision screen next March.”
James Dickey in a letter to a friend
while the movie Deliverance was being shot

Since I mentioned both director John Boorman and Liberal Arts in the last few days that lead me to the writer of Deliverance, James Dickey. It took Dickey ten years to write the novel and he also wrote the screenplay for the 1972 movie that would be his only feature film release. (Though he did also write the TV version of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild.) 

Dickey was born and raised in the Atlanta area and was an athlete in high school and began writing poetry while serving in the Army during World War II flying combat missions in the South Pacific. He didn’t want the girls back home to forget him. After the war he attended Vanderbilt and earned a B.A. in philosophy and minored in astronomy and then went on to earn an M.A. in English.

After school he taught at what is now Rice University before being recalled to active duty in the U.S. Air Force due to the Korean War. He later worked as a copywriter in Atlanta and in New York where he said he was “selling his soul to the devil in the daytime and buying it back at night.”

He published his first book of poetry in 1960 and appointed in 1966 he as the Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress.  In 1977 he was invited to read his poem “The Strength of Fields” at President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. And just to top off an interesting life, he played Sheriff Bullard in Deliverance. 

Though Dickey’s popularity exploded after the movie Deliverance was released he taught and wrote poetry until he died in 1997. His limited role with Hollywood  may have something to do with the stories of the behind the scene drama of the Deliverance location shoot that sometimes matched the drama on-screen of Burt Reynolds and his buddies little boating adventure. In short, Dickey was banned from the set.

Dickey was like many a classic southern writer – greatly talented and greatly flawed. Given to drink and sometimes hard to get along with Dickey was an exaggerator and liar on par with the father in the movie Big Fish. (While Dickey was in many flight missions over the South Pacific during World War II he was never the pilot he claimed to be.)

Dickey’s oldest son, Christopher Dickey, an accomplished writer and speaker (who also has a website and blog) , wrote the book Summer of Deliverance about his father and the film. (Christopher worked on the film including standing in as Ned Beatty’s character in the famous pig scene.)

Christopher also has done us all a favor by setting up the blog, James Dickey: Deep Deliverance, devoted to his father and his writings. And where I found this quote from a You Tube link where James says in a distinctly slow southern draw:

“To anyone who reads my work, I would like to have it deepen him and make him more aware of possibilities… of the mystery of things, and the strangeness of the creation — the universe. Although as much as I write about death, disease, and mutilation, and so I on, I essentially consider myself an affirmative poet. I remember hearing that Beethoven once said, ‘He who truly knows my music can never know unhappiness again.’ I would like to think it had some effect of that sort.” 

And as a side note here’s something interesting to ponder from one of Dickey’s letters, “I heard from John Boorman day before yesterday, and he says Marlon Brando is definitely going to play Lewis (Burt’s character) in the film version of Deliverance. I certainly hope so, for that would bring Nicholson in, and after that the rest would be easy, provided we don’t get Brando’s and Nicholson’s heads bashed in on some of those rocks up in north Georgia, which is quite easy to do.”

Scott W. Smith

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