To honor the memory of the recently deceased Burt Reynolds, Smokey and the Bandit is headed back to the big screen.
According to Variety, the 1977 hit flick will show in 240 AMC theatres for nine days from September 12 to 20.
As a child of the '70s with a real love for American trucker culture, I'll be at one of those shows.
R.I.P. Burt Reynolds. Recently, I had the pleasure of watching his film The Last Movie Star, directed by Adam Rifkin. In this film, Reynolds portrays an aging movie star who is the guest of honor at a film festival where his successes, failures and personal demons are ever present and a reminder of the way he has lived his life. Read the rest
Burt Reynolds, the onetime jock from Florida who became an American screen icon, has died. Read the rest
This is from a 1994 episode of The Tonight Show host by Jay Leno. This clip begins after Leno interviewed Burt Reynolds, who is sitting to the left of an empty chair reserved for the next guest, Marc Summers (host of Nickelodeon's game show Double Dare). Before Summers comes out, Leno shows a scene from Double Dare where Summers gets repeatedly hit by pies from some kind of pie throwing machine.
Leno asks him about it, and Summers says that it is weird for him to be the host of a messy show because he is a "neatness freak." (Summers has OCD) For some reason, that strikes a nerve with Reynolds, who starts making sourfaced verbal jabs. Summers makes a crack about still being married (Reynolds had just gone through a messy divorce with Loni Anderson) and Reynolds grabs a mug of water and tosses it on Summers. It goes downhill from there. Leno does nothing to stop it because he knows good TV when he sees it.
If you want to know the backstory (and it's fascinating to hear Summers describe it), here's the chapter about the incident from Summers' book, Everything In its Place: My Trials and Triumphs with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
