Burt Reynolds on The Bandit

The Bandit, a very watchable documentary about making movies, highlights the relationship between Burt Reynolds (one of the biggest stars of the 1970s and beyond) and Hal Needham (1931-2013), Reynolds’ stuntman and friend who went on to become an accomplished director in his own right.

When The Bandit had its world premiere at SXSW last March, Reynolds walked onto the stage of The Paramount Theatre assisted by a cane. Reynolds at 80 years of age may have slowed down a bit, but he still has his mojo working. During the Q&A a woman in the audience walked up to the stage and tossed her bra at Reynolds.

The Bandit chronicles how Needham and Reynolds mixed friendship and business and made a film that nobody wanted them to make and how that film turned into a cult phenomenon. Smokey and the Bandit was released the same week as Star Wars, and both films were the top one and two grossing films of 1977. To put things in perspective, Star Wars grossed $307 million (adjusted for current inflation: over $1.2 billion) and Smokey and the Bandit grossed $126,737,428 (adjusted for current inflation: over $515 million).

“It was an enormous hit,” Reynolds tells Free Press Houston at a post-screening interview in the spacious backyard of the Four Seasons Austin. Just behind the hedge in front of which Reynolds and The Bandit director Jesse Moss sit stretches out the NBC Rio Olympics promo tent complete with loud noises that almost drown out Reynolds’ quiet voice. “Star Wars was in theaters a long time, but we played forever.”

Moss points out that “Star Wars opened in urban markets and Smokey opened in the South.” The films had a sort of reverse trajectories as to how they made their money.

One scene in The Bandit shows Reynolds doing his own stunt in the mystery thriller Shamus. Reynolds jumps from a bridge to a tree, whereupon the branch breaks and Reynolds plummets to the ground. It was a stunt that broke his arm. “I busted a few things,” Reynolds says.

Reynolds also parleyed his status as a leading man into a series of directorial efforts that resulted in the hilarious black comedy The End (1978), as well as straight ahead actioners like Gator (1976) and Sharkey’s Machine (1981).

The End sported an excellent cast including Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Sally Field, Joanne Woodward, Carl Reiner and many others. After an abortive suicide attempt, Reynolds finds himself in an asylum where DeLuise chews scenery. “There’s no better comic actor than Dom,” he says. “Yes, there was a lot of improvisation going on. But it was also a film that was gazing into darkness. The comments we got at the original preview were amazing.”

Reynolds worked with some of the top directors during his peak years including Peter Bogdanovich and Robert Aldrich. Speaking about Aldrich Reynolds notes: “He was tough on actors, but in the end he made me stretch my abilities.”

Another film that holds up well under time is Sharkey’s Machine, not only for its plot points purloined from the classic film noir Laura (1944), but for a spectacular stunt where famed stuntman Dar Robinson dives out of a window in the top floors of the Atlanta Hyatt Regency Hotel. At a drop of over 220 feet, the stunt remains the highest free-fall feat ever recorded for a feature film. “He did that without a net,” Reynolds says. “I wanted to rehearse for a bit but Dar was insistent that he was ready to do it. And he did the stunt and it was perfect.”

Moss talks about how Reynolds’ mother kept meticulous scrapbooks of her son’s career and how that became his main avenue of discovery. “It starts in the 1950s and continues until the 1970s,” says Moss. “It described your career in such a way that I knew it was special, and that it was the heart of the film.”

The Bandit focuses on Smokey and the Bandit as the primary subject, yet at the same time serves as a guideline for various now-forgotten cultural events, ranging from Reynolds’ nude centerfold in a 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan to early television shows that jumpstarted Reynolds’ career like Riverboat and Gunsmoke.

There’s also a look at camaraderie and the respect Reynolds and Needham had for each other. Needham was so well known as a daredevil stuntman that he was hired by the car industry to serve as a live test dummy for the first air bag trials. The footage of this experiment, shot in slow motion, will leave you gasping.

“Growing up in the ‘70s I knew that a lot of Burt’s films – Deliverance, The Longest Yard, Smokey – were popular, but I hadn’t seen White Lightning (1973), or any of his television shows,” Moss says. “There was a lot of risk these two guy invested in making movies. I thought that relationship, their friendship, should be the spine of the film.”

“I’ve worked with many overnight sensations, and they were just that,” notes Reynolds. “Needham would meticulously work out all of the angles and shots needed for huge shots involving nearly one hundred vehicles [for Smokey and the Bandit 2] by using toy cars placed on a schematic.

“What you do is get little toys. We’re all in a circle, put them down here. And Hal says ‘This is you, and these are the trucks.’ We mapped out on the ground what we were going to do, the route each vehicle would take. It was ambitious.”

“That’s what I loved about making this movie, it was celebrating the era of analog stunts,” adds Moss.

In the mid-1970s, Reynolds had a short-lived syndicated late night interview show on NBC featuring guests like Orson Welles and Michael Caine. Nobody has seen this footage since it aired, and the episodes of that show demand an instant DVD release. “In most parts of the country it aired after 1 am.” says Reynolds.

The Bandit begins with a video clip of the opening of Reynolds’ talk show. He enters down a spiral staircase, walks across a stage and nonchalantly dives through a window. Other parts of The Bandit observe Reynolds’ involvement in a dinner theater in Florida where he teaches acting classes.

Reynolds continued to work with promising directors during the late-80s and 1990s like Bill Forsythe with Breaking In (1989) and Paul Thomas Anderson in Boogie Nights (1997).

“You have to be lucky,” Reynolds replies. “I was lucky because it turned out those directors were as good as I thought they were.”

After a series of eventful film festival  screenings The Bandit is currently unreeling on the Country Music Television cable channel throughout August.

by Michael Bergeron