Helluva Career ,Burt -- RIP
SPOILERS for "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"
I recently watched the recent straight-to-video indie "The Last Movie Star," starring a very frail looking Burt Reynolds -- matched in a few sobering clips, with his macho younger self in Deliverance and Smokey and the Bandit.
Well, now the film ends up being a rather touching swan song. He has passed, from a heart attack, at age 82.
And there's some dark irony: Reynolds had been announced, long ago, to play abandoned ranch manager George Spahnn, host of the Manson Family, in Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
Reports are that Burt never got to shoot his scenes. Only two days would have been required. Evidently, QT has now moved on to shooting "the Manson scenes," with Charlie and some of his ladies , and Tex Watson(the male killer in the family). Pretty much all the Manson victims have been cast, too -- a cast list with character names was announced this week. I didn't see character names for Rosemary and Leo DiBianca, but I did see them for Abigail Folger and Voytek...ah, can't remember his last name now. Also an actor has been cast as Roman Polanski.
Who will play George Spahnn now? Its a controversial role in a controversial movie . Clint? Warren Beatty?(who turned down Bill in Kill Bill.) How about grizzled QT veterans Don Stroud and Lee Horsley, from 60s through 80's TV? (Starred in Django and Hateful Eight, respectively.)
Oh, well -- it was Burt's role to start with.
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The Burt Reynolds career was pretty amazing, really. Its like he toyed with being a movie star in the late sixties, gave up, became a TV cop("Dan August") in 1970, but in 1972 suddenly EXPLODED as a movie star/public figure. We got the queasy prestige classic "Deliverance," a lower-budget private eye movie called "Shamus," a "MASH-like" cop movie called "Fuzz" -- and Burt naked(almost) on a bearskin rug in Cosmo. One year, THREE movies, one fold-out. Burt was launched.
As big a star as Burt was in the 70's, people forget how many small-scale fizzles he made: WW and the Dixie Dancekings(small, good) Lucky Lady(big, not so good), Hustle(cop loves hooker tale, with Catherine Denueve.) And two flops for Peter Bogdanovich: At Long Last Love(Cybill Shepard dances!) and Nickelodeon(which I liked.) Sheesh, Burt made all these flops and yet turned down villain Arthur Adamson in Hitchcock's Family Plot!
But Burt scored big, too: Deliverance, White Lightning, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing -- and his two blockbusters: The Longest Yard(a favorite of Hitchcock's to watch; he cast Family Plot from it) and Smokey and the Bandit.
The 80s began a slow descent, but Burt ruled in the 70's. As he said on a talk show in the 00's: "If any of you knew me in 1978...I'm sorry." Ego problems and bad role choices helped bring him down. (I also liked his line about his ASCENT: "I became a star in spite of my movies, not because of them.)
The 1978 movie Hooper -- about movie stuntmen -- has its fans(Robert Klein plays a fatuous director based on Peter Bogdanovich). This was directed by Burt's stuntman pal Hal Needham; it is rumored that Leo and Brad in the jQT movie are PLAYING Burt and Hal, under other names.
And I rather like Semi-Tough(1977) where Burt channels Cary Grant for a screwball romantic triangle with Jill Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson(as Ralph Bellamy!) It was based on an NFL book, but another script about "Werner Ehrhard and EST" type self help trends, was shoehorned in. We had to wait two more years for "North Dallas Forty" for a real NFL movie. Still, Burt was a macho charmer in this.
It took til 1997 for Burt to get the Oscar nomination he desperately wanted, but it was for the wrong type of role in his opinion -- a 70s/80s porn director, in Boogie Nights. He lost to ...Robin Williams(Good Will Hunting.)
And Burt -- struggling to pay bills -- did TV sitcoms(Evening Shade) and straight-to-video to survive.
Still...they can't take 1978 away from him. RIP