Burt's Quote About His Movie Career

In his Playboy interview (the late 70s?), Burt Reynolds made an interesting statement/quote:

"I became a star in spite of my movies, not because of them."

Funny and a bit true. Burt had been a TV guy with series through the sixties and early seventies(Gunsmoke, Hawk, Dan August) , rather stumbled into the disturbing and historic greatness of "Deliverance"(1972) and then did two things rather simultaneously:

He became a COMEDY star on TV talk shows, from Johnny to Merv to Dinah Short(his older love of the time), He showed this great capacity for self-deprecating one-liners even as he was Muy Mas Macho. (And hairy and close to naked in his Cosmo centerfold.)

His MOVIES (post Deliverance) were pretty "Studio but B": Shamus and Fuzz and White Lighting and The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing and WW and the Dixie Dance Kings. A star "despite his movies."

The Longest Yard in 1974 was a big fall hit and mixed his macho and his comedy chops in perfect, equal measure.

But he still rather "stumbled on" in the 70's. Gator, At Long Last Love, Nickelodeon, Hustle. Not terribly major films.

And then he got the megahit "Smokey and the Bandit," within which the scenes of his career demise were planted:

Too many no-calorie, self-involved good ol' boy comedies: Hooper, Smokey and the Bandit II, the lousy Cannonball Run, the worse Cannonball II -- Stroker Ace.

Burt TRIED to do serious stuff around those films -- Semi-Touch was very good(Burt seriously thought he deserved an Oscar nom for his Cary Grant act); New York comedies Starting Over and Paternity. Even a much-needed (but not very good) cop action movie called Sharkey's Machine. And Rough Cut(more Cary Grant, for Dirty Harry director Don Siegel.)

Too many "in spite of his movies" movies led to career decline for Burt in the 89s and then tragedy hit: a REAL chair smashed into his face in a fight scene in the movie City Heat(with Burt finally paired with fellow macho star Clint Eastwood, in not much of a movie.) The broken jaw contributed to heavy weight loss and a frail look which, coupled with increasingly bad wigs and a sallow look, killed off Burt's macho stardom somewhere around 1985.

And yet: maybe he didn't make a lot of great movies, but Burt Reynolds maintained a stardom(Number One for several years) that kept him historic and a hot commodity pretty much up to the end -- when he was in character parts and "living legends" stuff.