Feature
Smokey and the Bandit Turns 30
Three Decades in a Black Trans Am
You hear it before you see it, the roar of its 400-cubic-inch V8 echoing off the wood-covered corrugated steel walls of the truck's trailer. And then it's revealed. The blackest car you've ever seen. It's just 10 minutes and 53 seconds into Smokey and the Bandit, when Burt Reynolds drives that black Trans Am out of the truck and into the sunlight. A powerslide and the car's first smoky burnout are less than two minutes away.
This month Smokey and the Bandit turns 30. It was on May 19, 1977 that the film premiered at New York City's Radio City Music Hall and injected 6.6 liters into America's vernacular. By July, everybody wanted a Screaming Chicken decal on their hoods.
Smokey and the Bandit is so much a part of popular culture, it's hard to believe it's a 30-year-old movie. Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jackie Gleason and even Jerry Reed all made movies that film critics would consider "better," but it's Smokey for which they'll always be remembered. Because Smokey and the Bandit is the most popular and important car movie of all time, and there's virtually no chance it's going to lose that distinction in the next 30 years.
The Legend
But the movie's success wasn't immediate. In fact, the NYC premiere delivered little business and no acclaim. "This is a movie for audiences capable of slavering all over a Pontiac Trans Am, 18-wheel tractor-trailer rigs, dismembered police cruisers and motorcycles," wrote The New York Times' reviewer Lawrence Van Gelder. After all, does this look like a New York kind of movie? Or a movie for a guy named "Van Gelder?"
"I don't think it made enough to pay the Rockettes," recalls the film's director, Hal Needham. "So they jerked it out. I said to them [Universal Studios], 'I made this movie for the South, Midwest and Northwest, basically. So why don't we take the damn thing somewhere where it was made for?' They took it down South, the Southern 13 states, and it went right through the roof."
It went so far through the roof, in fact, that it has been in sort of a cultural geosynchronous orbit over the country ever since. Smokey and the Bandit was the second highest-grossing motion picture of 1977 behind only the original Star Wars, it shows up on cable TV today more frequently than Ron Popeil infomercials and virtually everyone in America between the ages of 8 and 50 knows that if you're "eastbound and down," then dang it, you're "loaded up and trucking" determined to do "what they say can't be done."
Three generations know this film so well, the only popular misconception left is that Jerry Reed's classic "Eastbound and Down" played over Smokey's opening titles, when it was actually another Jerry Reed song composed for Smokey called "Legend."
A legend is just what this film has become. And like most legends, the story behind it grows hazier with each passing day.
Stealing Coors
The idea for Smokey came during production of 1976's Gator on which Needham was the stunt coordinator and second unit director, Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed were the stars and most of the filming was done in Georgia.
"We were on location, I think, for Gator, and the driver captain had brought some Coors beer out from California. He said to me, 'Hal, I put a couple of cases of Coors beer in your room.' Anyway, I put it in the fridge and it kept disappearing. So I thought to myself, 'What the hell is going on?' I set a trap and I caught the maid stealing my Coors beer. So I asked her why, she told me that her boyfriend liked it and so on and so forth and then I realized you couldn't [back then] take Coors beer east of the Mississippi. It would be bootlegging. So I thought about that for awhile and I said, 'Hell, that's a pretty good premise for an action movie,' and the rest is history. I sat down and wrote it, I gave it to Burt and he said he would do it if I could find someone to give me the money. I did, and we made the movie."
The plot was simple and consisted of a trip from Atlanta, Georgia, to Texarkana, Texas, to pick up 400 cases of Coors and return it to Atlanta in under 28 hours. Why? For the good old American life; for money, for the glory and for the fun. Mostly for the money. $80,000.
While Needham had never directed a movie before, he was one of Hollywood's most experienced stunt coordinators and had been second unit director on numerous films, including Reynolds' White Lightning (1973) and The Longest Yard (1974).
But beyond all that, Hal Needham was also one of Burt Reynolds' best friends. So good a friend, in fact, that he was actually living in Reynolds' house. And during the mid-to-late-'70s, no one was a bigger movie star than Burt Reynolds. If anyone could get Reynolds to star in what is essentially a live action Road Runner cartoon, it was Needham.
It was that confluence of Hal Needham's hard-earned reputation, Burt Reynolds' massive star power and a Georgia maid with a boyfriend thirsty for Coors that made Smokey and the Bandit possible.
Casting the Trans Am
With a script crafted around stunts Needham wanted to execute, and comic situations fine-tuned by veteran TV comedy writers, all that was needed to get the production started was the right supporting cast to surround Reynolds as Bo "Bandit" Darville. Sally Field, then dating Reynolds, was a natural for the runaway bride. Jerry Reed (who Needham had originally considered as the Bandit) came along as Cledus Snow driving the semi full of Coors. All that was needed was the right car for the Bandit to drive, and the right man to play the antagonist, Sheriff Buford T. Justice.
"I just happened to look in a magazine," remembers Needham about the first time he saw the 1977 black-and-gold Special Edition Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, "and I saw it and I said, 'That's a pretty sexy-looking car and I think old Burt will look real good in it. You know, take the T-tops off, and that's how I picked it. I called Pontiac and they gave me some Trans Ams and some Le Mans sedans [which portrayed Sheriff Justice's patrol car] and we went and shot a movie."
Needham says the production got a total of five Trans Ams from Pontiac, but others involved with the production recall the number of Trans Ams at three (in fact, on the "Special Edition" Smokey and the Bandit DVD, Needham himself recalls it as three) and some sources peg the number at seven. But what's undisputed is that all the Trans Ams were destroyed over the course of the production.
"When Burt and Sally jump that bridge," explains Needham, "that was a brand-new car. But when it hit the other side it wasn't even a used car — it was used up. It was totaled. So what we'd do is just salvage pieces off of that, put it on another one and another and another one until they were all jumped except one. Then that one was jumped in the last shot. The last shot we did, the last Trans Am that would roll wouldn't run. So we pushed it with another car. That's how we got the last shot. We wrecked them all."
In fact, there's a bit of controversy to this day about the continuity of the vehicles. Some say Honeycomb wheels appear on the car in at least one scene, while others refute the claim.
While many of the Trans Ams used were fortified with roll cages, Needham claims they were otherwise left stock with the exception of the car that performed the long jump over that missing bridge. Because of the short run to the ramp there, that car was equipped with a Chevrolet-based stock-car racing engine to produce the necessary acceleration.
Casting the Great One
Casting "The Great One" Jackie Gleason was at least as important to the film's success as that iconic Trans Am.
"Originally I thought about Richard Boone for the part," says Needham, "but that didn't work out for some reason or another and Gleason's name came up. So we sent him the script. So he called me up and said, 'Mr. Director, what makes you think that I would want to do this script?' And I said, 'Well, two or three things. One, I'm a fan. I've watched every Honeymooners ever made. Two, there is a very, very funny part there with somebody like you playing. Now, what is written in the script is not etched in stone. I'm going to direct it, so if there are things you don't like, we'll change it.' And he said, 'I'll do it.' And that's the way we got him. And believe me, he changed a lot of his dialogue.
"First of all, me directing Gleason, who is a master, that was ridiculous, you know. So I seldom asked him to change the way he was doing things."
When you have both a black '77 Trans Am and Jackie Gleason in a movie, it's hard not to have a success.
The Slow Release of a Juggernaut
Virtually all of Smokey and the Bandit was shot, says Needham, within 30 miles of Atlanta — the production never left the state of Georgia. What seems to be Texarkana, Texas, in the film is actually the town of Jonesborough with a few strategically placed signs. To create the states of Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, the production would, for the most part, simply repaint the squad cars different colors and change the troopers' uniforms. There are virtually no special effects in Smokey and the Bandit beyond the stunts, and while the studio tried to mess with the soundtrack a bit, what's on the screen is pure country.
After the film's not surprising inability to attract an audience in New York City, Universal slowly and methodically released the film across the country. Unlike current studio practice of opening every film wide on every theater screen possible, back in 1977 Smokey spread almost like a virus; it established itself as a hit in the South, then moved to the Midwest and earned its audience by word of mouth instead of critical praise. In fact, the release was so slow that the movie didn't open in Southern California until July 29.
"A few years from now," wrote Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, "when the freeways are silent except for the gasping of the bicyclers, we will all gaze in misty-eyed nostalgia at an antique and improbable 1977 item called Smokey and the Bandit."
Champlin's review reflected the generally pessimistic view so many of the "educated" elite held at that time about the prospects for the future. The '70s were, after all, a depressing decade defined by fuel shortages, political scandals, ineffectual leadership and economic stagnation. Not that many people had much hope things would change much in the future.
In the face of that, along came Smokey and the Bandit, a relentlessly happy and fun movie that said it was still possible to get into a muscle car and run around the country showing off.
The Lasting Impact of a Silly Movie
Beyond its own two sequels (the first sequel was bad, the second one terrible), Smokey and the Bandit cleared the way for The Dukes of Hazzard to appear on television a year later and then Knight Rider a few years after that. Every car movie and television show, and every car chase in every movie or television show, owes some sort of debt to Smokey. And Smokey's success was impossible to ignore. Not to mention it sold a heck of a lot of Trans Ams.
"More than fancier, big-budget movies that receive front-cover treatment in the news magazines and are widely publicized on TV talk shows," wrote The New York Times' Vincent Canby as 1977 was drawing to a close, "country movies tell us about the state of mind of a large part of our union. They are movies supported — often exclusively — by people who live in the rural South, Southwest and Middle West, people who see their movies in drive-ins and respond, I suspect, to the nonstop action (which is often just movement), to the colorful, heightened vulgarity of the language, and who feel most at home in the country movie's principal setting: the automobile...
"Nobody in Smokey and the Bandit ever gets killed or even permanently damaged in epic fistfights or on the highway, though cars are smashed up continually and no one ever thinks twice about passing another car on a blind curve or on a hill. In Smokey and the Bandit, the top of the automobile Jackie Gleason is driving, with his idiot son at his side, is sheared off but are the two men decapitated? No. Only inconvenienced and made ridiculous."
Canby is right. Smokey and the Bandit is a fantasy barely based in reality. But he's wrong about it being solely a "country movie" in the sense that its appeal was restricted to rural hicks. In fact, by the time its long release wound its way back to New York, it became just as big a hit in that most urban of cities as it had been everywhere else. It seems New York City is part of the country, too.
There's been talk on and off of Universal producing a Smokey and the Bandit remake, but Needham still holds many of the rights and they've never talked to him. So there's little risk of a lousy remake coming along to diminish the enduring, irrefutable appeal of the original.
10-4.
This month Smokey and the Bandit turns 30. It was on May 19, 1977 that the film premiered at New York City's Radio City Music Hall and injected 6.6 liters into America's vernacular. By July, everybody wanted a Screaming Chicken decal on their hoods.
Smokey and the Bandit is so much a part of popular culture, it's hard to believe it's a 30-year-old movie. Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jackie Gleason and even Jerry Reed all made movies that film critics would consider "better," but it's Smokey for which they'll always be remembered. Because Smokey and the Bandit is the most popular and important car movie of all time, and there's virtually no chance it's going to lose that distinction in the next 30 years.
The Legend
But the movie's success wasn't immediate. In fact, the NYC premiere delivered little business and no acclaim. "This is a movie for audiences capable of slavering all over a Pontiac Trans Am, 18-wheel tractor-trailer rigs, dismembered police cruisers and motorcycles," wrote The New York Times' reviewer Lawrence Van Gelder. After all, does this look like a New York kind of movie? Or a movie for a guy named "Van Gelder?"
"I don't think it made enough to pay the Rockettes," recalls the film's director, Hal Needham. "So they jerked it out. I said to them [Universal Studios], 'I made this movie for the South, Midwest and Northwest, basically. So why don't we take the damn thing somewhere where it was made for?' They took it down South, the Southern 13 states, and it went right through the roof."
It went so far through the roof, in fact, that it has been in sort of a cultural geosynchronous orbit over the country ever since. Smokey and the Bandit was the second highest-grossing motion picture of 1977 behind only the original Star Wars, it shows up on cable TV today more frequently than Ron Popeil infomercials and virtually everyone in America between the ages of 8 and 50 knows that if you're "eastbound and down," then dang it, you're "loaded up and trucking" determined to do "what they say can't be done."
Three generations know this film so well, the only popular misconception left is that Jerry Reed's classic "Eastbound and Down" played over Smokey's opening titles, when it was actually another Jerry Reed song composed for Smokey called "Legend."
A legend is just what this film has become. And like most legends, the story behind it grows hazier with each passing day.
Stealing Coors
The idea for Smokey came during production of 1976's Gator on which Needham was the stunt coordinator and second unit director, Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed were the stars and most of the filming was done in Georgia.
"We were on location, I think, for Gator, and the driver captain had brought some Coors beer out from California. He said to me, 'Hal, I put a couple of cases of Coors beer in your room.' Anyway, I put it in the fridge and it kept disappearing. So I thought to myself, 'What the hell is going on?' I set a trap and I caught the maid stealing my Coors beer. So I asked her why, she told me that her boyfriend liked it and so on and so forth and then I realized you couldn't [back then] take Coors beer east of the Mississippi. It would be bootlegging. So I thought about that for awhile and I said, 'Hell, that's a pretty good premise for an action movie,' and the rest is history. I sat down and wrote it, I gave it to Burt and he said he would do it if I could find someone to give me the money. I did, and we made the movie."
The plot was simple and consisted of a trip from Atlanta, Georgia, to Texarkana, Texas, to pick up 400 cases of Coors and return it to Atlanta in under 28 hours. Why? For the good old American life; for money, for the glory and for the fun. Mostly for the money. $80,000.
While Needham had never directed a movie before, he was one of Hollywood's most experienced stunt coordinators and had been second unit director on numerous films, including Reynolds' White Lightning (1973) and The Longest Yard (1974).
But beyond all that, Hal Needham was also one of Burt Reynolds' best friends. So good a friend, in fact, that he was actually living in Reynolds' house. And during the mid-to-late-'70s, no one was a bigger movie star than Burt Reynolds. If anyone could get Reynolds to star in what is essentially a live action Road Runner cartoon, it was Needham.
It was that confluence of Hal Needham's hard-earned reputation, Burt Reynolds' massive star power and a Georgia maid with a boyfriend thirsty for Coors that made Smokey and the Bandit possible.
Casting the Trans Am
With a script crafted around stunts Needham wanted to execute, and comic situations fine-tuned by veteran TV comedy writers, all that was needed to get the production started was the right supporting cast to surround Reynolds as Bo "Bandit" Darville. Sally Field, then dating Reynolds, was a natural for the runaway bride. Jerry Reed (who Needham had originally considered as the Bandit) came along as Cledus Snow driving the semi full of Coors. All that was needed was the right car for the Bandit to drive, and the right man to play the antagonist, Sheriff Buford T. Justice.
"I just happened to look in a magazine," remembers Needham about the first time he saw the 1977 black-and-gold Special Edition Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, "and I saw it and I said, 'That's a pretty sexy-looking car and I think old Burt will look real good in it. You know, take the T-tops off, and that's how I picked it. I called Pontiac and they gave me some Trans Ams and some Le Mans sedans [which portrayed Sheriff Justice's patrol car] and we went and shot a movie."
Needham says the production got a total of five Trans Ams from Pontiac, but others involved with the production recall the number of Trans Ams at three (in fact, on the "Special Edition" Smokey and the Bandit DVD, Needham himself recalls it as three) and some sources peg the number at seven. But what's undisputed is that all the Trans Ams were destroyed over the course of the production.
"When Burt and Sally jump that bridge," explains Needham, "that was a brand-new car. But when it hit the other side it wasn't even a used car — it was used up. It was totaled. So what we'd do is just salvage pieces off of that, put it on another one and another and another one until they were all jumped except one. Then that one was jumped in the last shot. The last shot we did, the last Trans Am that would roll wouldn't run. So we pushed it with another car. That's how we got the last shot. We wrecked them all."
In fact, there's a bit of controversy to this day about the continuity of the vehicles. Some say Honeycomb wheels appear on the car in at least one scene, while others refute the claim.
While many of the Trans Ams used were fortified with roll cages, Needham claims they were otherwise left stock with the exception of the car that performed the long jump over that missing bridge. Because of the short run to the ramp there, that car was equipped with a Chevrolet-based stock-car racing engine to produce the necessary acceleration.
Casting the Great One
Casting "The Great One" Jackie Gleason was at least as important to the film's success as that iconic Trans Am.
"Originally I thought about Richard Boone for the part," says Needham, "but that didn't work out for some reason or another and Gleason's name came up. So we sent him the script. So he called me up and said, 'Mr. Director, what makes you think that I would want to do this script?' And I said, 'Well, two or three things. One, I'm a fan. I've watched every Honeymooners ever made. Two, there is a very, very funny part there with somebody like you playing. Now, what is written in the script is not etched in stone. I'm going to direct it, so if there are things you don't like, we'll change it.' And he said, 'I'll do it.' And that's the way we got him. And believe me, he changed a lot of his dialogue.
"First of all, me directing Gleason, who is a master, that was ridiculous, you know. So I seldom asked him to change the way he was doing things."
When you have both a black '77 Trans Am and Jackie Gleason in a movie, it's hard not to have a success.
The Slow Release of a Juggernaut
Virtually all of Smokey and the Bandit was shot, says Needham, within 30 miles of Atlanta — the production never left the state of Georgia. What seems to be Texarkana, Texas, in the film is actually the town of Jonesborough with a few strategically placed signs. To create the states of Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, the production would, for the most part, simply repaint the squad cars different colors and change the troopers' uniforms. There are virtually no special effects in Smokey and the Bandit beyond the stunts, and while the studio tried to mess with the soundtrack a bit, what's on the screen is pure country.
After the film's not surprising inability to attract an audience in New York City, Universal slowly and methodically released the film across the country. Unlike current studio practice of opening every film wide on every theater screen possible, back in 1977 Smokey spread almost like a virus; it established itself as a hit in the South, then moved to the Midwest and earned its audience by word of mouth instead of critical praise. In fact, the release was so slow that the movie didn't open in Southern California until July 29.
"A few years from now," wrote Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, "when the freeways are silent except for the gasping of the bicyclers, we will all gaze in misty-eyed nostalgia at an antique and improbable 1977 item called Smokey and the Bandit."
Champlin's review reflected the generally pessimistic view so many of the "educated" elite held at that time about the prospects for the future. The '70s were, after all, a depressing decade defined by fuel shortages, political scandals, ineffectual leadership and economic stagnation. Not that many people had much hope things would change much in the future.
In the face of that, along came Smokey and the Bandit, a relentlessly happy and fun movie that said it was still possible to get into a muscle car and run around the country showing off.
The Lasting Impact of a Silly Movie
Beyond its own two sequels (the first sequel was bad, the second one terrible), Smokey and the Bandit cleared the way for The Dukes of Hazzard to appear on television a year later and then Knight Rider a few years after that. Every car movie and television show, and every car chase in every movie or television show, owes some sort of debt to Smokey. And Smokey's success was impossible to ignore. Not to mention it sold a heck of a lot of Trans Ams.
"More than fancier, big-budget movies that receive front-cover treatment in the news magazines and are widely publicized on TV talk shows," wrote The New York Times' Vincent Canby as 1977 was drawing to a close, "country movies tell us about the state of mind of a large part of our union. They are movies supported — often exclusively — by people who live in the rural South, Southwest and Middle West, people who see their movies in drive-ins and respond, I suspect, to the nonstop action (which is often just movement), to the colorful, heightened vulgarity of the language, and who feel most at home in the country movie's principal setting: the automobile...
"Nobody in Smokey and the Bandit ever gets killed or even permanently damaged in epic fistfights or on the highway, though cars are smashed up continually and no one ever thinks twice about passing another car on a blind curve or on a hill. In Smokey and the Bandit, the top of the automobile Jackie Gleason is driving, with his idiot son at his side, is sheared off but are the two men decapitated? No. Only inconvenienced and made ridiculous."
Canby is right. Smokey and the Bandit is a fantasy barely based in reality. But he's wrong about it being solely a "country movie" in the sense that its appeal was restricted to rural hicks. In fact, by the time its long release wound its way back to New York, it became just as big a hit in that most urban of cities as it had been everywhere else. It seems New York City is part of the country, too.
There's been talk on and off of Universal producing a Smokey and the Bandit remake, but Needham still holds many of the rights and they've never talked to him. So there's little risk of a lousy remake coming along to diminish the enduring, irrefutable appeal of the original.
10-4.
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