“He was an arrogant prick”: when Burt Reynolds named and shamed Hollywood’s “biggest asshole”
Honesty is a quality that’s often in short supply in Hollywood, but it was never one Burt Reynolds was lacking. The actor was one of the industry’s most famously outspoken personalities, which did as much harm to his career as it did good.
The moustachioed menace never shied away from criticising his own films or the people he made them with. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with calling a bad movie a bad movie or calling an arsehole an arsehole, Reynolds’ no-nonsense approach wasn’t a positive when the roles started drying up.
He was the undisputed king of the American box office from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, which was as good as it got. Like many performers who don’t trade in bullshit, Reynolds made a few enemies along the way, and his vocal disdain for so many of his credits may have played a part in making directors hesitant to hire him in case he did the exact same thing to them, too.
The Smokey and the Bandit figurehead feuded with Marlon Brando, found an arch-nemesis in Kathleen Turner, and hated every second of collaborating with Paul Thomas Anderson, none of whom went down in the history books as the person he detested most in Tinseltown.
Instead, that honour went to a journeyman filmmaker who followed up their ill-fated partnership with Reynolds by winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ with their very next picture. “John G Avildsen was a polarising director,” the actor wrote in his memoir, But Enough About Me. “No, that’s too wishy-washy.”
What was his real opinion, then? “He was an arrogant prick and the biggest asshole I ever had the misfortune to work with,” was the unfiltered addendum. As was often the case, Reynolds wasn’t a fan of the movie they made together, 1975’s WW and the Dixie Dancekings, and he must have been fuming when Avildsen took the stage at the Oscars the following year to claim his prize for Rocky.
The southern-fried comedy starred Reynolds in his usual archetype of a roguish hero who breaks the law with a heart of gold. While on the run from the authorities, he teams up with the titular band, helping the group take their career to the next level while remaining one step ahead of his pursuers, which ensured it fared well at the box office in spite of its formulaic nature.
The leading man didn’t care for the film and branded Avildsen as his least favourite person in Hollywood, but WW and the Dixie Dancekings bizarrely wound up defining America’s independent scene in the 1990s. Tangentially, anyway, after Quentin Tarantino shared that he read the novelisation numerous times and became “so offended” when he finally got around to seeing the feature that it inspired him to start writing screenplays, which is comfortably one of cinema’s most unexpected domino effects.
