The director who called Burt Reynolds “a bit of a shit”: “He looked like he was going to hit me”
The biggest stars are often the most difficult to deal with because they’ve become so accustomed to getting their own way, but Burt Reynolds continued to be a thorn in the side of many filmmakers even after his mainstream career fell off a cliff.
For a while, there wasn’t a single actor in the industry more bankable. Reynolds spent five consecutive years as Hollywood’s top-drawing name, but once he slipped from the mountaintop, he found it impossible to regain his footing. And to think, he could have been even bigger.
Yes, he was one of his era’s defining leading men, but if he’d accepted even one of the countless iconic, acclaimed, or Academy Award-winning roles that he made a habit of turning down, he could have secured the A-list longevity and box office staying power that remained forever out of reach.
It didn’t help his case that he was known for being difficult on occasion, whether he was punching directors in the face and paying $500,000 out of his own pocket for doing so, or trying to kick Thomas Jane in the nuts on the set of Boogie Nights after falling victim to what was supposed to be a harmless prank.
Peter Bogdanovich experienced Reynolds’ prickly side when they worked together twice in quick succession on 1975’s At Long Last Love and the following year’s Nickelodeon. The actor gave solid performances in both and maintained that the former wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be, but he didn’t always see eye-to-eye with the filmmaker who was calling the shots.
“I liked Burt, but he was a bit of a shit,” Bogdanovich told Vulture. “He blew with the wind. He very much followed the box office. He was very affected by how people were talking about his films. He wasn’t a great friend, but he did two of his best pictures with me, and he worked hard. They were two of his best performances, but they weren’t successful, so he turned against them.”
When Reynolds wasn’t capturing a scene to the director’s satisfaction, he gently needled him into doing it differently by saying, “That was a bit Burt Reynolds, wasn’t it?” In response, he got nothing but a glare, with Bogdanovich recalling that “he looked like he was going to hit me, but he did it differently in the end.”
The two-time Academy Award nominee wasn’t best pleased with how he was depicted in the Smokey and the Bandit frontman’s autobiography, either, with Reynolds’ overriding memory being that “he just talked and talked and talked,” a penchant for pontification that “drove me crazy.”
It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever said about one of his former collaborators, and from Bogdanovich’s perspective, the lack of warmth between them was an entirely mutual feeling.
