The director who betrayed Burt Reynolds: “There was no doubt he wanted nobody but me”
Burt Reynolds was always a disarmingly honest interview subject, and countless reporters over the years were treated to off-the-cuff admissions that other A-list stars would never have considered making. For example, in the late 1980s, when his career was on the downturn, he didn’t think twice about telling the Los Angeles Times that his history of bad movies precluded him from consideration by Hollywood’s most acclaimed directors.
Any star admitting that most of their work isn’t good is highly unusual. However, Reynolds wasn’t like most stars. He openly acknowledged that he knew where his bread was buttered at the height of his fame in the ’70s. This was when he primarily starred in a succession of action-comedies like Smokey and the Bandit that made him the biggest box office draw in the business, but were regularly lambasted by critics. To him, it made sense to make films for “the guys who show up in pickup trucks,” as that was the audience that kept him gainfully employed.
Unfortunately for the hirsute star, by the time his commercial dominance cooled off in the late ’80s, he’d become so well established as “Burt Reynolds, action star” that he felt he couldn’t just approach the top directors about their prestigious projects. When asked why he couldn’t pull a Paul Newman, who called up Martin Scorsese to make The Colour of Money as a sequel to The Hustler, Reynolds baulked, “Paul had the great idea of playing The Hustler 25 years later. Can you imagine me phoning a major director and asking if they wanted to direct me as ‘The Bandit’ 25 years later? I don’t have the cachet Paul has.”
Similarly, Reynolds revealed he would have loved to star in 1985’s Witness for director Peter Weir, but he was too nervous to contact Weir like his ex-girlfriend, two-time Oscar winner Sally Field, would often do with directors. “I used to admire how Sally would call a director and ask him to work with her,” Reynolds said. “I should be able to do that, but I can’t.”
Fascinatingly, Reynolds’s inferiority complex regarding the most prominent directors can perhaps be traced back to a humbling encounter with Francis Ford Coppola in 1977. This was when Reynolds was in his prime, and the Godfather director approached him about starring in Tucker, a biopic about the inventor Preston Tucker, who created the Tucker 48 automobile.
Reynolds had dinner with Coppola and his family in San Francisco, and the actor even stayed the night. The next morning, Coppola screened “seven different endings of Apocalypse Now” for Reynolds to get his opinion on which was best. Then, they “watched home movies of Tucker, who looked exactly like my dad.” Reynolds was adamant, “By the time I left, there was no doubt he wanted nobody but me.”
Four days later, though, Reynolds’ ego took a direct hit when Paramount called to tell him it wanted to greenlight Tucker, but not the other six projects Coppola had tied up in the deal, which he intended to produce. Reynolds realised Coppola had used him as a carrot on a stick for the studio because he was “the flavour of the month.” Angry and disappointed, he phoned the director and pointedly asked, “Don’t you want me without using me to push through your other six projects?”
To Reynolds’ dismay, Tucker fell apart after that phone call, which told him all he needed to know about how Coppola truly felt about him as an actor. Even 10 years later, the betrayal stung the Deliverance star, who lamented, “The Tucker incident was very sad.” Indeed, it was surely no coincidence that he became reticent to contact directors on Coppola’s level from then on. Even worse, Tucker: The Man and His Dream finally saw the light of day only a year after this tell-all interview, but it starred Jeff Bridges instead of Reynolds.
