The movie Burt Reynolds desperately wished he could do over: “Better than it was given credit for”
In most cases, an actor would be thrilled that one of their movies recouped its budget seven times over at the box office. Most actors aren’t Burt Reynolds, though, who openly regretted the one decision that turned a potentially great film into one he thought was underrated at best.
It’s admittedly unusual for someone like Reynolds, who, by his own admission, made more terrible pictures than the average A-lister, to turn his nose up at a profitable enterprise, especially when those became increasingly thinner on the ground once his heyday ended in the early 1980s.
And yet, anyone who respects their work always thinks it can be improved somehow. Literary adaptations can often be the most straightforward things: the source material is there, and all it really needs is someone to take a good book and write a faithful script that turns it into a good movie.
That’s not what happened to Reynolds, even though there wasn’t much he could do about it. After all, he was an actor-for-hire, regardless of his bankability and fame, so when he agreed to play Billy Clyde Puckett in director Michael Ritchie’s sports comedy Semi-Tough, he wasn’t sitting in on script meetings.
Dan Jenkins’ novel provided the blueprint for the actor and co-star Kris Kristofferson to ham it up as a pair of professional American football players who get caught up in a love triangle and a cultish self-help group, but he could never shake the feeling that, despite how lucrative it was, the creative team missed the boat.
“I’d say of all those films, if you’re asking me which one I thought should have been more successful than it was,” he told Jim Whaley. “I think Semi-Tough should have been more successful, but not because it was a really good picture. Just because we didn’t make the book, I wish we’d shot the book.”
Reynolds was convinced that “if we shot the book, I think it would have been a terrific movie.”
He didn’t think it was a steaming pile of shite, but nor did he believe it maximised its potential. It’s somewhat oxymoronic for the moustacheioed lothario to say “it was a better movie than it was ever given credit for” while simultaneously wishing they’d stuck to the source material, but he was a man of contradictions.
Few cinematic superstars have ever openly denigrated their filmography to the same extent as Reynolds, who gave off the impression that he had at least one major issue with most of his work. Apart from Deliverance, of course, with John Boorman’s classic thriller standing out as the actor’s self-perceived high point, regardless of how many smash hit action comedies he headlined in the years after.
Semi-Tough certainly isn’t one of his best, but neither is it anything close to his worst, because Reynolds was the first to admit he made some truly atrocious films. Still, if he were given a second chance, the first thing he would do is ensure that the page-to-screen translation hewed closer to its origins.
