Burt Reynolds immediately changed his mind about making ‘Gator’: “I’ve had some real turkeys”
In Hollywood history, a strong argument can be made that no actor has ever been as scathingly honest about their own filmography as Burt Reynolds.
Over the years, plenty of actors have admitted to hating one or two of their films. For example, George Clooney hated Batman & Robin, Sandra Bullock couldn’t stand Speed 2: Cruise Control, and Ryan Reynolds has made a second career out of taking potshots at Green Lantern. However, none of these stars has thrown their own movies under the bus quite as wholeheartedly as Reynolds, a man who once hilariously admitted, “I think I’m the only movie star who’s a movie star in spite of his pictures, not because of them; I’ve had some real turkeys.”
Reynolds spent much of the 1970s and early ‘80s making box office-conquering action comedies that cast him as funny, charming men of action who loved driving their muscle cars at 100 miles per hour through the dusty trails of the American South. This formula was applied to countless movies, most famously Smokey and the Bandit, and it made Reynolds literally the most bankable star in Hollywood for a period. However, the man was no dummy, and he recognised that the vast majority of these flicks were as far from good cinema as he could get.
Still, while the action crowd kept paying for Reynolds’ mansion and car collection, he catered to them by making more of those kinds of movies, often at the expense of more prestigious roles he would later regret turning down. For instance, he said no to playing Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Han Solo in Star Wars. It’s no wonder the hirsute bonehead once admitted, “I’m an idiot.”
Reynolds has also admitted that he had a habit of pursuing bad projects to the bitter end, just because he believed he was capable of turning them around. For example, in the nine years following 1971’s Deliverance – which Reynolds believed to be his only good movie – he made 22 films, most of which were dismissed by critics as typical slapdash “Burt Reynolds pictures.”
One of the worst offenders in this mould was the sequel to 1973’s White Lightning, which starred Reynolds as Bobby ‘Gator’ McKlusky, an ex-con agreeing to work with the authorities to bring a corrupt country sheriff to justice. That movie was a modest hit, and when the producers came to Reynolds with a script for a follow-up, not-so-inventively titled Gator, he had little interest in reprising the role because he knew the project wasn’t good. Then they appealed to his vanity, and he instantly did a complete 180.
“They sent me the script for a picture called Gator, and I said, ‘No, it’s a terrible script,’” Reynolds told The New York Times in 1978. “Then, they asked me: Do you want to direct? And I said, ‘It’s a wonderful script.’”
Obviously, Reynolds tells a great anecdote, and it’s amusing to imagine him changing his mind so quickly about Gator just because the producers afford him more creative control. However, they knew that, in this period, Reynolds’ desire to direct had been growing with every passing year, so it was an effective lever for them to pull.
“I’ve felt in the past eight or nine years that I’ve had tools, gifts that as an actor I had been unable to use,” Reynolds admitted, referring to his ability to envision movies as a whole, outside his usual capacity as an actor. “They’re gifts for a director.”
Once this offer had been made, Reynolds was practically powerless to turn down Gator, not least because that pesky belief that he could always improve questionable material also kicked in. Ultimately, the star loved helming his first film and revealed, “I enjoyed it more than anything I’ve ever done in this business. And I happen to think it’s what I do best.”
Unfortunately for him, though, he probably should have stuck by his initial instinct that Gator was a mistake, because with all the talent and belief in the world, he still couldn’t turn that dismal script into a worthwhile movie.
