The 2008 movie ruined by Burt Reynolds’ unprofessionalism: “We knew there was trouble”
Hiring late-career Burt Reynolds for any movie was always a risk, with the veteran becoming increasingly prone to phoning it in and sleepwalking through most of the last two decades of his professional life.
He was never the greatest or most talented actor to begin with, but since he was still a relatively well-known name, albeit one who’d peaked by the early 1980s, there was still some residual value attached to having him aboard a picture, especially a smaller-scale one that was outside of his comfort zone.
Most of his post-Boogie Nights credits comprised voice-only roles, gratuitous cameos, or forgettable genre flicks, the majority of which went straight-to-video, so screenwriter Nick Newman was understandably thrilled when Reynolds agreed to fly across the pond for an independent British comedy.
2008’s A Bunch of Amateurs revolved around the Smokey and the Bandit star’s washed-up Hollywood actor travelling to England under the impression that he’ll be performing King Lear at the famous Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, only to discover when he gets there that he’s actually doing it for the local theatre repertory of Suffolk’s Stratford St John.
As Newman recalled, Reynolds hadn’t bothered to learn his lines, and when he arrived on set and saw ‘idiot boards’ plastered everywhere, the industry term for the Marlon Brando-inspired practice of actors having their lines written on cue cards they could read their lines from, “We knew there was trouble.”
“That morning, he had demanded that the stunt coordinator be fired,” the scribe recalled, and that was on his first day. “But the most pressing issue for us as writers was that our leading man couldn’t remember his lines. This did not bode well for the scenes in which he had to perform long speeches from King Lear.”
Despite being surrounded by Derek Jacobi, Imelda Staunton, Samantha Bond, and other tried, trusted, and talented British thespians, Reynolds ended up dragging the movie down to his level, not the other way around. In fact, things got so bad that when the idiot boards stopped working, he started being fed his lines through an earpiece instead.
In one scene, set inside a phone box, his lines were fed through the receiver. When the voice on the other end of the line told him to put the phone down, Newman remembered how “Burt solemnly said to the camera, ‘Put the phone down, Burt,'” which would be funny, if it wasn’t happening on the film you’d written.
As shooting progressed, the title became increasingly ironic, with Newman acknowledging that “life began to imitate art at an alarming pace.” In the end, A Bunch of Amateurs failed to make a surprise, and to the co-writer’s absolute lack of surprise, most of the scathing reviews were focused on Reynolds’ lazy, uninspired, and robotic performance.
