The one remake that Burt Reynolds absolutely hated: “I didn’t want to see it”
The world of Burt Reynolds is a confusing place to be. Swaggering through our cinematic lives with the air of cigar smoke and whiskey perfuming every single step, Reynolds’ character as one of Hollywood’s suavest jerks is one that he likely holds high in his records of achievements.
Whether it is falling out with Paul Thomas Anderson on Boogie Nights so badly that he refused to work with him ever again or just generally disapproving of the change in Hollywood’s output, Reynolds has grown older rather more disgracefully than many would have imagined when he broke into the collective consciousness with a plethora of roles in the 1960s and ’70s.
Almost every one of those roles involved Reynolds providing the rugged charm that he seemed to ooze with every moment on screen. Unlike his sometime doppelgänger and full-time nemesis, Marlon Brando, Reynolds rarely ventured into the more artistic side of filmmaking and, instead, preferred to sit in the middle of the road cashing cheques and making movies that largely placated rather than piqued the intellects of audiences.
That’s not to say he made awful movies. Smokey and The Bandit series may be trivial but it certianly has its ardent admirers. Deliverance from 1972 is also one of the actor’s better accomplishments. The actor himself has even admitted that despite having scores of movies to his name, he only truly considers five worth watching and that 1974’s The Longest Yard is his favourite.
Reynolds plays a disgraced quarterback locked up in prison with nowhere to exude his talents. Soon enough, though, as he tries to find his place in the prison hierarchy, his talents with the pig skin come in handy as a brutal game against the prison guards is set up by the prisoners. It’s hard to avoid the cheerful camaraderie mixed with spit and sawdust grit, and it hits you like a jailed hooligan who wants to strip your ball. The after-effects are a dizzying sense of comfort and joy that makes The Longest Yard a decidedly enjoyable movie.
So much so that the picture has been reproduced twice. Firstly, the film was adapted for UK audiences with the NFL football now becoming soccer and the man in the middle of the park becoming the newly-anointed cockney of Hollywood and former footballer Vinnie Jones. It gathered a whole trope of admirers for its nuanced dialogue and cultish set-ups. However, perhaps the most famous remake is one in which Reynolds even found a role in Adam Sandler’s 2005 true-to-source reboot.
While Reynolds’ version focuses on the hard-and-fast grit at the centre of the 1970s jail system, Sandler’s vision of the story relies more heavily on comedy and, more specifically, slapstick. It provided a few chuckles for audiences but didn’t land well with Reynolds, or at least, it likely wouldn’t have had he even bothered to watch it.
Despite starring as Coach Nate Scarborough alongside Sandler, Chris Rock and rapper Nelly, Reynolds turned down any opportunity to watch the movie: “I didn’t see. I didn’t want to see it,” he reflected. For Reynolds, the idea of remaking the original was off the mark: “[There were] like seven people in an office. And they were all talking about how they were going to make the best picture of The Longest Yard. And I said, ‘Well I hope you make a good one. But I don’t think you’re going to make a better one.'”
Instead, Reynolds was simply there to make a movie and cash a cheque when it was finished: “I said, ‘Well, good luck. And how many days am I working? Three days?’ I said, ‘OK. And how much money is it? OK, this is good’.”
Reynolds is one of Hollywood’s icons, and you can only remain there if you have a reliable reputation. The star certainly has that; it just so happens that his reputation is for clocking in, taking his money, and clocking out while making a few enemies along the way.
