Smokey and the Bandit Part 3

Our first episode returning from paternity leave takes us back to 1983, and one of two sequel bombs Universal made with Jackie Gleason that year, Smokey and the Bandit Part 3.

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TRANSCRIPT

 

From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

 

On this episode, we’ll be covering one of the oddest Part 3 movies to ever be made.

 

Smokey and the Bandit 3.

 

But before we do, I owe you, loyal listener an apology and an explanation.

 

Originally, this episode was supposed to be about the movies of H.B. “Toby” Halicki, who brought car chase films back to life in the mid-70s with his smash hit Gone in 60 Seconds. Part of the reason I wanted to do this episode was to highlight a filmmaker who doesn’t get much love from film aficionados anymore, and part because this was the movie that literally made me the person I became. My mom was dating Toby during the making of the movie, a spent a number of days on the set as a five year old, and I even got featured in a scene. And I thought it would be fun to get my mom to open up about a part of her life after my parents’ divorce that I don’t remember much of.

 

And it turned into the discussion that made me question everything I became. Much of which I will cover when I find the courage to revisit that topic, hopefully in time for the 50th anniversary this July.

 

So, for now, and to kind of stick with the car theme this episode was originally going to be about, we’re going to do a quick take on one of the most bizarre, and most altered, movies to ever come out of Hollywood.

 

As you may remember, Smokey and the Bandit was a 1977 hit film from stuntman turned director Hal Needham. Needham and Burt Reynolds has become friends in the early 1960s, and Needham would end up living in Reynolds’ pool house for nearly a dozen years in the 60s and 70s. Reynolds would talk director Robert Aldrich into hiring Needham to be the 2nd unit director and stunt coordinator for the car chase scene Aldrich’s 1974 classic The Longest Yard, and Reynolds would hire Needham to be his 2nd Unit Director on his own 1976 directorial debut, Gator. While on the set of Gator, the two men would talk about the movie Needham wanted to make his own directorial debut on, a low-budget B movie about a cat and mouse chase between a bootlegger and a sheriff as they tried to outwit each other across several state lines.

 

As a friend, Reynolds would ask Needham to read the script. The “script” was a series of hand-written notes on a legal pad. He had come up with the idea during the making of Gator, when the Teamster transportation captain brought some Coors beer to the production team. And, believe it or not, in 1975, it was illegal to sell or transport Coors beer out of states West of the Mississippi River, because the beer was not pasteurized and needed constant refrigeration.

 

Reynolds would read the “script,” which, according to Reynolds’ 1994 autobiography My Life, was one of the worst things he had ever read. But Reynolds promised his friend that if he could get a studio involved and get a proper budget and script for the film, he would make it.

 

Needham would hire a series of writers to try and flesh out the notes from the legal pad into a coherent screenplay, and with a verbal commitment from Reynolds to star in it, he would soon get Universal Studios to to agree to make Smokey and the Bandit, to the tune of $5.3m. After all, Reynolds was still one of the biggest box office stars at the time, and $5.3m was small potatoes at the time, especially when Universal was spending $6.7m on the Super Bowl assassin thriller Two-Minute Warning, $9m on a bio-pic of General Douglas MacArthur, and $22m on William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, an Engl