SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT
(^36) Summer 2019 Truck & Driver
Smokey and the Bandit, the ultimate celebration
of trucking and driving, is a movie built
upon a simple but brilliant premise. Critics
panned it; nobody expected it to do much
upon its release – in 1977 – but the film went
on to earn $300 million-plus and is as loved
and celebrated as ever over 40 years later.
Sometimes simple ideas are the best.
The plot was formed by legendary
Hollywood stuntman Hal Needham. In the
1970s, Coors beer couldn’t be sold east of the
Mississippi river. According to Burt Reynolds’
autobiography, the beer didn’t contain
preservatives and as a result had to be kept
cold all the way from the brewery to the
customer, making the transportation process
too expensive. People loved the beer though.
Caught red-handed
On the film set of Gator in Georgia, one
of the crew brought some cases of Coors
down with him. Hal Needham noticed beer
was going missing from his fridge on a
regular basis and one morning caught the
maid red-handed. She told him that you
simply couldn’t get the stuff in that part of
the country, and her husband loved it.
Hal realised that bootlegging Coors
beer would make a good plotline for a
movie, so scribbled a script on various pieces of notepaper and
approached his good friend – and house-mate at the time – Burt
Reynolds, who was arguably the biggest box office star in the
world at the time.
Burt recalled: “I read it and said, Hal, if you can get someone to
give you the money, I’ll star in it and you can direct it.”
Needham was known as a stuntman, not a director, and it took
a while for him to get the green light from a film studio, even with
Reynolds on board. At the same time, the script for Convoy was
doing the rounds and Universal Studios wanted them to make it
instead. “We stood our ground and said Smokey or nothing, and
they finally gave in,” said Reynolds.
The initial budget for
the film was $5.3m. Two
days before shooting was
due to begin, Universal
Studios called Hal to
tell him the budget was
being cut to $4.3m. With
Burt being paid $1m,
that made the revised
shooting schedule almost
impossible. The filming was
as frantic as the action itself.
Shooting took place over six
whirlwind weeks on location
in Georgia. Furthermore,
Reynolds fell ill during
shooting and the jam-packed
schedules had to be further
revised to work around him.
Pure chemistry
The chemistry of the cast
plays a huge part in the film’s
success. Needham’s original
idea was to get Jerry Reed
to star as the Bandit, having
worked with him on Gator.
When Reynolds said he’d do
it, Reed was lined up to play
Snowman. The studio requested
Sally Field, which everyone was
happy with (who wouldn’t be?).
On the suggestion of Reynolds, Jackie Gleason was approached
to play the role of Buford T Justice. It was a masterstroke. Gleason,
who had not acted in a film for seven years, made the role his
own. Given the chance to build his character from scratch, he
suggested the character of Junior, his dim-witted son, played by
Mike Henry. According to both Reynolds and Needham, Gleason
made up pretty much all of his lines on the spot, ad-libbing at
least three-quarters of his part.
● We will be playing Smokey and the Bandit in an open-air
cinema at Convoy in the Park on 10/11 August at Donington Park.
same 8V92T as
George’s, and you can
hear why. He shifts up
the gears expertly and, once into
high-range, gives it some proper
throttle – and boy does this thing
howl. “The power band is really
only from 1400 to 1800rpm, so
you need to keep it singing. It’s
not like a new truck that will pull
from low down.”
If you’re going to end up with
tinnitus, we can’t think of a better
way to get it. Pedestrians and
little old ladies from a nearby
care home turn round to see
what the racket is. As soon as
they see it’s this truck they smile
and wave. Cars stop to let the
truck through in situations where
in a normal truck you’d get
ignored. It’s hard to think of a
vehicle that would get more of a
reaction than this. Maybe if you
did a low-flying pass in the
Millennium Falcon. That might do
it. With the emphasis placed
firmly on might.
Celebrating Smokey
The sound of the Detroit under acceleration is matched only by that from the Jake brake!