Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know. And if this were the Gong Show, we would have been gone a very long time ago, I believe.
I think you mean Chucky Baby.
Yeah that's right. Nice catch, because we're talking about Chucky Baby, the original one, not you, the Chucky baby.
I got called that though back then because of this. Oh really, Oh yeah.
Boy, you've been alive for a while.
I get I was about the same man. This was right in my cultural wheelhouse from like seven to ten. But yeah, that makes it a little young for you or a little old for you, I guess.
Uh. Yeah, it was a I was a baby when it started. I think I might have not been born quite yet when it started, but yeah it was. Did you watch as a.
Todd Okay, did you watch any Gong Show ever? Like? Was it reruns or something?
Yeah? I saw some reruns. I was never I mean, I can understand the Gong Show is a cult classic. Yeah, and I totally get why. It just never got me in that way, you know what I mean?
Hey, when you're seven, it's pretty great.
How bad you're like, come on, boobs.
Yeah.
So we're not talking specifically just about the Gong Show. We're talking about the guy who is routinely wrongly attributed for creating the Gong Show. And the reason why is because he was a legendary game show producer and he hosted The Gong Show and his name was Chuck Barris. But just to kind of clear the air right out of the gate, the Gong Show is actually created by Chris Beard, who would go on to become a legendary creator of another cult classic called Sherman Oaks in the nineties.
I never watched that.
I've never heard of that.
I feel like I had heard of it, but I really don't think I ever saw it. There's a lot of the nineties I probably don't remember, but yeah, you know, I don't think I watched Sherman. Oh.
Yeah. The nineties were our seventies.
Yeah, yeah, kind of like our seventies and our sixties combined.
Yeah. And the reason we're talking about Chuck Barriss is not just the fact that he was way ahead of his time in a lot of ways as far as what kind of content he was putting on television like a real visionary if you look back at what we're seeing today and what he was doing at the time. But the reason we're talking about Chuck Barris is because he did that. And also, as we will learn in Act three, well we'll learn it now, but we'll get
into it in AC three. Chuck Barris also wrote a book in nineteen eighty four, after his TV career was pretty much over, wherein he said basically that while this was going on, he was a secret assassin for the CIA and carried out at least thirty three murders on behalf of the American government. And that was a book called Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, also made into a film of that same name, which makes this sort of an obvious pick for something for us to go over.
I thought you're gonna say, like something new came up about him or something like that recently. So how did you think of Chuck Barris? Like, are you always just walking around with Chuck Barris in the back of your mind?
I don't. It popped up somehow, and I was like, because I saw that movie and I was like, oh, yeah, that's so weird that Chuck Barris wrote a memoir in which he said that he was a CIA assassin. Yeah, like what was up? Like I never even like did any research to see how untrue that may or may not have been. So that was really kind of it.
Yeah. In the movie I think that was George Clooney's directorial debut, they treat it like, yeah, it's part of his life and ericave Yeah, which was an interesting choice, but also it kind of gets you out of like really getting caught in the weeds of trying to explore if it was true and if it's not, why he did that. Yeah, I think it was a good move. Actually.
Yeah, so here we go on the Baron of bad taste, the King of dynamite television, I've got one, the King of schlock and drum.
Roll, the Iatola of trash Ola.
Is that great and very of the time. That fits?
Yeah, the Iatola was on people's minds in the mid to late seventies. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, this guy was born in nineteen twenty nine. Apparently when you read about interviews that he's given, like he was born in twenty nine, thirty thirty one, thirty two. Yeah, Like he is not
huge on keeping up with consistent details. And I still don't know whether that was intentional, Like was he toying with people all this time or did he just not pay attention to that kind of thing because he had bigger stuff going.
On, Yeah, like killing people. Who knows, but he is a guy from Philly, went to at the time Drexel Institute of Technology now Drexel University in the fifties, wanted to be a songwriter for Tin pan Alley for a little while. Ultimately would write a song which we'll get to, and then decided he wanted to get into tell and became a page at NBC in nineteen fifty five, which went nowhere because the daytime sales department he was a page for at the time was eliminated. But that gave him the TV bug.
Yeah, that was what he wanted to do, was crack into TV. He even went so far as to marry the niece of the founder of CBS not, a woman named Lynn Levy. Yeah. But yeah, in the context of his ambitions, you're like, like, what's that, like, you know, deliberate kind of thing. I guess it doesn't really matter.
Although yeah, he was married to her for nineteen years. I will point that out, you know, so it seems like a real marriage.
Talk about keeping up appearances.
Yeah.
So, yeah, he started out like Kenneth from thirty Rock didn't last and then I don't know how it happened, but he ended up getting an assignment from ABC. So he started at NBC, moved to ABC, and his sole job was to go babysit Dick Clark to make sure that he wasn't accepting bribes or being a corrupt host of American Bandstand. That was his job in his twenties. Yeah, and it was supposed to last just a couple of weeks. It ended up lasting a year. And then very interestingly,
he kept copious notes. Every day he would write up like a minute detailed account of everything that happened on set that day, and he would also include jokes and like parts of his philosophy and stuff like that, and it turned into like a seven hundred page document that ended up bailing Dick Clark out.
Yeah. In the end, when Dick Clark testified in front of the US House sub committee, it was about you know, payella scandals of you know, pay for play basically for music, which was illegal. It actually got him out like you said, And Dick Clark was like, hey, buddy, I wonder what you were scribbling on all those that whole year, But you helped me out inadvertently, and now you got a full time job in our daytime TV department here at ABC.
Yeah. He also said, hey, by the way, have you ever thought about getting into songwriting? And in fact, Dick Clark set him up with Freddie Boom Boom Cannon, a top recording artist at the time and a friend of Dick Clark's, and he recorded a song Palisades Park that Chuck Barris wrote, and it made it to like number three on the Billboard charts. Yeah, I know it's and I think in nineteen sixty two, I think it was. Yeah,
and the Beach Boys ended up covering it. So that alone probably made him quite quite successful right off the bat.
Yeah, for sure, even though his songwriting career, I mean that was kind of it for songwriting because his TV career was taking off. By all appearances, was a very hard worker and you know, I don't want to come across as we're just you know, singing Chuck Barris's praises constantly here. He changed the game in a lot of ways in TV. But as we'll see, because it was the seventies, that was a lot of misogyny tied into stuff he was doing on TV, which we'll get to.
Just wanted to sort of level set on that.
Yeah, I think that was good.
But when he was working for ABC, he became worked his way up to director of daytime Programs and initially got on the map with them by making a pilot about it was called People Poker, and it was sort of the first sign that he wanted to do a different kind of game show, like sort of a what would become like a Jerry Springer type thing with a
game show component. With as far as People Poker goes was people were on the show to guess the professions of different other people in this pilot, which is I believe as far as it went, he had all women on the show. He had brain surgeons, police officers, and sex workers, and it ended up that the cops and the sex workers got into a literal fight and the show obviously didn't go anywhere, and he left ABC not too long after.
Yeah, so that was huge that out on his own, and in fact, shortly after that he founded Chuck Barris Productions. That was nineteen sixty five, so probably as the door was still swinging behind him at ABC, which, by the way, you said he was the director of daytime Programs. Apparently he didn't like that title, so he changed his official title to Duke of Daytime. That's the kind of guy
he was. This guy's working his way up and that's one of the things he does, right, So it does make sense that he goes off and founds his own production company with a twenty thousand dollars loan from his stepdad, and that ended up paying off because in nineteen sixty five he developed the dating game, turned around and sold it to his former employer, ABC, and it was basically off the bat, a smash hit in that it was innovative. It was a pioneering game show. Up to this point,
like you said, this was all new. People answered questions on quiz shows or there were puzzles or something like that. No one was doing this kind of thing, and Chuck Barris literally came up with it. He genuinely, sincerely came up with it, and it was it just it put him on the map and just kind of showed everybody what he could do for better or worse like you were saying.
Yeah, And the Dating Game was huge. I mean I watched a lot of Dating Game as a kid. Jim Lang was the original host back then. Eventually Chuck Woolery would take over. He'll be back in two and two as we all know. Yeah, and if you've never seen The Dating Game, the format was there are three potential dates hidden on the other side of a screen, and a woman interviews these three men and then supposedly goes
on a date with one of them. But what it became known for eventually was was people coming on early in their career who were underemployed or unemployed. Actors, so Sally Field, Schwarzenegger, Tom Selleck, John hamm Andy Kaufman as Laka like workshopping a character as you know, as a contestant on the Dating Game.
As an eligible bachelor on the Dating Game. Oh yeah, locka.
It was a big deal. It was a huge show. And I want to quickly plug this new movie from Anna Kendrick, Woman of the Hour on Netflix.
If you heard of it, yeah, I haven't seen it yet, though it's good.
Man Anna Kendrick's directorial debut. She knocked it out of the Park. I think it's a really effective movie about the true story of a dating game bachelor Rodney Alcala, who was a serial killer and he was on the game after he had been a serial while he was a serial killer, won the dating game and the woman who was the bachelorette refused to go on the date
with him because he was such a creepy weirdo. But it's a really effective movie, Like she nails the threat that a woman feels generally from men, like more effectively than maybe I've seen anyone ever do it, Like crawling out of your skin. Wow, just by this guy, like being in a parking lot with her at night, like that kind of thing.
Yeah. And plus also at that time too, that was fully socially supported. Yeah, men could be total creeps and put their hands on women, and it was pretty much like, yeah, that's just the way things are at the time too.
Yeah. Good movie though.
So he followed up the Dating game with the newlywoed game Huge very similar, except well not that similar. I mean the format was different enough that it's not the exact same game. But he took married couples. We've talked about this before, I think on our game shows episode, and he would separate the husbands and keep the wives back and ask them questions about what their husband would
answer say to some question. Then he'd bring the husbands out and they'd go through and see if their answers matched, and then invariably, like they would get it wrong, and some wives would get mad if they got it right,
some couples would kiss. It was like, very cute. They were newlyweds, right, But the content of both the dating Game and the Newlywed Game were so raunchy that in a lot of cases they were sayments of the dating Game that Chuck Barriss was like, well, can't use that because the guy mentioned as his junk in like a really vulgar term. Yeah, Like like he was, yeah, exactly, he said, uh, he said even he was surprised at first,
that's not what he was going for. But when it started to when he could get enough of the innuendo and everything out as produced shows that were aired and the popularity that they were met with, He's like, well, I guess this is the direction I'm going.
Yeah. Uh. And so for the first time on TV, you had people airing parts of their personal lives on television. And you had people that Chuck Barriss even acknowledged, like the prize money wasn't good on these shows, like they were doing these shows to be on TV.
Yeah, that was also partially deliberate on his his his part, because I read an interview with him and he said that like a wife bonk her husband over the head with like the card that she has the answer written on if he gets a question wrong when there's a toaster at steak, but if you have like a yacht at stake right, completely changes the dynamic of the game and takes away all the fun. Yeah, we could have
won a yacht exactly. But at the same time, he also said that, like the Newlywed game was also famous for couples just going totally gaga over pretty mundane prizes. Yeah, and the other couples would be upset or they'd look kind of upset that they didn't win. And he said that he would do pre interviews with people and ask what their dream prize was, and then he would put together three couples that all had the same dream prize, so it would hurt that much more when they didn't
get it. So I don't know which one's true. Or maybe both are true. But that's another example of him speaking out of both sides of his mouth, which he did a lot.
Yeah, and the data shows that eighty percent of newlywed couples in the seventies their dream prize was and all spence paid trip to Acapulco.
Yeah, well that's what they got, whether they liked it or not. The most exotic place in the world at the time.
Man a Capolco was so big back then.
Mm hmm.
I didn't even know anything about Acapolco. Is it still around.
I believe it's still around. Don't think it's falling into the ocean yet.
All right, So Barris is killing it with dating game and newlywed game. He started just producing show after show after show. The only one I will mention is the only one from this list that I really watched, which was the dollar ninety eight beauty show hosted by the late great Rip Taylor.
Yeah, I'm glad that was the one you chose. That was I was like, what is that? And I researched it and I was like, you have to be kidding me.
It was so good. The prize was a dollar in ninety eight cents and Rip Taylor is just a legend and you know, sort of an American gay icon in the seventies.
Yeah, the guy who were a really bad to pay him with tow confetti all the time.
He's great.
Yeah, he was great. So yeah, that the show was one of the ones that Chuck Barriss really took a lot of heat for. It was described by him as a spoof of pageants, right, so they were making fun of actual pageants, but the way that they made fun of it was to humiliate and embarrass women who normally wouldn't have participated in a traditional beauty contest, that's right. Rather than celebrating them, they pointed out all the reasons why they couldn't have made it on a real beauty contest.
It was just some of the quotes I read were really really mean. And yeah, it was a hit show at the time. I think it was just on for a couple of years, but that seems to be about how long his shows lasted. But they were like huge flashes in the pan. Sometimes not all the time. He had some flops, but he would you know, a show like that would be on for a few years and then it'd just be gone.
Yeah, and just to stick up for myself a little bit. The eight year old Chuck didn't realize he was being fed Oh yeah, blatant misogyny at the time.
Yeah again, I mean that's how were It's really changed for the better in so many ways, because yeah, I'm like, I'm sure grown men were just laughing so hard at those insults. It's just crazy.
Yeah, I was probably like, my dad's laughing, So let me bond with him exactly, or try to at least. So no, no, no, do your laugh from the that's not quite a laugh from the Halloween episode.
I can't redo it. It'll just be a disappointment.
Oh man, all right, before we break, we should mention that he got into book writing in nineteen seventy four. He would, like you said, going to write many books and believe, at the end of his life even kind of hoped you would be remembered for as an author rather than the King of Shlock. But in seventy four he published You and Me, Babe, You and Me Babe, a fictionalized account of his marriage, which ended a couple
of years after the book came out. But he gained the system, Like we talked about gaming the system for the New York Times bestseller list. In that shorty episode landed on that New York Time bestseller list. But you know, that's how we started his book writing career. Yeah.
And at the time, this is nineteen seventy four, this is like you pretty much were in the TV industry to know to have heard really of Chuck Barris and know what he was doing. He was not a cultural icon yet, so that was there was a chance at the time that he could have been remembered for an author. But he made a huge, fateful decision in nineteen seventy six. And we'll talk about that fateful decision right after this.
It slick, all right, we're back.
Josh left a quite a cliffhanger with the word that Chuck Barriss made a very faithful decision, and that faithful decision was to be the actual host of what would be the thing he was known for, The Gong Show, which ran for but two years in daytime, then a couple of more years in syndication until nineteen eighty and Bears said, initially, like I thought this would be basically what we see now with like America's Got Talent, like a real talent show with real amateur talent, but he
got a lot of bad people in there and decided to go a different route and the show ended up being very bad talent. That was I mean, the premise of the show was they performed in front of celebrity, a celebrity panel, and if it was so bad the celebrity panel, one of them could or all of them sometimes could get up and hit the gong, which would end their performance. If they managed to make it through without the gong, they would rate them on a scale of zero to ten.
Yeah, but the celebrity pan, and we're talking like celebrities of twenty years before panel, or if they were active celebrities like say Jamie Farr, they were like B list maybe yeah, they were at.
The game show celebrities match game level stuff.
You're right, yeah, right, But they the celebrity judges on the panel had to wait forty five seconds. He couldn't bang the gong forty five seconds. So you'll see some gong shows where Jamie Farr is just standing there at the gong for that forty six second so he can hit it. And then if they made it ninety seconds, that's when they would judge and potentially win. Yeah, and it was just so I found a description of it. This is Encyclopedia Britannica. It was quote part talent show parentheses,
most contestants conspicuously lacked talent, part demented variety show. That's that's Encyclopedia Britannica describing this.
Yeah, I mean it was really really funny because the talent was bad and you could laugh at that. The panelists really yucked it up, and sometimes one would have the gong hammer whatever you call the thing you hit the gong with is the mallet, I guess and other celebrity the panelists would be trying to rip it out of their hands and like no, no, no, let it go.
They're all hamming it up. And Chuck Barris as host was he's probably the weirdest TV show host in TV show history, and just how he hosted a show and how he behaved that the weird things he did it was just very awkward and strange.
Yeah, Like he would hide his face by pulling hats like the gold hats that he would wear down over his eyes, and he'd be talking to the audience like like continuing on the show, but he clearly wanted to crawl into that hat and hide. He was beyond awkward.
So when you put all this stuff together, like bad talent acts that aren't trying to be bad in some cases, a really weird, awkward host that's clearly uncomfortable hosting a game show, and then you know these these, like you said, celebrity judges on the panel, hamming it up like you have a cult classic today. But at the time, there was nothing even remotely like this that anyone had ever done. Ever.
It was totally groundbreaking. I was two, but even I knew that at the time that that was a groundbreaking show.
You said, Mama, ground baking. That's right, yes, dear.
Yeah, that's exactly what she said too.
So I don't think we said that if you won, you get a little Gong trophy and you get a check for five hundred and sixteen dollars and thirty two cents, which was the SAG minimum daily rate at that time.
And what the Gong Show, again in retrospect, became known for in some ways was the fact that some real, you know, talented people sometimes got their break there, sometimes didn't necessarily get their break, but they were it was the first time they'd ever done anything you know on television before country singer songwriter box Car Willie was on the band Oingo Boingo when they were the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.
Yeah, they would go on to Their biggest hit was Weird Science.
Oh much other, I mean og Go boing Go was great.
Yeah, but I mean their big hit was that, and then the other one was dead Man's Party, which I think they played tad a party and back to School.
Probably, And they're probably best known now for the fact that their lead singer and songwriter was Danny Elfman.
Yeah, so Danny Elfman. He was a huge composer, especially in the late eighties early nineties. I mean he did some really high profile stuff, one of which was the Simpsons theme.
Oh yeah, Batman.
Yeah. He also a lot of Tim Burton stuff too. He also did the theme. He composed the theme to pee Wee Herman, pee Wee Herman's I don't know if it was pee Wee's Playhouse, but certainly pee Wee's Big Adventure he composed. And that's interesting because they actually could have potentially crossed paths on the Gong Show because Owingo Boingo wasn't the only one on there. Paul Rubins was as he was kind of trying to start to develop as Pee Wee Herman character.
Yeah, he was on He was on The Dating Game a few times as sort of the proto Pee Wee Herman character. The Gong Show fourteen times, and he later in his career credited Chuck Barris. He was like, if it hadn't been for me getting just the SAG minimum payment to be on that show, that made me able to focus on my career and then my work with the Groundlings improv group and not have to get another job. And the fact that like I got to workshop this character,
it got me in the public eye. Like he really kind of credited Chuck Barris with not only helping him, but all kinds of struggling artists besides Oeo Bongo and Boxcar. Willie Andrey and mccartial was a twelve year old who performed on the Gong Show and she would get ca as the Broadway lead in Annie because she was discovered on that show. So you know, things like that were happening. Another singer name, did you mention Cheryl Lynn?
I didn't know.
Yeah, she got a recording contract. Another singer because of her appearance on The Gong Show.
So she was when she recorded that disco hit, got to be real.
I don't know that song.
It's got to be real, Susu su su su sue. I gotta have it, baby, you know that song?
I don't know.
Please don't make me continue.
That's okay, I'll look it up.
So, yes, she really said disco hit, among other things from what I know. But there's one more thing I wanted to to mention about Paul Rubins. He didn't always do pee wee. One of the things he did, and I could not find a video of it, but I saw it written of He impersonated a dripping faucet as one of his acts.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, I thought that was very creative.
It was, I mean, he was a groundling. He's a very funny guy. He got he was. I mean, he was known most for pee wee, obviously, and I think he at times felt like he was sort of stuck in that character. It became so big he couldn't do anything else. But he was also very in love and appreciative with that character. You know.
Yeah, we saw his you mean, I went to Los Angeles and saw his live pee Wee pee Wee's Playhouse. But that was so it was really good. And yes he was trapped in Pee Wee Herman for the most part. But he did a great turn in Mystery Men as the Spleen. Remember, Yeah, good guy.
He didn't get enough of those chances, unfortunately. But I think we should do a Peewee episode at some point.
You bet, Let's do it a Pee Wee three parter.
All right, So the end would come for Chuck Barris as far as his TV work goes, at his peak, this is staggering. And this is you know, mind you a time when there were three main television networks, it was even pre Fox. As far as programming goes, he supplying twenty seven hours a week of programming of TV game shows, which is I mean, I don't know what percentage of that overall, you know, of their overall programming that was, but twenty seven hours a week is your
your king Daddy TV. If you're doing that, Yeah, you.
Literally can fill more than a full day of programming every week of new stuff.
That's crazy, Oh, totally. And in nineteen eighty sort of at the peak, I guess it was starting to wane a little bit, he shut it down, sold his TV company for supposedly one hundred million bucks, did little TV here and there, But basically that was it for him. And one of the reasons, and there are many, you know, taste change and the people were sort of moving away from that kind of thing a little bit, I think.
But the show called Three is a Crowd that he pitched in the sixties and then would later do a pilot for in the seventies had a lot to do with his downfall.
My goodness. So the original version was one of the most abhorrent ideas anyone's ever come up with for a game show. It was you were going to have a man and his wife, and then the man's mistress, and the mistress and the wife would compete answering questions like on the Newlywed Game to see who knew him better,
ivable imagine, And apparently they made a pilot. I can't think about how ruined those people's lives were like, even if it sounded like a lark at the time, like just to just to go through that in actuality had to be totally different from the idea of it. So he revamped it a little bit and then replaced the Mistress with the Secretary, and it was still the same format, and even that alone proved to be extremely awkward and uncomfortable to watch.
Yeah, thinly Veiled Mistress is what they should have called it.
Sure, Sure, So that didn't last very long, and that one seemed to really draw the most ire. He got the goal of the Grand Goble Award that year from the National Organization for Women, which dubbed him the year's largest living Turkey. And this he'd been doing this for decades already. But that's how bad that show was. That Like, they gave him that, and they said that this was from his lifetime body of work. But that's how bad
Three's a Crowd was received. And apparently the United Auto Workers also came out against it because they represented a lot of women workers back then, So the UAW and now came out against it really hard. And he ended up just saying, like, you know what, forget it. I'm done, not just I'm going to like fade in the background and keep producing shows. He I think sold Chuck Bearris productions and just retreated.
Yeah, he retreated, but not before he made one final mistake, which was in nineteen eighty the Gong Show movie pretty much universally known as one of the worst movies ever made. It was Robert Downey Sor was gonna write and direct it as a slapstick comedy. Chuck Barris didn't like that direction, so he took over as director, turned it to a more serious thing about him. And you know Chuck Barris's story of and how difficult it was to be sort of known as the King of schlock, and it was
just a mess. Yeah. I didn't see it, but I remember when it came out, and I even remember at the time it being a massive failure.
Yeah, it was a flop right out of the case, not just with critics but with audiences too. And I watched a couple of trailers for it, and I mean, he didn't seem to have really gotten rid of the slapstick element. So he tried to combine a serious, sympathetic look at his life right slapstick, and yeah, it did not work at all. If you've ever have you ever seen Ring Master the Jerry Springer.
Movie, Oh no, is it a documentary or no?
It's a slightly fictionalized version where he plays himself kind of like our TV show. But it is interesting, Like, there's no way Jerry Springer didn't watch the Gong Show movie and say, like, I want to remake that. It's basically what he did.
You know. I think the lesson we can learn here from our TV show, from that one and from the Gong Show movie is it slightly fictionalized versions of a real job. Don't go over to it.
They don't work, don't try, don't even do it. You want to take a break and come back for the rest of this.
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone knows what's hanging out there coming up in act three? Did Chuck Barris assassinate people for a living while he was a TV producer? Right for this?
Okay, Chuck, like you said. In nineteen eighty four, Chuck Barris released an autobiography called Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The subtitle was an unauthorized autobiography which is pretty funny, and in it he recounts, apparently as far as the
critics concern were concerned, like pretty masterfully. He recounts his life as a game show producer as a hated destroyer of civility and taste, you know, across American culture, and just how he dealt with that but some of the other parts were also part of his life at the time, mixed in where he was going abroad as a CIA hitman and carrying out contract killings for the CIA, thirty three of them by his count, and he would describe
these in graphic detail. Apparently there was one where he writes about having broken some guy's front teeth because he jammed the gun with the silencer in there, and it's really graphic stuff, and he's writing about this totally matter of factly and seemingly totally un ironic, as if he's revealing to the world he was both this producer's legendary producer and secretly at the same time a hitman.
Yeah, and you know, the the idea was that he was. It was the perfect cover because nobody would suspect Chuck Barris, TV producer King of Schlock of doing something like this. So the CIA just loved it. Did you see the movie?
Yeah, I thought it was if I remember correctly, I thought it was pretty good.
Yeah, it was pretty good. It wasn't great, but it was pretty good. It was it was a weird movie and it was a weird book. When there were some critics, I believe Jeff Simon from Buffalo News said that Chuck Barris is alive and well and living in schizophrenia. Other reviewers tried to suggest that it was a metaphor and that it's really about a guy that's struggling so much with his life as an outsider that it was you know, it was all just metaphor.
Wait wait, you got to finish the rest like this A Gorman guy really missed the mark if you ask me, all.
Right, suggesting with this conceit is that he spent his life as an outsider, an assassin of sorts, dealing with a species that frightens and baffles him.
Yeah, that's like terribly, terribly terrible.
I think a lot of leeway there for what Barris was intending, and I don't know what he was intending, and no one really does. The only interview with any clear sort of indication that it was all a put on was when he gave to Regis and Cindy Garvey on the Morning Show when the book was released, when he very, uh, you know, in a very straightforward way,
said I was not in CIA. I wanted to be got an FBI background check, but then got my job working in television, which is what I wanted to do, and that the version of me in this book is just a character. But he did say a character crucified by the critics for inner chain the public. So there, you know, there was maybe a little bit of metaphor to it. After all.
What's weird to me is it doesn't seem that anyone just took it as face value. Is not even a metaphor just an interesting thing that he did in his autobiography right punch it up. Everybody seems to just be
totally perplexed by it. The best explanation I saw apparently he hinted in some interviews that he used it as a device to point out that all of those critics and people in like government who criticized him so openly and so meanly in a lot of cases too, would also have totally praised him for killing on behalf of the American government. That seems like a stretch as well, But it's better than Ed Gorman's interpretation, I think.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of that. And you know, I do agree with this as the American way as far as entertainment goes, which is boo sex and yay violence. But you know, there's a difference between you know, he wasn't filming like tasteful love scenes. It was some pretty blatant misogyny happening.
Yeah, I mean and through over and over again. Even so, like, like I was saying a couple of times at the time, this is just how things were. So it really goes to show just how much over the line he went that he was roundly criticized and made fun of him, mocked by people for the level of misogyny his shows displayed. That's how misogynistic his shows were in a lot of cases.
Yeah, for sure. The CIA, for their as far as they go, they were like, of course. In two thousand and two, a spokesman named Tom chris Bell for the CIA said, it's absurd. It sounds like he's been standing a little too close to the gong all those years, which, of course Chuck Barris said, yeah, of course, that's what they're going to say. Have you ever heard the CIA acknowledged someone was an assassin?
Right, it's a good, good, good point.
Yeah, and it's seemingly a good way to sell books, even though it didn't turn out that way, right.
No, it languished an obscurity for twenty years before his friend Andrew Lazar, producer picked Up. Apparently sold less than a thousand copies, which was about one percent of the run the first and I guess well the first run. They later re released it when the movie came out. But yeah, one of his friends was like, you know, I've always thought this was a pretty cool book. Let's see what Charlie Kaufman can do to it. So they had Charlie Kaufman write a screenplay based on the book.
And no one's ever seen that, No one, as far as I know, well, I don't know that, no one's ever seen it. There's a script out there that he wrote, but it never got made because George Clooney came along and, like I said, made the decision of Nope, we're gonna present all this his face value. We're not gonna do anything weird with it. We're just gonna basically shoot the movie version of his book.
Yeah, I mean, an interesting choice, and it was a pretty good movie. Like Sam Rockwell was great as barrass like the perfect casting. But man, Charlie Kaufman is so unique in his take and spin on things. I would have really loved to see in what that movie would have been.
Yeah, I wonder if the script is out there, surely somebody had the wherewithal to be like, this needs to be out there in the world.
Maybe we can get our hands on it. I remember years ago my friend Stacy, who works still works in the film business, would give me screenplays at the time when she would get them from her jobs, just to I was trying to learn how to write scripts, and
so it's always good to read scripts. And she gave me one called The Orchid Thief like Charlie Kaufman, and I read it, and I read it in a night and called her the next day and I was like, Stacy, I've never read anything like this before in my life, Like, this is the craziest movie and narrative I've ever heard of. And that would become adaptations, and that's the first time I had heard of Charlie. Charliekaufman was reading that script
like before they even made the movie. This is in pre production.
Yeah, and then you follow that up with being John Malkovich or vice versa. I can't remember. No, No, he's so yeah, because John Cusack plays a cameo in adaptation, right, yeah, yeah, I would like to read that script too, the movie itself. Did you notice I don't know if this is just my interpretation, but in the early two thousands, about the first decade, movies were like overly polished, overly tight. Yeah, the Bob Crane movie, what was that one?
Oh h At one point your favorite movie auto Focus?
Auto Focus? Right, Yes, it was just everything is just too polish, too perfect, and I think that was the Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was another good example. Catch Me If you Can, I think, is the pinnacle example of this where these movies are so refined and so polished and so clearly done by Hollywood people who have been doing it for so long that they've kind of lost the not edge, but just the heart to what they're doing that it's not actually particularly entertaining for me.
Yeah. I mean with Catch Me if you Can, it makes sense because it's Spielberg. But Auto Focus was Paul Schrader, so that's I mean, he's not known for being slick in Hollywood, so that is a I just remember early on when you and I were getting to be friends at work, he talked a lot about Auto Focus.
I love that movie at first, Yeah, I do. I haven't seen it for a while. Yeah, good movie, Yeah, Greg Near what kind of casting was that?
It's just nuts. Yeah, he was good though.
So spoiler alert. Chuck Bears died. He died in twenty seventeen at aged the ripe old age of eighty seven, although it's not entirely clear he was eighty seven, eighty eight, eighty six, Yeah, but that's what they put down in his obituary at eighty seven. He also wrote some other books over the years. He did a follow up to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind called Oh what was it?
Called Badgrass Never Died. I think that he released in two thousand and four, and he doesn't mention he talks about a lot of the same scenes, does not mention any of the CIA stuff in that one, which.
Is just is almost like a two over.
Yeah, and I think he was toying with people. I'm not sure, but that's my take. And he said that he wanted to be remembered I think as a novelist. I think you said, and that's just not how he was remembered. But apparently he was a good enough author that he's also remembered in part as a novelist.
Yeah, Chuck Barris.
There's one other thing he invented, syndication. Chuck, Oh really, yeah. He created a game called Parent Game, and in nineteen seventy two, ABC was like, no, we don't actually want to do this, so he bought the rights to the game back from them and went directly to stations and sold at to stations, hence creating the entire concept of syndication.
Oh wow, yeah, I mean a real visionary in a lot of ways, and just a kind of a kooky guy.
Yeah. Well, Chuck said he was kind of a kooky guy, and as anyone who's ever listened to stuff you should know before knows that Chuck just unlocked listener mail.
That's right. Quick correction on ADHD guys, And we do want to read this one because it's kind of an important thing we got wrong. Oh no, I want to point out a minor correction. Towards the end. It was mentioned a couple of brand named drugs that are amphetamine based stimulants, Adderall Vivens and Straterra. Straterra, though Guys, is one of the non stimulant ADHD medications. It is a selective nora epinephrine reuptake inhibitor and is not a controlled substance.
I couldn't help point it out because I'm a pharmacist, and miscategorizing a pharmaceutical I could keep listeners from trying something that could help them if they're adverse to amphetamines. Point regardless, I have to say I've always been meaning to send in an email. Thanks for the work you've done Avid Listener for five years and it's truly fascinating to learn about the variety of topics. And I really love the chemistry you guys have between each other.
They get it.
And that is from Michael on.
Thanks a lot, Michael, we really appreciate that that was a huge miss and thanks for following up and letting us tell everybody else that we got it wrong, because that is pretty important. And we got a lot of emails from a lot of people about the ADHD episode, So thanks to everybody who wrote.
In big time. It would seemed like a pretty important suite to a lot of folks in that means a lot of time.
Yeah, for sure, we actually got people who are like I had no idea that I had ADHD until I listened to this episode and realized you were talking about me. Beat for beat, like I can't. That's just nuts that were running around diagnosing people with ADHD with the podcast.
Yeah, and I had even several personal friends that knew they had HD ADHD that were like, I never knew this part of my life was due to that even And you know that's great. It makes us feel good, Yeah.
For sure. So if you want to make us feel good, or you want to point out something we got wrong, doesn't matter, you can do it via email. Send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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