Burt Reynolds died today. Here’s my story about the one film of his I’ve seen more than any other and how long it took me to realize what exactly all those colorful women and football players were singing about in that delightful little Texas house.
If you’re old enough, you probably have a Burt Reynolds story. I don’t mean the Bill Murray kind where you randomly ran into him on the street one time and he was delightfully bizarre. No, I mean you have a story about some Burt Reynolds film, performance, interview, SNL impression, or otherwise which intersected with your life at one point. We are, after all, talking about a man who was once the most popular actor in the world, the first since Bing Crosby to be Hollywood’s top-grossing star four years in a row (1978 to 1982). If you grew up in that time period, chances are Burt made his way to the background noise of your life, whether you liked it or not.
Burt’s biggest films – Deliverance, The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit – actually predate me. When I was old enough to actually know anything about actors, Reynolds was already on the downside of his career, the kind of sad figure chasing after his faded star in vehicles like Cop and a Half in which he’s the grizzled old cop with a new partner – an 8-year-old kid! Ah, the 90s.
Then, later in the decade, there was the post-bankruptcy, anything goes Burt debasing himself as a horndog southern Senator in Demi Moore’s Striptease and vying for respectability in Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful Boogie Nights, which netted him an Oscar nomination. Too bad he hated the film, but I’ve already written all about that.
Way, way, way back before all of that, though, Burt was just the cockey epitome of 80s cool grinning his way through the Cannonball Run movies my older brothers loved so much. Those were fun, sure, but my heart had already been sold to the lady in the black dress singing from the footsteps of what I mistook to be a quaint Texas town.
I present to you none other than The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas:
Jumping ahead in the story a little bit, here: Good gawd! How did I not know any better? How did my dad let me watch that? This is a movie whose own title was so salacious by 1982 standards that they couldn’t even say it in the TV commercials:
Backing up…
From 1905 to 1973, Texas had its own brothel, called the Chicken Ranch, located just outside of La Grange. Oh, it was totally illegal. It’s not like we’re talking about Nevada here. But the Texas authorities agreed to look the other way. As a result, the brothel became a local institution, frequented by notable types like politicians, soldiers, and college football players. Texas A&M University fraternities would send freshman there every year to be initiated (into manhood, I suppose).
Then in 1972 the state Attorney General secretly deputized a local television reporter to raise plenty of noise about the brothel on TV as prelude to officially shutting it down. This was after the Fayette County District Attorney refused similar orders since no one who actually lived near the Chicken Ranch seemed to want it gone. Eventually, the state AG got his way and the Chicken Ranch was quietly closed. Efforts to prove it was connected to an organized crime ring flamed out, but, in the end, it was an illegal brothel. There was no real legal leg to stand on.
This story became the basis for the 1978 Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which was nominated for six Tonys, including Best Musical. It won two (for Best Actor and Actress). Four years later, Universal Studios left behind most of the musical original performers in favor of a big-name film adaptation starring Dolly Parton as the Head Madam and Reynolds as the local Sheriff she’s been getting, um, friendly with. Tommy Tune, who directed the Broadway version, was replaced with 9 to 5 director Colin Higgins.
The result was the highest-grossing musical of the 80s, topping the likes of Annie and Yentl. Dolly got another #1 out of it thanks to a re-released version of her 1974 hit “I Will Always Love You.” Plus, she gained a new obligatory inclusion on any of her Greatest Hits compilations with “Hard Candy Christmas,” a carryover from the Broadway original given a faithful treatment in the film but alternate recording for the soundtrack featuring Dolly singing both verse and the chorus. The song has since become a Christmas favorite, but how many remember what it was originally about – prostitutes lamenting the closing of their whorehouse.
The film eventually found its way to my dad’s VHS collection, and I took to it like everyone’s little kid took to Frozen 5 years ago. I just always wanted to be watching this movie…this movie whose title I wasn’t allowed to say. I knew not of this so-called Best Little Whorehouse. No, what I watched was Best Little House because it’s what I legitimately believed the title to be after my dad called it that.
“Thank God he’s not old enough to read yet,” my dad probably thought on more than one occasion.
I now have my dad’s old VHS copy. The title is as plain as day:
I’m not sure why I adored the film so much. It might be no more complicated than, well, it was the first musical I ever saw. People randomly breaking out into song? What kind of messed up world is this! I love it!
I was only 4 or 5, after all. I barely remember any of this. Stories of my obsession with the film passed into family legend, my dad and brothers joking about me watching Best Little House, happily dancing along with those college football players who visit the brothel mid-movie, totally oblivious to not even the subtext of it all but the outright text – they didn’t put “Whorehouse” in the title for nothing.
But, I think I responded to it the way I did partially because at the time I viewed Dolly and Burt as being so wholesome and fun:
Yeah…I was a really dumb kid. Clearly.
However, there was always something about Burt’s on-screen presence which put me at ease, whether he was laughing his way through a zany comedy, putting his heart into an Oscar contender, or just taking on certain films as an excuse to get close to a new leading lady. Even the admittedly bizarre sight of him singing and dancing alongside Dolly Parton made me feel happy. Reportedly, the two did not get along at all, but at 5 I had no idea and at 35 I still can’t see much sign of their off-screen friction.
After my Best Little House fever, I moved on to other movies and didn’t think much of it, always regarding Best Little House as my first favorite movie. It would be another 8 years before I actually saw Best Little Whorehouse again. I was gobsmacked. “Dad, these guys are having sex with these women, and you used to let me watch this all the time!” I remember yelling. “Yeah, I was wondering when you’d figure that out,” he laughed.
And that’s how someone like Burt Reynolds can enter our lives. Some actors deliver performances which legitimately change lives. Others toil on the edges and provide underappreciated windows into the human condition. Yet others transform their profession and industry.
That wasn’t my experience with Burt. Instead, he was the guy in that one movie I saw way too young and took way too long to figure out what it was really about. It became a running joke in the family, and in that way Burt has been a co-star in some of my favorite childhood memories.
That’s my Burt Reynolds story. What’s yours?
We Minored in Film 
I remember watching the Cannonball Run films as a kid on free-to-air TV but have very little memory of them.
The first time seeing “Boogie Nights” was very memorable. I was part of the university fencing team and we often went out socially together (and some of them dated together). We went together and the then-boyfriend of our best female épée player was named Paul Anderson. Not sure what his middle name was. We friendly mocked her for this.
Thanks for sharing your own story, and that’s exactly what I was hoping for/getting at – the little ways an actor like that can play unwitting co-star to our sometimes trivial, other times meaningful, and yet others just kind of funny life stories with pop culture.
Now, if Burt Reynolds had then randomly walked by and tried to punch this “Paul Anderson,” as he attempted to do with the real PTA on the Boogie Nights set, then that would have been…well, weird. And, technically, assault.
While he is a legend, i wasnt surprised to read this. He was on the jonathan ross show not long ago and had to leave midway. He had a school boy’s legs abd a belly and looked frail as anything with his walking stick in toe. Its not aids he says and deflects to charlie sheen. Its coz i hurt my jaw and couldnt eat. Whatever it was it was we may find out on a few weeks or months if it really is that. Back to celebrating his life. The thing about burt is he never wanted to change. His contemporaries like Clint Eastward stopped playing the cowboy to do other things and branch into dirty harry, directing, comedy, aging drifters. He just wanted to wear an open shirt handke bar moustache and handlebars and play smokey forever. Yeah i know he wasnt in the third one but it was the same old in other films. So he got real stale when he could have kept with the times and been more successful than Clint. Instead I had to watch him reduce to evening shade tv show and later on those dolland and aitkinson glasses commercials. Not fair for a man of his calibre but his own doing. Cannonball runa d smokey were hits but not becauae of burt rather his entourage of stars. Boogie nights was his comeback but everything stank after that. Striptease and sukes of hazzard anyone?
“Boogie nights was his comeback but everything stank after that. Striptease and sukes of hazzard anyone?”
Not to be that nitpicky guy, but technically Striptease came first, then Boogie Nights, but I take your point. Paul Thomas Anderson gave Reynolds his John Travolta-Pulp Fiction cultural moment and even tried to keep the training going, offering him a part in Magnolia. But Reynolds threw it all away on a series of very obvious, very lazy choices.
Re: his appearance. He’d looked frail for a while now. It need not be anything more than “lived a hard life and he was 82” but I take your point. The official cause of death, incidentally, was cardiopulmonary arrest.
Re: his career choices. In his 2015 memoir, he owned up to that ongoing failure to challenge himself:
“I didn’t open myself to new writers or risky parts because I wasn’t interested in challenging myself as an actor. I was interested in having a good time,” Reynolds recalled in his 2015 memoir, But Enough About Me. “As a result, I missed a lot of opportunities to show I could play serious roles. By the time I finally woke up and tried to get it right, nobody would give me a chance.” – From THR obit: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/burt-reynolds-dead-deliverance-boogie-nights-star-was-82-831093
He was cocky you mean? Like mickey rouke. Yeah i read about that. I do think it is a hard game playing megastar celebrity. Re striptease yes point taken. Maybe it was released later in uk. Or i cant remember. Felt like it came after. Re quentin tarrantino. Isnt burt starring in the next qt film?
“Re quentin tarrantino. Isnt burt starring in the next qt film?”
No. He WAS going to, but they hadn’t filmed his stuff yet.
“He was cocky you mean? Like mickey rouke.”
I didn’t really mean he was cocky, more complacent. Simply that, later in life, he looked back on things and regretted not challenging himself more at the time when all of his colleagues were. But, as the post-Boogie Nights example shows, he also just had chronic poor taste in material. This is, after all, the guy who turned down roles in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Godfather, Terms of Endearment, Pretty Woman, Star Wars, and Die Hard.
“Re striptease yes point taken. Maybe it was released later in uk.”
I just remember Striptease came first because of the weird one-two punch of Burt Reynolds, star of my youth, returning during my teenage years in two R-Rated sex movies, playing the horndog Congressman in Striptease and the star-making porn director in Boogie Nights. Striptease, in particular, was a big deal because of the Demi Moore connection. It drew so much attention to pole-dancing (along with Showgirls the year prior), and as I was going to a Catholic school at the time we were all forbidden from seeing it. Then a year later along comes Burt in another racy movie, one with actual Oscar buzz. The weird order of it all always stuck in my head.
Lol catholic school. Me too. Striptease was hardcore at that age. Didnt realise it was comedy. They made such a fuss of demi moore baring all. You should blog about that film actually. After the doctor who tv movie of course.. Ahem. Anyway im sure the some paper quoted him saying he was an @sehole and will be in the next QT film. Dont get me wrong. Im not knocking the actor. He is a legend. Shame he isnt going to be i QT film then. I know there are two other movies but they look a bit lacking tbh.