PDX---Live Bootleg Version

Frog (Sally Field): What is it that you do, really? Straight.
Bandit (Burt Reynolds): Well, I just go from place to place, and do what I do best.

Bandit's famous bootleg cargo

At one point after dinner, while sitting with Nick, I notice the Coors can he is holding. I remember something on his Facebook profile.

I point to the can in his hand.

"So you truly are a fan of Smokey and the Bandit," I tell him.
 
He laughs. Not only does he like the movie a lot, but he also knows quite a few details about the production back in the late 1970s.

"It had almost no budget," he says. "They didn't think it was going to be a big deal." .

"The only reason they got to make that movie was because Burt Reynolds agreed to take almost no money for it."

I mention that I saw it recently on television while I was staying at the Best Western in Wilsonville.

"One of those situations where I got into the room and turned on the t.v right as the movie started," I tell him.

"I had to watch the whole thing."

Nick said he can't bear to watch it on television, because of the censored language, especially the classic lines by Jackie Gleason as Smokey, many of which are quite profane.

We swap some of our favorite lines from the movie.

"I take my hat off for one thing, and one thing only," says Nick, reciting one of his, that is spoken by Bandit.

One of his favorite things of the movie is the chemistry between Burt Reynolds and Sally Field.

"It was all real," he says. "They actually fell for each other on the set. You can see it on screen."

 

"Cowboys love fat calves."

 
I wax about the cultural importance of the movie. "It reflects an America of the 1970's that completely disappeared for a while---Outlaw rebellion against the Establishment.

Nick agrees.

"And it was racially inclusive," added Nick, referring to scenes in Bandit.

"The police are not the good guys in the movie," I say.  "Today there's no way they could show the hero doing what he did, actually outrunning the police and getting away with it. You're not allowed to do that in movies now. But the Seventies were different."

"It reminds me of the song "Convoy" by C.W. McCall."

"Can you imagine now---we crashed the gate doing ninety-eight?"

"---moreover Jesus freaks who had long hair and drove microbuses?"

"That was a huge hit on the radio."

"There was a consciousness that everyone was getting screwed by the Man," I said.

It's something I've thought a lot about. For a moment in America after the end of the Vietnam War, there was a feeling that the power structure had gone slack. The Death Machine was temporarily on the ropes.

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
announcer, WHO Radio, Des Moines

It certainly had something to do with the Interstate Highway System. And also the fact that people traveling on it could communicate in a way that was free and outside the System, specifically for a while through C.B. radios. You didn't have to be a radio announcer on a government-licensed station to be heard by other human beings over the air.

"But all that went away immediately in 1980 when Reagan was elected," I said.

"All of a sudden, all that post-Watergate, post-Vietnam rebellion got sucked back into the System. To be a conservative meant to worship the Police State again---and look what we wound up with."

We discussed the various merits of Ronald Reagan as an actor. We both agreed that one of our favorite Reagan movies was The Killers (1964).  Nick is a big fan of Lee Marvin, who is also in the movie.

That was Reagan's final acting role before he became Governor of California. For once, he played the bad guy.

I mimicked Reagan in the scene at the end where his character dies.

"That look on his face when Angie Dickinson turns on him," I said. "---priceless."

 

William Dale Fries, Jr. (b. 1928)
A fellow native Iowan and Colorado transplant (and a heck of bread salesman)

Ten-four, good buddy!