![]() He understands that Barris will kill people for him not because he needs the money but because killing satiates the beast within like nothing else. Jim Byrd is less a man than a sinister force, the terrifying darkness in Barris’ soul rendered human. Then one day, this struggling young man is approached by Clooney’s Jim Byrd, who informs him that “he fits the profile” of the kind of young man the CIA is interested in (violent, angry, directionless, devoid of close emotional attachments) and offers him an unusual opportunity to serve his country as an independent contractor killing people for the agency. There’s also incoherent rage, the kind of bottomless, visceral anger that leads to bar fight after bar fight after bar fight, even though he’s really bad at bar fighting. When he begins to work in television, his passes are increasingly reciprocated to an almost disconcerting degree.īut there’s more to the up-and-coming Chuck’s life than ambition, television, and sex. ![]() We are then transported from this bleak ending to a similarly bleak beginning, as young Chuck Barris grows up and tries to find himself - a process that mostly involves trying unsuccessfully to get women to have sex with him. He’d seem to be the antithesis of the smiling goofball Chuck Barris played on TV, but really he’s just the flip side, the deep, depressive funk following a manic high that lasted decades. He stands before us, shaggy and pot-bellied, both emotionally and physically naked. Clooney also tackled the crucial supporting role of Jim Byrd, a glowering CIA handler who recruits the game show king into the shadowy world of international espionage.Ĭhuck begins the movie in a state of profound emotional disrepair. Bryan Singer and Johnny Depp were initially on board as director and star, but the film ultimately ended up getting made on a relatively modest budget, with the wonderful Sam Rockwell in the lead as Chuckie Baby and George Clooney behind the camera for his directorial debut. The film adaptation of Confessions Of A Dangerous Mindspent what felt like an eternity in development hell. The book particularly caught on with Hollywood because God knows there’s nothing show business people would rather read about than show business. The book was also presumably inspired by other ambitious authors not named Phillip.īarris seems to have written Confessions primarily to amuse himself, but also to prove to the world that he was a bona fide self-loathing Jewish intellectual and not the cynical, calculating hack of the public imagination. Confessions took its cues less from straight-faced memoirs by fellow game show mavens like Dick Clark or Merv Griffin than from the intense self-hatred and unrelenting sexual neurosis of Phillip Roth and the demented, surrealistic game-playing of Phillip Dick. Barris wasn’t just some celebrity who traded on his fame and success to get his kooky idea for a quasi-tell-all published. The idea that Confession Of A Dangerous Mind was real was absurd, of course, but it became an object of intense cult fascination. Like Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck during the making of I’m Still Here, Barris toyed extensively with the idea that Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind was real, and that during the heyday of The Dating Game he was out assassinating Communist agents when he wasn’t clowning around with Gene Gene the Dancing Machine or the Unknown Comic.Ĭonfessions wasn’t real, but it became an object of intense cult fascination. It was as much, if not more, about Barris’ claims to be a CIA assassin as it was about his real-life history as a reviled yet extraordinarily successful trash-culture maven. However, to folks like me, Barris was the author of Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, a game-show memoir unlike any other. That’s no mean feat, considering the level of discourse on television generally hovers between “rodeo at a state prison” and “three-year-old’s birthday party.” Yet these shows were eviscerated for not just being bad entertainment, but rather for lowering the level of discourse on television. These were profoundly bifurcated accomplishments: Barris created television shows that caught on with audiences like few shows before or since. Show business professionals also knew Barris as the creator of not just The Gong Show but also such insanely lucrative, venerable game show institutions as The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. On The Gong Show, everything was a lark, Barris’ genial presence most of all. For the masses that Barris entertained for decades before embracing life as a semi-recluse, he was “Chuckie Baby,” the seemingly stoned host of The Gong Show, a lovable goof whose hipster-beatnik antics conveyed just how little he cared about everything around him. When Chuck Barris died at 87 last month, he was remembered differently by different people.
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