Hot pursuit. Watching the Bandit tear up the road was a thrill for everyone and those scenes hold a place all their own in the genre of car chase movies and TV shows, then and now.
HPP: Jackie Gleason? He was certainly a catch for the movie.
HN: Well, I had a lot to do with that. I said, "What about Gleason?" and the studio said, "Well, Gleason, we don't have enough money for Gleason." So I sent him the script anyway. I did two Smokey and the Bandit movies with Gleason, and he never knew my name. It was either Pally or Mr. Director. It was Pally when everything was good, Mr. Director when he was a little pissed. So he calls me up and says "Mr. Director, what makes you think that I would do this movie?" and I said, "Well, Mr. Gleason, I'm a big fan of yours and I've seen every Honeymooners episode ever made and many of your other shows and movies. I wrote this script and I'm directing the movie, so nothing is etched in stone. If you play the part, I can see that character being very, very funny. He said, "I'll do it." Of course we had to do a little negotiating on the paycheck and things like that, but that was how it happened.
HPP: How was he to work with once he was on the set?
HN: Wonderful! The only thing you had to watch for was when you gave him a 10:00 a.m. call, he expected to be in front of that camera by 10:30. If I had him in at 10 and didn't get to him until 11, he'd say, "Mr. Director, if you don't get me in front of the camera soon," and he'd have his assistant next to him, "I'll have to have [my assistant] run in and get me a scotch and soda." And I'd say, "You're up next."
HPP: Was there a lot of rewriting or ad-libbing during shooting?
HN: With Gleason, I'd say 75 percent of what he said was his own. I mean, he just came up with some of the funniest damn stuff and it was wonderful. Who am I to tell the master what's good and what's bad, you know? Most of his dialog came right out of his head. You know things like, "There's no way you could come from my loins," and, "The first thing I'm gonna do when I get home is punch your mama in the mouth." He called his son a "tick turd," really, a "tick turd." He had all kinds of funny stuff.
HPP: Did the other actors follow suit? Was there a lot of ad-libbing from them as well?
HN: Yeah, I guess so. I mean there always is unless you got some director with a lot of ego. You gotta listen to your actors, they don't wanna look like fools. They would often change the script during rehearsal and most of the time they changed it for the better.
HPP: How did the Trans Am become a character in the movie?
HN: That was my idea. I saw a picture of it in a magazine in black with gold stripes and T-tops and I said, "That's the car I want to put the Bandit in." I called the Pontiac people and told them my plan and, of course they'd never heard of me, so they said, "Well, what do you need?" I said "Well, I'd like to have some Trans Ams for Burt and I need three LeManses for the sheriff." After some negotiating, they gave me three Trans Ams and two LeManses. After that movie came out, you couldn't buy a black Trans Am. You had to wait six months. Their sales chart rose like the Empire State Building.
Burt and Sally as "the Bandit" and "Frog."
When I got ready to do the Smokey and the Bandit II, I had some pretty good friends at Pontiac. I was on a first name basis with them, in fact. They even invited me to speak at one of their affairs. So when I got ready to do II (the guy's name at Pontiac was Graham), I called and said, "Graham, I'm ready to do another Smokey and the Bandit." "How many cars do you need?" he asked. I said, "Well, I'm gonna need at least five Trans Ams." He said no problem. Then I said, "And I'll need 50 four-door sedans," and he said, "What?!" "I need 50 four-door sedans." In the second movie, Gleason calls his two cousins with the red and white cars. Well, I had 25 of each. They built them and shipped them on a train to me in Las Vegas. Pontiac said, "Do anything you want with them, but when you're done we gotta have them back so we can crush them to avoid any liability problems." So they gave me $750,000 worth of cars, but I sold more Trans Ams than all their dealers put together, for Christ's sake.
HPP: Many HPP readers have said "I first got into Trans Ams when I saw Smokey and the Bandit."
HN: You know what's really weird? I travel around a lot, and I do some speaking engagements. Kids will come up and they'll be 22 or 23 and they say, "Smokey and the Bandit's my favorite movie," and I say, "Wait a minute, you're 22 or 23. You weren't even born when I made that movie." They'll say, "Oh yeah, but my daddy's got a DVD of it and we watch it all the time." I'll tell you something else. It's hard to turn the TV on for a week without seeing Smokey and the Bandit. I was speaking up in Crested Butte at a film festival and they wanted a copy of Smokey, so my wife went to Universal to pick it up for me and they got to talking to her and they told her it was the most requested feature they ever had. That movie holds up even today.
HPP: How were the Pontiacs that you had gotten for the first movie modified to do the stunts?
HN: They weren't modified, except the one for the bridge jump. We were using a dirt road and the stuntman only had a short distance to get up to speed. We tried running the car stock with an automatic and it wouldn't get it done; it wouldn't go fast enough. Well, I had a NASCAR race team, so I just called my shop and said, "Send me up a 750 hp engine and a stick trans." Those are the only modifications we did, aside from safety equipment.
This Special Edition Smokey and the Bandit DVD was released by Universal Studios Home Entertainment in 2006 and contains never-before-seen special features, including interviews with Hal, Burt, and Paul Williams.
HPP: How was the bridge jump set up?
HN: Well, we built a ramp obviously, but I had the camera set so you couldn't see it. That bridge was already out, so we just measured it and determined how fast the Trans Am had to go to get over there, put a ramp in there, a big engine in and a stick shift, and said go for it.
HPP: By the time shooting was over, how many of those three Trans Ams were left?
HN: Zip. In the last shot, the Trans Am wouldn't even run. We had to push it in with another car so it would coast to the spot where Burt had to get out. We beat the crap out of those cars.
HPP: Then you also had the flatbed jump with the police car.
HN: Yeah. That's a pretty hard stunt. In fact, the first time, the stuntman came in a little hot and just went over. The left wheels fell off the trailer, the car hit the ground and rolled back on its wheels, and he just fired it up and said, "Let's do it again." He went back and did it a second time and it was perfect.
HPP: Were there any happy accidents that made it into the final cut?
HN: Well, let me tell you, when they jumped the fence and went onto the football field and then into that dugout, that whole thing was an accident. The stuntman got on the grass and the T/A just wouldn't stop. It scared me to death, because those were real kids in that dugout. My heart just sank because I could see a little kid, almost in slow motion, moving out of the way. I thought, "Oh my God I killed some kids." But nobody was even scratched. They said, "Well, Hal, let's use it." So we just built a board for the back of the dugout, drove through it and back on the highway.