Duke and I also played lots of chess during our breaks. I am a decent player, but he had a bullish attack style that you would have expected of him. I never once beat him.
I WAS WRONG to have been so haughty about deigning to star in Eat My Dust! I learned a lot from observing Chuck Griffith’s fast, nimble, low-budget approach to filmmaking, and I just liked the indie vibe around the Corman machine. The movie performed surprisingly well at the box office, on its modest New World Pictures terms. Who’d a thunk it? So Roger was now especially inclined to let me make a movie. I was in the game! Not since American Graffiti had I felt so fulfilled by my work. My eczema started to clear up.
I bounded into Roger’s office for a pitch meeting, excited to enter the directing phase of my life. We were joined by Frances Doel, the beloved head of the script department at New World Pictures. She was a slim Englishwoman who, like Roger, struck me as surprisingly elegant for a gatekeeper of grindhouse. As Frances took notes, I sketched out a few different ideas I’d developed. One was a suitably gritty and provocative noir picture about a detective who cracks a case in the world of snuff films, movies that depict actual murders. I also pitched a dystopian sci-fi movie in which warring countries, rather than sending in troops to battle, resolved their disputes by having teams of futuristic gladiators fight.
Roger patiently listened to these pitches and a couple of others and then politely told me that I had struck out. “It’s wonderful to hear actors pitch,” he said. “It’s so much more entertaining. Ron, you tell these stories very well, but I’m not interested in any of them. They’re just not the type of film I make.”
I was preparing to skulk out of his office in defeat when Roger threw me a lifeline. He told me that New World Pictures had a process for testing titles to see if they held appeal to filmgoing audiences. The methodology was hardly scientific. He sent out interns to canvass people waiting in line at movie theaters, with mock-up posters for films that did not yet exist.
“Ron, when we were testing Eat My Dust! as a title, there was another title that came in a close second,” Roger said. “It was Grand Theft Auto. Think about that. If you could come up with a car-crash comedy called Grand Theft Auto, sort of like Eat My Dust! but different from Eat My Dust!, I’d probably make that picture. Provided that you also star in it.”
This was well before video-game consoles were commonplace, so grand theft auto was best known as a term used by lawyers and policemen. I had to admit, it did have an appealing ring. I left Roger’s office on Sunset grateful for the opportunity but also drawing a total blank. Grand Theft Auto: the movie. What the hell could it be? I knew that Roger liked to move fast, and therefore I needed to think fast.
I wasn’t getting very far by myself, so I sought out the help of my most recent screenwriting collaborator: Dad.
UP IN DAD’S office in the guesthouse in Toluca Lake, we spitballed. I paced around the room while Dad took notes on a pad. Then it occurred to him to pull out from a drawer an outline he had already written.
Dad was on friendly terms with Burt Reynolds and had been trying to hatch a project with him. Burt was red-hot in the mid-’70s, but Dad had known him prefame. Burt had done a guest spot on Gentle Ben in 1967, and a decade before that, he and Dad had first crossed paths when both were in a stage revival of Mister Roberts. Dad was keen to do a car-chase picture with Burt. Car-chase movies were at the apex of their popularity in the 1970s; Eat My Dust! was Roger’s way of cashing in on a trend popularized by such films as Vanishing Point, Gone in 60 Seconds, and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. Tough guys, hot babes, and muscle cars: the can’t-miss formula of the Nixon-Ford years.
Burt had already been in a smash-’em-up called White Lightning and was the logical choice to star in another. And he did—but not Dad’s. Instead, he committed to Smokey and the Bandit, a movie developed by the stuntman Hal Needham. Dad’s misfortune suddenly became my good fortune.
“I think we could adapt this, make it younger and funnier,” Dad said, showing me the outline. It wasn’t a youth-oriented plot, but I liked that it involved a car chase that stretched from L.A. all the way to Las Vegas. Dad and I started pooling our thoughts and film references. I came with the idea of taking inspiration from Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate: antiestablishment young people on the run, defying the wishes of the older generation. The lead female character, whom we named Paula Powers, defies her wealthy parents’ wishes to stay away from my working-class character, Sam Freeman, by stealing her parents’ Rolls-Royce so that she and Sam can gun it to Vegas and elope.