Professor Elam

Thursday August 18, 2011

Two stars of yesterday meet again. Yes Merrill, once a lead underwriter and now the ward of the Walking Wounded Bank of America, holds the mortgage on, yes, Burt Reynolds home. Burt took out a mortgage on the house in 1993 after divorcing Loni Anderson. No doubt he thought he would make enough money to pay back the proceeds. No doubt Merrill thought he would as well. Funny thing, they both have needed bailouts. 

It didn't have to be this way. 

While this story may not mean much to our younger students, older readers will recall that Burt once ran neck and neck with the likes of, yes Clint Eastwood. I recall reading an article comparing then  stars Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, and older Charles Bronson. What happened?

Bronson simply settled for doing serials of the street avenger he first played in Death Wish. But he was at least a big supporting star in the 1960s in Dirty Dozen and Once Upon a Time in the West. But settling for remake after remake of the same story suggested he was not interested or the studios had typecast him. 

Reynolds however achieved stardom equal to Clint, they even co-starred in a thoroughly forgettable movie together. Burt had a fling with Dinah Shore, then Sally Field (which never made sense to me), and finally blonde bombshell Loni Anderson. Burt snagged the lead in the popular tv series Evening Shade. He even had a actor's studio in Florida, a stretch given his role in films like Gator and SMokey. 

Clint has been married four times and fathered seven children. But Burt seemingly blew up after the divorce from Loni and lost the tv series. Unlike Clint, he had not solidified himself as a director producer with acting as a sort of second life. And so he has appeared in tv series and B movies since. Perhaps he peaked, in retrospect, when he posed pretty much in the all together for Cosmopolitan in the 1970s. 

Clint made sure that despite remakes like Dirty Harry, he had control of his career, and his films made the studios lots of money. Every Which Way was the second biggest grossing film for Universal after Jaws at that time!

The bottom line, get control of your career, focus long term, otherwise you and also rans like Merrill might end up as uncomfortable bed fellows.