A vintage dollhouse-sized figure of Burt Reynolds striking his famous pose as seen in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1972.
 
Today my dear Dangerous Minds readers you are going to get an eyeful of a tiny reproduction of Burt Reynolds’ famous Cosmopolitan spread, where the then 36-year-old actor posed nude on a bearskin rug. According to Burt, he now regrets the decision and recalls that to work up the courage to lose his clothes for the shoot he got completely plastered before becoming the first man in history to get naked for a major magazine.

Usually, decisions made after getting “zonkered” as Reynolds so eloquently put it and then taking off your clothes while there are cameras around often doesn’t end well. But this was simply not the case when it comes to the image of Mr. Reynolds that forever set the bar for nude photography at the highest possible level when it comes to the unbridled beauty of a hunky, hairy, naked man looking right at home on top of a bearskin rug made from the hide of a bear that he had presumably killed himself. Now that’s a man. But as usual, I’ve digressed a bit from the point of this post which is my recent discovery that a tiny reproduction of this blessed event exists—and can be yours for the low-low price of $314.99.

According to the information in the eBay listing for little Burt, the dollhouse-sized figure is likely made of porcelain or bisque and just over five inches long. It also includes an inscription, probably added by the maker of the figure, one “Joy #22” (if that is, in fact, her real name). The figure is said to be in excellent condition despite the fact that it’s probably 30-40 years old. Little Burt is slightly less tan than his real-life doppelgänger but is nicely covered with hair that looks to be entirely too real.

Buy it today and keep hairy little Burt prisoner in your own dollhouse. It could be therapeutic?

I’ve included photos from the listing below and even though this isn’t really Burt Reynolds in the nude, it’s still slightly NSFW.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Between the twin humiliations of his frozen peas and Paul Masson commercials, and unable to finish his last feature The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles found himself on an LA soundstage with Burt Reynolds, wearing matching red shirts with enormous collars and chatting about showbiz for a TV pilot. This was Welles’ shot at hosting a talk show. There were no takers.

Like much of the great director’s work, The Orson Welles Show was made on the cheap, and if no one will confuse this unloved project with Chimes at Midnight, it’s not because Welles was slacking. In Orson Welles Remembered, the show’s editor, Stanley Sheff, says that he got the job by offering to work for free for three days, which “turned into a year of collaboration with Mr. Welles on The Orson Welles Show.” That’s right: according to Sheff, he and Welles put in a year of eight-hour days editing this 74-minute program on video, “working weekends and holidays when required.” Compare this with Citizen Kane, which started post-production in November 1940 and was first screened in January 1941.
 

 
Did I mention The Orson Welles Show was cheaply made? The budget was such that Sheff had to wear three hats, filling in for Welles as director for a few inserts and playing the part of the violinist in the big finish with Angie Dickinson. And according to the notes on YouTube, it’s not just the canned laughter that makes the lengthy interview with Reynolds (roughly the first half of the show) seem so odd:

Audience questions for the Burt Reynolds Q&A session were scripted, with members of the audience given line readings - this was necessary, as unlike normal talk shows filmed with a multiple-camera setup, the low-budget show was filmed with only one camera, and so it was necessary to do multiple retakes to get multiple camera angles.

The second half of the show runs at a higher gear. Welles intones something about “the unfathomable antiquity of ancient Egypt.” Fozzie Bear gets flop sweat doing his “A material” during the Muppets’ bit, which leads into an interview with Jim Henson (“think Rasputin as an Eagle Scout,” Welles says) and Frank Oz. But it’s the last fifteen minutes of the show that are pure Welles. Fans of F for Fake will discern a strong formal resemblance between that film and the elaborate magic tricks that close The Orson Welles Show; I’m guessing this is where all those hours in the editing room went.
 
Watch the pilot for ‘The Orson Welles Show’ after the jump…

Burt Reynolds horse painting, opening bid $2,000-3,000
 
Burt Reynolds denies he’s having financial problems, he’s just clearing up some of the clutter. But he is definitely auctioning off some amazing items, and some of that clutter is pretty sweet, though, including the Emmy he won for his work in Evening Shade and the 1977 Pontiac Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit (actually used as a “promotional vehicle,” hmmm). Maybe he’s just found Buddha or something and has decided he doesn’t need his Emmy anymore. Tons of awesome stuff here, including lots of football helmets and belt buckles and cowboy boots and stuff like that. The man likes his rustic western motif, and he likes to put his name and initials on stuff and to look at his own face, judging from the items in the auction, which happens next Thursday at Julien’s Auctions. We decided to focus on some of the items that pretty much could only have come from Burt himself. No trace of the great literary masterpiece Burt Reynolds Hot Line—if only!!
 

Burt Reynolds portrait… I ... I have no words for this thing, opening bid $600-800
 

Burt Reynolds carved miniature, opening bid $400-600
 

Burt Reynolds “Beware” sign, opening bid $200-300
 

Burt Reynolds naked torso painting, opening bid $800-1200
 

Burt Reynolds Striptease working script, opening bid $200-400
 

Burt Reynolds voided American Express card, opening bid $100-200
 

Dom DeLuise painting, opening bid $1500-2000
 

Burt Reynolds Rolodex, opening bid $300-500
 

Sammy Davis Jr. painting, opening bid $800-1200
 

Burt Reynolds license plates and parking sign, opening bid $300-500
 

Sculpture of Reynolds reading a newspaper, opening bid $1000-2000
 

Burt Reynolds portrait bust, opening bid $300-500
 

Burt Reynolds Paternity poster art, opening bid $600-800
 

 
One of the many mystifying aspects of the 1970s was the American public’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for Burt Reynolds. The same decade that is widely considered the strongest for uncompromising American cinema, a decade that produced The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and Nashville.... was also the decade that multiple times bestowed on Reynolds the title of America’s top box office star.

It isn’t so much that Reynolds is bad, exactly. It’s just that often his fame and celebrity success often seemed to come in advance of the cinematic accomplishments. If you look at Reynolds’ finishes in the “Ten Money Making Stars Poll” annually conducted by the Quigley Publishing Company, you get this:

1973: 4
1974: 6
1975: 7
1976: 6
1977: 4
1978: 1
1979: 1
1980: 1
1981: 1
1982: 1
1983: 4
1984: 6

Number one box office star—five years in a row. That feat was duplicated only by Bing Crosby from 1944 to 1948. If you look at 1973, the first year Reynolds made the list, he finished ahead of (in order) Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, and Paul Newman. At that point his primary accomplishments as an actor were being second lead in Deliverance (an admittedly excellent movie in which he is also very good) and a brief appearance in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). In addition, of course, Reynolds had starred in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. For the next few years, it didn’t really matter what movies Reynolds starred in—the American public wanted more.

One of the most attention-getting episodes in Reynolds’ career was his hunkalicious nude appearance in the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan. Clearly, women were lusting after the cocky (ahem) and hirsute thespian and former athlete, a fact that leads us into the true subject of this post.

In 1972 Signet Books released a remarkable paperback, authored by Burt Reynolds, with the title Hot Line: The Letters I Get ... And Write! It was less a portrayal of Reynolds’ life as a man of letters than a kind of palatable, not X-rated version of his Cosmo pictorial.

Reynolds was not a man without a sense of humor, as can be seen in his confident, silly pose on the hand chair. (Yes, that’s right—hand chair.) The letters—who can say where these letters came from?—all acknowledge Reynolds’ fame and sex appeal as immutable facts and engage in some heavy double entendres—what one writer terms “Swahili.” Here’s a typical sample:
 

Dear Burt,

MAN, DO YOU EVER TURN ME ON! You’re great. When I told my husband how I love you, he said, “Well, just pretend that I’m Burt Reyolds.” To which I replied, “Nobody in the world has got that much imagination!”

I have to tell you this funny thing that happened at the office where I work. We have this 60-yr-old supervisor (lady). When we showed her the miniature picture of you from Newsweek, she said, “Well, that doesn’t turn me on!” The rest of us girls decided it would take all the men of South America put together to turn her on.

But you’re just the hottest! If I knew my tropic zone number I would use it rather than my zip code. (Sin)—Cerely

FAY IN FARGO

Dear Fay:

Why don’t you introduce your husband to the 60-year-old supervisor? Forget about your tropic zone number and bone up on your erogenous zones.

 
The pictures of these luscious babes literally draping themselves on Reynolds’ torso are a kind of visual corollary to the libido that the sexual revolution had just unleashed. You can’t exactly imagine Clark Gable doing this pictorial…. this was the new sexual frankness that would come to define the decade. In fact, you could argue that this stupid book, or the Cosmo pictorial, was the first thing that really reeked of the Seventies the way we think of it today. That hairy chest just needs a coke spoon to complete the picture.

Here are a few shagadelic scans from the book—I’m confident you won’t soon forget them.
 

 

 
More Burt Reynolds than anyone in this century could ever possibly want, after the jump…

 
Marlon Brando was not known for keeping his opinions to himself and in this recording from the set of Apocalypse Now Brando riffs on his disgust for Burt Reynolds.

Brando seems to savor every deliciously wicked word.

I disagree with the thought process of people like him, who is a totally narcissistic person who epitomizes everything wrong with being a celebrity in Hollywood.

 
I wonder if part of Brando’s hate for Reynolds is rooted in this parody from an episode of The Twilight Zone. Was Brando that thin-skinned?