Paul Williams Talks Burt Reynolds, Sobriety and the 1977 Blockbuster “Smokey and the Bandit”

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May 27, 2022 – “It’s just culturally so interwoven. If there was ever a film that acted as kind of a clubhouse for a time and place, it’s Smokey and the Bandit.”

Williams’s screen time in Smokey is relatively brief, but he makes an immediate impression as Little Enos Burdette, who sets the movie’s cavalcade of car crashes in motion alongside his on-screen dad (and off-screen friend), Big Enos, played by Pat McCormick. Credit for that goes to their matching blue suits, which tipped Williams off to the spirit of the enterprise he had joined. “I remember Pat walking into the room wearing his version of the suit, and I thought: ‘Sure, he gets the great costume!’ And then I realized: ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got the same one here!” Williams’s screen time in Smokey is relatively brief, but he makes an immediate impression as Little Enos Burdette, who sets the movie’s cavalcade of car crashes in motion alongside his on-screen dad (and off-screen friend), Big Enos, played by Pat McCormick. Credit for that goes to their matching blue suits, which tipped Williams off to the spirit of the enterprise he had joined. “I remember Pat walking into the room wearing his version of the suit, and I thought: ‘Sure, he gets the great costume!’ And then I realized: ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got the same one here!”

According to Williams, it was Reynolds’s idea to cast the height-mismatched duo as the father and son who dispatch the Bandit to snag some celebratory cases of Coors Beer while avoiding the long arm of the law, aka “Smokey,” represented by Sheriff Buford T. Justice, played by The Honeymooners star Jackie Gleason. Along the way, the protagonist picks up runaway bride, Carrie (Sally Field), and gives her a literal crash course in the pleasures and perils of life in the smuggling game.