MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: A maid stealing Coors beer from a hotel room inspired the creation of Smokey and the Bandit.

The late, great Burt Reynolds was one of the most famous movie stars in the world during the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout it all, he credited his "worst mistake" as being the time that he turned down a role specifically written for him in Terms of Endearment that ended up winning Jack Nicholson an Academy Award when he took it and instead chose to do the race car movie, Stroker Ace.

However, it is important to note that Stroker Ace was directed and co-written by Hal Needham, a good friend of Reynolds who had directed four previous hits for Reynolds -- Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper, Smokey and the Bandit II, The Cannonball Run and Cannonball Run II. Needham was one of the best stunt men in the business before he got into directing and he had been Reynolds' stunt double a number of times on earlier films. In fact, it was during one of those earlier films that Needham came up with the idea for his directorial debut, Smokey and the Bandit, and inspiration came from an unlikely source!

First, let us set the scene. Here is a Time Magazine article from 1974 discussing Coors beer...

Gerald Ford had a case of it tucked away in his luggage when he returned to Washington last month from a vice-presidential skiing trip to Colorado. President Eisenhower had his own steady supply airlifted to the White House aboard an Air Force plane. Actor Paul Newman refuses to be seen drinking any other brand on the screen. Until a court made him stop, Frederick Amon, 24, used to drive a refrigerated truckload every week from Denver to Charlotte, N.C., where he sold it to restaurants and country clubs for as much as $1 a can, better than triple the retail price of about $1.50 a sixpack.

The object of that foaming frenzy is Coors Banquet Beer, brewed from the waters of the 70 to 80 springs around Golden, Colo., 15 miles west of Denver. Unlike most U.S. beers, Coors contains no preservatives or stabilizers and is not pasteurized; if left unrefrigerated and allowed to get warm, it will spoil in a week. It is probably the only beer that is kept cold from the brewery to the customer. But its lack of additives and its brewing process greatly enhance its taste. For many connoisseurs, Coors is the Château Haut-Brion of American beers.

Because of the danger of the beer spoiling, there was actually a law saying that you couldn't ship the beer east of the Mississippi River, as the idea was that you couldn't promise it being safe to drink at that point. A dude driving a refrigerated truck wasn't exactly reliable in the eyes of the law, ya know?

Anyhow, in 1976, Needham was working as the stunt coordinator on the Burt Reynolds film, Gator.

The late Needham himself wrote in to Fortune magazine before he passed away in 2012 with the following story:

While shooting Gator in Georgia [in 1976], something small happened that changed my life forever. The driver captain on the movie came to me one day on the set and said he had brought some Coors beer from California, and that he would drop off a couple of cases in my room. At that time you couldn’t buy Coors east of the Mississippi River. I thanked him but didn’t mention that I didn’t drink much beer. Two cases of Coors appeared in my room. I put a few bottles in the fridge and forgot about it. Some days later I noticed that the fridge was empty of Coors, so I restocked it. As days went by, the beer again disappeared. I don’t claim to be a detective, but it was pretty obvious that someone with a passkey had been raiding my fridge. A good guess was a hotel employee; better yet, how about the maid?

One day when I didn’t have to work, I set a trap. I counted the beers in the fridge and went to breakfast, figuring by the time I got back the maid would be there. As I returned, she was making up my room. I left for a few minutes and returned to verify my suspicions. I counted the bottles; there were two missing. I tried to figure out why. How important was it to acquire Coors beer? I had read an article about Coors being transported on Air Force One. The driver captain had bootlegged a number of cases to Georgia. The maid was stealing two bottles at a time. This must be serious stuff. Bootlegging Coors would make a good plotline for a movie.

So he then put together a script for a low budget movie that would star Jerry Reed, who had played the bad guy in Gator, as the guy bootlegging the beer.

However, he then showed the screenplay to his friend, Reynolds, who thought that the script was terrible, but he liked the idea so much that he agreed to star in the movie and suddenly, the movie was a legit major film production (Jerry Reed moved over from being the main smuggler to being the guy driving the refrigerated truck while Reynolds' Bandit drove ahead to keep an eye out for the police, i.e. "Smokey"). Universal Studios backed it for five times what Needham originally intended to spend on the film (they then cut 1/5 of the budget right before shooting began, which made the whole thing a lot more difficult for Needham, but such is life in the film business).

Much of the film's dialogue was improvised, but it was still a massive hit and started Needham on a successful career as a film director. His next film, Hooper, also starred Reynolds and it was about...a movie stuntman! Write what you know, write what you know...

The legend is...

STATUS: True

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