The writer and podcaster Will Sloan is back for a show about Burt Reynolds, who started the eighties as the most popular movie star in America but who by the end of the decade was consigned to a series of B-movies that asked less and less of him, in the years before his unexpected mid-nineties comeback in Boogie Nights (a film he hated even though he won awards and nominations for his performance).

We discuss several of his eighties projects with a particular focus on four of them: his best film as a director, 1981’s Sharky’s Machine, his botched 1986 downbeat Vegas drama Heat (originally a Robert Altman project with a screenplay from the great William Goldman), 1987’s Malone (basically a remake of Shane, shot in British Columbia with a stacked supporting cast) and his nadir, the tired 1987 romantic comedy-thriller Rent-A-Cop (co-starring Liza Minnelli in her first film out of rehab, set in Chicago but filmed at Cinecitta studios in Rome). As his career declined Burt looked increasingly checked-out as a movie star, but these films are fun to watch and talk about, especially since Heat and Malone in particular are almost very good movies despite themselves.

Along the way we discuss Burt’s short-lived discotheque in Atlanta, Marlon Brando’s pathological hatred of him, and the injuries Reynolds sustained on the set of City Heatthat left him with an addiction to painkillers that sparked health rumours in the early days of the AIDS crisis.

Plus Will talks about his new project The Journal of Stoogeological Studies: An Unauthorized Three Stooges Fanzine.

Follow Will Sloan on Twitter and subscribe to his great podcasts The Important Cinema Club and Michael and Us.

You can order The Journal of Stoogeological Studies: An Unauthorized Three Stooges Fanzine here.

Heat, Malone and Rent-A-Cop are currently available to watch on Tubi.

35mm open matte trailer for Sharky’s Machine (Reynolds, 1981)