Chuck Barris was a TV visionary, developing shows in the 70s that were decades ahead of their time. But was he also a covert assassin for the CIA? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What was Chuck Barris's role in television?
Okay. So did you, did you watch any gong show ever? Like was it reruns or something?
Yeah, I saw some reruns. I was never, I mean, I can understand the gong show is a cult classic.
Yeah.
And I totally get why. It just never got me in that way. You know what I mean?
Hey, when you're seven, it's pretty great.
How bad? You're like, come on, boobs.
Yeah.
So we're not talking specifically just about The Gong Show. We're talking about the guy who is routinely wrongly attributed for creating The Gong Show. And the reason why is because he was a legendary game show producer, and he hosted The Gong Show, and his name was Chuck Barris.
But just to kind of clear the air right out of the gate, The Gong Show was actually created by Chris Beard, who would go on to become a legendary creator of another cult classic called Sherman Oaks in the 90s. I never watched that.
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Chapter 2: How did Chuck Barris become a game show producer?
Isn't that great?
And very of the time. That fits. Yeah.
The Ayatollah was on people's minds in the mid to late 70s. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, this guy was born in 1929. Apparently, when you read about interviews that he's given... Like he was born in 29, 30, 31, 32. Like he is not huge on keeping up with consistent details. And I still don't know whether that was intentional.
Like, was he toying with people all this time or did he just not pay attention to that kind of thing? Because he had bigger stuff going on.
Yeah, like killing people. Who knows? But he is a guy from Philly, went to, at the time, Drexel Institute of Technology, now Drexel University in the 50s, wanted to be a songwriter for Tin Pan Alley for a little while, ultimately would write a song, which we'll get to.
And then decided he wanted to get into television and became a page at NBC in 1955, which went nowhere because the daytime sales department he was a page for at the time was eliminated. But that gave him the TV bug.
Yeah, that was what he wanted to do was crack into TV. He even went so far as to marry the niece of the founder of CBS.
Not a bad move.
A woman named Lynn Levy. But, yeah, in the context of his ambitions, you're like, like, what's that? Like, you know, deliberate kind of thing. Who knows? I guess it doesn't really matter.
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Chapter 3: What was the concept behind The Gong Show?
Chapter 4: What were the controversies surrounding Chuck Barris's shows?
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Like, data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality.
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All right, we're back. Josh left quite a cliffhanger with the word that Chuck Beres made a very faithful decision. And that faithful decision was to be the actual host of what would be the thing he was most known for, The Gong Show, which ran for but two years in daytime, then a couple of more years in syndication until 1980. And, you know, Beres said initially, like, I thought this would be
basically what we see now with like America's Got Talent, like a real talent show with real amateur talent. But he got a lot of bad people in there and decided to go a different route. And the show ended up being
very bad talent um that was uh i mean the premise of the show was they performed in front of celebrity a celebrity panel and if it was so bad that the celebrity panel uh one of them could or all of them sometimes could get up and hit the gong which would end their performance if they managed to make it through without the gong uh they would rate them on a scale of zero to ten
Yeah, but the celebrity panel, and we're talking like celebrities of 20 years before panel. Right. Or if they were active celebrities, like say Jamie Farr, they were like B-list maybe.
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Chapter 5: How did Chuck Barris claim to be a CIA assassin?
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Okay, Chuck, like you said, in 1984, Chuck Beres released an autobiography called Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The subtitle was an unauthorized autobiography, which is pretty funny.
Yeah.
And in it, he recounts, apparently as far as the critics were concerned, like pretty masterfully, he recounts his life as a game show producer, as a hated... destroyer of civility and taste across American culture and just how he dealt with that.
But some of the other parts were also part of his life at the time, mixed in, where he was going abroad as a CIA hitman and carrying out contract killings for the CIA, 33 of them by his count. And he would describe these in graphic detail. Apparently, there was one where he writes about having broken some guy's front teeth because he jammed the gun with the silencer in there.
And it's really graphic stuff. And he's writing about this totally matter-of-factly and seemingly totally unironic, as if he's revealing to the world that he was both this legendary producer and secretly at the same time a hitman.
Yeah. And, you know, the the idea was that he was it was the perfect cover because nobody would suspect Chuck Beres, TV producer, king of schlock of doing something like this. So the CIA just loved it. Did you see the movie?
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