Last night as I pulled into the driveway, I was listening to one of Atlanta’s country stations.
They were playing the Jerry Reed song “East Bound And Down”, the theme to the 1977 Burt Reynolds movie “Smokey And The Bandit” (SATB), and it brought back memories of my childhood in Snellville.
The first time I saw the movie was at the old Snellville Cinema. I enjoyed the movie so much, I went back there to see it at least 1 or 2 more times. In fact, I give SATB credit for shaping my very early roadgeek existence. :)
For those of you who may not have seen the movie, here’s the premise…
An eccentric father/son pair of Texas millionaires named “Big Enos” and “Little Enos” make an outrageous big-money deal with an egotistical thrillseeker, “The Bandit” (Burt Reynolds), to pick up a tractor-trailer load of Coors Beer in Texarkana, Texas, and bring it back to Atlanta in an 18-hour round trip. (At the time, Coors Beer was not allowed in Georgia, thus it was roughly an equivalent to running moonshine.)
“The Bandit” talks his reluctant trucker friend Cletus “Snowman” Snow (Jerry Reed) into accompanying him in this insane quest. “Snowman” drives the tractor-trailer full of beer while “Bandit” runs interference miles ahead of him with his Pontiac Trans Am. Their primary means of communcation were their CB radios.
On the way back, “Bandit” unwittingly picks up a runaway bride, Carrie (Sally Field), who was to be married to the dimwitted son of Texarkana Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason).
When the Sheriff learns that Carrie is with “The Bandit”, he and his dimwitted son “Junior” go on a cross-country pursuit of “The Bandit”.
The result was one of the craziest, wackiest cross-country car chases in movie history, plus a real-life surge in the sales of CB radios and Pontiac Trans-Ams.
I remember the fun we had traveling down to Florida with the new 23-channel Cobra CB rig my dad bought and installed in the family car (which was not a Trans-Am, but a 1972 Grand Prix which I would later have as my car during my college years). As a kid, it was pretty cool "spotting Smokies" (police) and "ratchet-jawing" (speaking) with other CBers. Eventually, as CBs became passe along with other 1970s fads like disco (I HATE DISCO!!!), I grew out of it.
The movie was filmed in various locations around metro Atlanta, including freeway scenes that were shot on the stretch of GA 400 between Alpharetta and Cumming. At the time SATB was filmed(1976-1977), GA 400 made a great filming location since it was sparsely used… quite a contrast to the huge traffic volumes it has due to the phenomenal growth of North Fulton and Forsyth Counties in the 1990s.
One particular scene was where a Georgia State Patrol car was chasing “The Bandit’s” Trans-Am around and around an interchange. The interchange was GA 141 (Exit 13).
This afternoon, I just ordered SATB from Amazon.com. This also includes the totally lame sequels SATB II and SATB III, but it was the only way I could get the first SATB :(
That's all for now. Thanks for your visit, keep 'er between the ditches, and we'll catch you on the "flip-flop", good buddy!!! :)
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2 comments:
Wow, I thought that freeway in the movie looked familiar, but I just could not seem to place it. I kept thinking it was I-85 down south of Atlanta. Now I DEFINITELY want to see it again. I'd love to know what other state and major county roads they featured in the movie, because those also looked familiar.
I remember this. I was only 12 and my mom lived at the McFarland Rd exit on a dirt road (one exit south of 141). There's a bunch of offices there now. It was a HUGE deal to the locals to have a movie filmed there especially the Smokey and the Bandit movie with those actors. Another fact is that GA-400 was still being built north of Hwy 20. If you didn't grow up around there, it would be very difficult to identify these days for sure!
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