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In the movies, as in life, certain topics have to be addressed with care, compassion, and sensitivity. Suicide is very much one of these topics, as it is something that affects so many people in first-hand and tangential ways, making it extremely triggering. Therefore, it stands to reason that when Burt Reynolds wanted to make a movie dealing with suicide in the late 1970s, most of Hollywood wanted nothing to do with the project. After all, this wasn’t the usual fare of the star best known for movies like Smokey and the Bandit – and it made everybody extra nervous that the film was pitched as a black comedy.
In 1971, Jerry Belson – the co-creator of The Odd Couple – wrote a script about a shady Los Angeles real estate promoter who finds out he has less than a year to live. He resolves to kill himself rather than die a slow and painful death, but when he botches it, he wakes up in a mental institution. He then befriends a paranoid schizophrenic who helps him try to finish the job, but each and every time, he is unsuccessful. The script was entitled The End, and it wound up sitting in a drawer at Columbia Pictures for five years.
Naturally, this description of The End sounds like it could be potentially offensive on many levels, and this is why Columbia wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to get it into production. However, when the script made its way to Reynolds—a man who admitted to having a dark sense of humour—he found it hilarious. He also thought it was more nuanced and true to life than executives were giving it credit for.
“I’d read an awful lot of comedies, and none struck me as especially funny, according to my strange sense of comedy,” Reynolds told Film Comment. “There are a lot of minefields in this topic – death – and that’s why everybody turned it down over the last five years.”
Reynolds found the script to have a unique combination of boundary-pushing subject matter with comedy that sprung from three-dimensional characters. “You can deal with death on a totally Mel Brooks level,” he explained, “but when you try to make a film with parts that are really real amidst the comedy, that’s a big risk.”
When Reynolds declared that he wanted to make The End, though, it seemed like the entirety of Hollywood baulked. In 2011, he told Sarah’s Backstage Pass, “I loved it, but it was impossible to get the studios to do it. You can imagine saying, ‘I have a comedy, and it’s about dying.’ No one wanted it.”
At the time, Warner Brothers was pushing for Reynolds to make Hooper, an action comedy about stuntmen and women, but he wanted to make The End. He stonewalled the studio, insisting, “No, I won’t do it unless you do this picture.” Ultimately, he agreed to star in Hooper as long as The End was greenlit at a budget of $1.5million. The film wound up being produced by United Artists instead of Warner Bros, but Reynolds didn’t care – he just wanted to get the thing made.
Once again, though, Reynolds found casting the film to be as much of an uphill battle as getting it greenlit. “It was very difficult to get anybody,” the Boogie Nights star admitted. “I then went out and got some friends who were in the picture. I had an amazing group of people who did guest parts.” Those friends included Dom DeLuise, Carl Reiner, and Sally Field, who was in a relationship with Reynolds and also starred alongside him in Hooper.
At the end of the day, Reynolds dragged The End kicking and screaming into creation, and nobody would have been surprised if his suicide comedy had struggled to find an audience before being shuffled quietly out of cinemas. Instead, despite middling reviews, it struck a morbid chord with filmgoers, making a healthy $45million at the box office – proving that Reynolds may have been right to take such a big risk and push for it to be made.
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