The Gong Show’s Chuck Barris dead at 87
Chuck Barris, whose game show empire included The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and that infamous factory of cheese The Gong Show, has died of natural causes. He was 87.
Barris made game show history in 1966 with The Dating Game. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from view, to determine which would be the best date, or sometimes a male questions three females. Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin and a pre- Charlie’s Angels Farrah Fawcett.
After the show became a hit, the Barris machine accelerated. New products included The Newlywed Game, The Parent Game, The Family Game and even The Game Game, with Barris at one point supplying 27 hours a week of TV.
He became a familiar face as creator and host of The Gong Show, which aired from 1976 to 1980.
Patterned after a 1930s radio hit, Major Bowes Amateur Hour, the program featured performers with peculiar talents and, often, no talent at all. When the latter appeared, Barris would strike an oversize gong, the show’s equivalent of vaudeville’s hook.
He called himself “The King of Daytime Television,” but to critics he was “The King of Schlock” or “The Baron of Bad Taste.”
As The Gong Show and Barris’s other series were slipping, he sold his company for a reported $100 million (U.S.) in 1980 and decided to go into films. He directed and starred in The Gong Show Movie, a thundering failure that stayed in theatres a week.
Afterward, a distraught Barris checked into a New York hotel and wrote his autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in two months. In it, he claimed to have been a CIA assassin.
The book (and the 2002 film based on it, directed by George Clooney) were widely dismissed by disbelievers.