‘Gong Show’ creator Barris dies aged 87
NEW YORK: Chuck Barris, whose game show empire included The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and that infamous factory of cheese, The Gong Show, died at 87.
Barris died of natural causes on Tuesday afternoon at his home in Palisades, New York, according to publicist Paul Shefrin, who announced the death on behalf of Barris’ family.
Barris made game show history right off the bat, in 1966, with The Dating Game, hosted by Jim Lange. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date. Sometimes the process was switched, with a male questioning three females. But in all cases the questions were designed by the show’s writers to elicit sexy answers.
After the show became a hit on both daytime and nighttime TV, the Barris machine accelerated. New products included The Newlywed Game, The Parent Game, The Family Game and even The Game Game. The grinning, curly-haired Barris became a familiar face as creator and host of The Gong Show, which aired from 1976 to 1980.
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’ other series were slipping, he sold his company for a reported US$100 million (about 3.5 billion baht) in 1980 and decided to go into films.
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 who said the creator of some of television’s most lowbrow game shows had allowed his imagination to run wild when he claimed to have spent his spare time travelling the world, quietly rubbing out enemies of the United States.
“It sounds like he has been standing too close to the gong all those years,” quipped CIA spokesman Tom Crispell. “Chuck Barris has never been employed by the CIA and the allegation that he was a hired assassin is absurd,” Mr Crispell added. Barris, who offered no corroboration of his claims, was unmoved. “Have you ever heard the CIA acknowledge someone was an assassin?” he once asked.
He moved to a villa in the south of France in the 1980s with his girlfriend and future second wife, Robin Altman and rarely returned to his old haunts over the next two decades.