Chuck Barris, noted host of such classic game shows as The Gong Show and The Dating Game, has a book out Confessions of a Dangerous Mind that is now being released as a movie (with George Clooney). In it, he claims that all the while he was hosting these television shows, he was secretly a CIA hit man.
Naturally, the skeptic meter starts ringing like a five alarm fire. On the other hand, the conspiracist can retort, “Who better for a hit man? Nobody would believe it.”
So I’m wondering, what evidence is there to support or refute this claim? Anybody got anything conclusive?
It does state that the game show components are word-for-word from another Barris autobiography, but without the CIA components. Not that that means anything. Barris could have written the one book, then later re-released it with the new CIA stuff in it.
Barris was on Letterman tonight and he told the story about how a reporter called the CIA and asked for confirmation of Barris’ claims. The official CIA spokesman something to the effect of “I think Mr. Barris has been standing too close to his gong”.
When I was a game show contestant in 2000, one of the contestant coordinators told me that she got her start in Hollywood working for Chuck Barris Productions.
She was a staffer on the Dating Game, Gong Show, and the $1.98 Beauty Show. Needless to say, she had some great stories.
She remembered Chuck Barris as a very kind man, not terribly Hollywood. This kindness was balanced, apparantly, by an offbeat worldview.
I wasn’t aware of this book at the time. I’d love to get her opinion.
Barris admitted in an interview back in the 1980s that he made the whole hit man section up. Today, of course, with the movie giving revived publicity to his reissued book, he is disclaiming his disclaimer and dancing beautifully around the question, as he did on Letterman last night.
It was a wonderful performance, but I don’t believe it for even a second.
He reportedly did the denial during a tv interview. I’m fairly sure that Letterman alluded to it at one point during the show. But I read about it in a magazine article on Barris and I can’t find the reference again. Sorry.
I certainly would be surprised to learn he was a hit man.
On the other hand, I’d be surprised to learn that he’s an oenophile, speaks fluent French, is an extremely nice and very refined guy, and all of those are true.
I’d also be surprised to learn that “Boss Hogg” from DUKES OF HAZARD was a multilingual agent for OSS (the CIA’s predecessor), yet that’s true also.
Biggest evidence that Barry really was a hitman: he lived to release the novel.
If that’s not enough, then the story is non-falsifiable because someone could always say that the CIA would never admit it if it were true.
Asking for cites to prove that the creator of The $1.98 Beauty Show is joking about being a CIA assassin is like asking for cites to prove that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy might not be real.
Thanks, Bob, and you’re correct. This is such a strange claim, one would need evidence to support it. And that’s as much what I’m looking for as evidence to deny it. It’s just the first responses I got were “Naw, it can’t be true.”
Let’s start with a something that can be verifiable.
Did The Dating Game really offer chapperoned dates to, uh, “political hotbeds” that weren’t exactly know for their tourist attractions? i.e. West Berlin?
Plenty of man-butt in that movie, there is.
Why couldn’t there be plenty of Julia Roberts Butt?
I don’t really believe it either, but the proof is hardly in the title.
You could just as easily argue that the proof that it’s true is in the title, because he’s CONFESSING what’s on his mind.
I confess what’s on my mind when talking w/ a priest. That hardly makes it fantasy.
Um…Barris was on the local morning show idiot’s show and Barris doesn’t seem to agree with you.
He said that it was A) real, B) he wouldn’t discuss anything in more detail and C) got pretty pissy and got weird (long pauses, rambling digressions not apropos of anything, etc) when pressed.
It was not a “I’m playing coy to sell the book”-type interview, it was an “I’m suffering from a psychotic delusion and will snap if pressed” type interview.
It sounded like he believed it. And going on the air and convincing people that your book is the product of a mental illness is not the work of a crafty marketing genius.
The local morning-show idiot is one of the more credulous people around (he just did a huge fund raiser for a kid who needs a bone-marrow transplant, without checking to see if the kid needs the money. Turns out that a hospital had already offered to do it for free.) but even the local morning-show idiot thought that the interview was “bizarre”.
