Tiffany N. D’Emidio: Sam Rockwell was quoted as saying, “ He has a laid back exterior, but you know there is a lot going on underneath.�? Would you say that is an accurate description?Chuck Barris: Oh yeah. That’s true. I think that’s very true. I wont expand because I think that says it all. I hold a lot of stuff in. I’m aware of what’s going on around me but I think I’m more shy introverted to express some of those feelings.

TND: Sam also said you were very generous with your time helping him get the mannerisms in your voice down and where you were coming from.

CB: Well Sam, I’ll say right up front, I wasn’t thrilled about the fact that Sam Rockwell was going to play me because I was hoping to get the picture made and so many other guys wanted to do it like Ed Norton, Johnny Depp, Mike Meyers, Russell Crow which I could never understand, Kevin Spacey and I never heard of Sam Rockwell. But George Clooney was so adamant about Sam that I felt there must be something good about him. Why is George going to the mat for this guy because he said, “I will not direct the film unless Sam does the part.�? Miramax, who was holding the greenlight, was arguing the opposite. So when it was all resolved and Sam was the guy, I remember telling the producer, “Well we’ve got three quarters of a cup�? meaning we had Julia, we had Drew, we had George and Sam’s the fourth. And he said, “No, we have all four.�? Then Sam came over to say hello and he came to meet me. I like him from the moment I saw him. We hung out for four months. He saw every videotape he could get his hands on. I would say forty or fifty of them. He made me read to him from books so he could hear my inflections in my voice. I read to him on audiotapes and stuff like. He took the digital camera and followed me around New York with a little film camera. He made me dance for him and do all that stuff. Four months later he went up to Montreal and he did a wonderful job. I couldn’t imagine the picture being done with anybody but Sam.

TND: As a producer of so many shows, how was it letting someone else take the reigns to put this film together?

CB: I didn’t have anything to do with it contractually from the start. All I could do is root. I sold the book to Warner Brothers. Andrew Lazar bought the option on the book and he eventually sold the book and I got the money for the book. That’s it. I didn’t have any creative control or approval or anything. I didn’t care. I was really down. I wasn’t doing anything. I couldn’t write anything that anybody wanted to print or publish so if they just got this film made then the book might be reborn and then maybe I could write a sequel, which is the way things worked out. George Clooney opened up the doors. He said come up anytime you want to Montreal when they were filming it. He asked me questions about the game show parts. He also told me a very important thing. He said if there’s anything you don’t like let me know and I’ll try to get rid of it. The one thing that was paramount to me was in the original script, by Charlie Kaufman, I was into drugs, which I never was and which I was always accused of being. I asked if he would take that out and he did.

TND: Were you on set for any of the recreations of the game shows? Did it really take you back?

CB: Yeah, of course it did. They were perfect. They were absolutely perfect. Jim Bissel, the art director, recreated The Dating Game and recreated The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show…he recreated perfect sets. I could have gone up there and started doing the shows again on those sets. That’s how good they were. I had wonderful memories of those days. From the time The Dating Game went on in 1965 ‘til the day The Gong Show went off the air in 1980, I just had a ball. The thing I couldn’t deal with was the criticism. That was relentless. In the beginning I didn’t care but towards the end I cared.

TND: That was my next question. The critics said there wasn’t anything socially redeeming about the shows.

CB: It started out with The Dating Game going on the air in 1965 and I don’t know if anybody remembers The Dating Game but it was one girl talking to three guys trying to find a date. I don’t know where that was the end of civilization but the Chicago Tribune said, “Daytime television hits all time low�? and Jim Lang, the host of the show, came running in. He was pale from worrying and he said what’s that all about and I said forget it. It’s television criticism. It doesn’t mean a thing. This is nothing. Book critics mean something; film critics mean something because you’re going to pay money for something. Just don’t listen to them. And that’s how I felt. But it never stopped. It was relentless. I never claimed these were Pulitzer Prize winning, Nobel shows. I wasn’t going to get a Nobel Prize for $1.98 Beauty Show. For what they were, they were half hours of entertainment simply done and that was it. So fifteen years later I really started to buckle from that. But that was a combination of factors. I was tired of television, I was over-worked, I wanted to get out and the way I took the criticism I think I pushed myself out. One rule I learned in television is that audiences don’t like change. They really just like for everything to continue on the way it is. The more mellow the situation, the better it is. Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, they keep grinding them out. If you ratchet up entertainment you’ll find yourself off the air. And that’s what I did.

TND: You call your book and unauthorized autobiography.

CB: It means nothing! [Laughter breaks out] The reason I say that is because it was just a play on words. I love reading. I read a lot. I always see authorized biography; this one was an unauthorized biography. A biography to me was a biography so I just said unauthorized biography and everybody reads a lot of stuff, which is what’s true.

As for what is actually true in the book, I won’t answer that question for very good reasons. I think they’re good reasons, nobody else does. My feeling about all that stuff is when I wrote “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind�? in 1980 I was really bummed out and I was hurt and I was feeling awful about a lot of things. I checked into a hotel room and I wanted to get this anger out of my system and the only way I could do it, I thought, was cathartically write it down on paper. Maybe years later I could get rid of that and maybe use that material for something. I only intended to stay in the hotel for a couple of weeks and two and half years later I came out with “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind�?. Two and half years later. I stayed in this hotel room. I had my clothes moved. The point being the premise I used then was here’s a guy getting crucified by the critics for trying to entertain the public meanwhile getting covert metals and Presidential citations for killing even though they are enemies of The United States government. The premise just knocked me out and for two and half years I wrote about that. When the book came out critics killed it. I was still under that Gong Show thing. They said what do you expect from the guy that gave us The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show…the book was history.

When I finished writing the book I was amazed at how good it was considering how I felt when I wrote it, considering where I was mentally and the fact that there was some humor and there was sort of an edge to it and it had an attitude. When I say I was amazed it was maybe ten years later. The publisher thought it was really good and printed up one hundred thousand copies which was a lot in those days and it still is of which ninety thousand was laying in some warehouse because they never sold But here’s all I ever cared about then and now is whether or not the book is a good read. If you don’t think it’s a good read then I’ve failed in trying to get done what I wanted to get done. If, on the other hand, somebody else does think it’s…puts it down and says boy that was fun I enjoyed that book, then I did what I wanted to do. Whether I was in the CIA or not in the CIA or killed or didn’t kill…that’s not the least bit important to me. What’s important to me is what’s the end product, what form of entertainment are you getting from what I created. Now the CIA according to the journalists who have talked to me about it constantly say you want to know what the CIA says and I say not particularly and he says I’m going to tell you anyway. They say it’s absurd, it’s asinine. One guy said we don’t make it a practice of saying who was in the CIA and who wasn’t in the CIA but I’ll tell you in case we’ll make an exception, he definitely was not. [Laughter breaks out] Again who cares? I don’t care.

TND: So after enduring years of bad criticism, how does it feel to have all of the positivity surrounding the movie?

CB: You see that’s just it. Now twenty years later Publishers Weekly said after twenty years the books a classic. It’s so gratifying to see the book in all of the bookstores and not just in the bookstores but selling. The book is selling lots and lots of copies, there’s a cd out, there’s an audio out, it’s been sold in seven foreign countries and of course the movie is the locomotive. It all comes back to that thing about whether people enjoyed it or not.