Was Chuck Barris, game show host, game show INVENTOR, songwriter ("Palisades Park") a CIA Assassin for hire?
After seeing this film, which I enjoyed, I ordered the very confessional book. I wanted to read the words Chuck Barris wrote and also see how much of his autobio /memoir was in or out of the film. Turned out that the film followed the book rather closely, especially the dialogue!
I wanted to read C.B. about his involvement into CIA operations that resulted in his killing 33 people.
Although I almost never rely on Wikis for my encyclopedia because I have found so much opinion, or so much druck quoted from lies in books referenced in Wikis about celebrities, I checked the Wiki on Barris. It said the CIA denied that Barris ever worked for them.
Yea, well why would the CIA ever admit that anyone ever killed for them?
The film leaves me with the notion that maybe, just maybe, Chuck was recruited by someone who worked for the CIA or had a side business, and that he was under a very incorrect impression that he was working directly for the CIA. The book sure didn't give that notion. The film blurred the possibility that he had killed his superior while the book said someone else killed the man and Chuck killed a mole to revenge that death. The mole (acted by Julia Roberts) is killed by switching poison in the movie. In the book he kills her with a gun.
What makes anyone able to kill people who they have no personal issue with? In this case money and patriotism and the game of the hunt.
Inventor of now very vintage television shows such as the Dating Game, the Gong Show, Barris wanted more in life, and was perhaps a bored genius. Was killing people for money what kept him interested in life? No, but perhaps what was challenged by a lifestyle that was at once comedic and tragic was his notions of life itself. It's value. If any.
Chuck Barris wrote without apology. He didn't excuse his womanizing or sexism, or anything else he did.
That is a lesson for me.
C 2012 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved
