The Moment You Grab Someone By The

I Can Sing As Well As Fred Astaire Can Act.

I Regret That I Do Not Have The Dignity Of Ricardo Montalban, The Class Of Dean Martin, Or The Humor Of Bill Cosby. I Do Have The Heart Of A Lion.

Smokey And The Bandit Was The First Picture [hal Needham ] Directed, And I Knew He Could Handle It. I Had Just Directed Gator, And He Saw My Style And Used That As A Pattern.

But Then When I'm In A Halfway Successful Movie, It Irritates The Hell Out Of The Critics In New York, Because They'd Like To Kill My Pictures If They Could. So Maybe I'm Pretty Good In The Movie. Then They Use All These Words Like I'm 'surprisingly' Good, Or 'shockingly Enough,' I'm Good. It's Like I Crawled Out From Under A Magazine And They're Surprised I Can Act.

I Had Known Hal [needham] For A While By The Time He Moved In, So I Was Sure We'd Get Along Well, And We Did. He'd Go Off And Do His Gigs And I Would Do Mine, And When We Were Lucky We Got To Work On The Same Ones.