Has anyone ever bothered to seriously check the claims of TV producer Chuck Barris in his book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind to see if he’s a fraud or not? Also, could you personally investigate his claims? (I think he’s a fraud, but I don’t have the time to investigate myself.) –Russell, Sacramento, CA
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Ah, right, Chuck Barris. Barris is the showbiz entrepreneur who created The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show (the last of which he hosted), hits in the late 1960s and ’70s that were thought to represent the absolute low in schlock TV, at least until everybody got a load of Temptation Island. In 1982 he published an “unauthorized autobiography,” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which has recently been given a new lease on life as a movie. Central to the book is the claim that “Chuckie Baby” (as Gong Show fans liked to call Barris), in addition to being a busy executive responsible at one point for 27 half hours of network TV a week, was a decorated CIA assassin. Barris writes that after chaperoning a winning couple from The Dating Game on their dream date in some foreign capital, he’d slip away, blow somebody’s brains out, and then head back to Los Angeles to contend with those A-holes at the network.
