Producer and Personality of ‘Gong Show’ Fame, Chuck Barris, Dies at 8

New Informasion  - Chuck Barris, the "Gong Show" inventor, songwriter and novelist who sought to add to his already eclectic ur? sum? with a made-up -- or was it? -- story about being an assassin for the C. I. A., perished on Tuesday at his home in Palisades, D. Y. He was 87.

His death was released by a spokesman, Paul Shefrin.

"The Gong Show" was just one of Mr. Barris's hit game show creations. Almost 40 years ago he emerged up with "The Going out with Game" and "The Newlywed Game, " making a spectacle of his contestants' romantic yearnings in the first case and their honeymoon-period bliss, adjustments and foibles in the second.

Mr. Barris might have earned a brief talk about in the obituary web pages with one of his earliest accomplishments: He had written the pop tune "Palisades Park, " which turned into a hit for Freddy Cannon in 1962 and an emblem of that period of good-time ordinary 'n' roll prior to the genre's harder, louder part emerged.

Decades later, in 2007, Mr. Cannon, a Massachusetts native, desired to remodel the song into a rally ditty for his favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. Nevertheless, he told The Boston ma Globe, he received a complaint from Mr. Barris, a Yankee fan, and so "Down at Fenway Park" ended up being a Cannon original alternatively than a repurposed Barris.

Mister. Barris wrote "Palisades Park" along an odd route to an eventual job in television. He was born in Philadelphia on June 3, 1929; his father, a dentist, perished when he was young.

After graduating from Drexel University in his home city in 1953, this individual was accepted into a management training program at NBC in 1955. Nevertheless he told The Phila. Inquirer in 2003, the department he was located in -- daytime sales -- was eliminated, and he found himself attempting, unsuccessfully, to sell the devices then known as TelePrompTers.

Throughout the payola scams of the 1950s, this individual was hired to keep a young ABC superstar, Dick Clark, of "American Bandstand, " out of trouble. ("He sat around doing nothing all day but drawing on a pad of paper, very well Mr. Clark told The Inquirer. ) By late 1950s he was ABC's overseer of West Coast regular programming.

But he needed to make his own shows, and in 65 he came up with "The Dating Game, inches in which a bachelorette or bachelor would choose a date from among three unseen members of the opposite sex after asking them questions.

This individual followed that the next year melody "Palisades Park, " which turned into a hit for Freddwith "The Newlywed Game, " another question-and-answer demonstrate that put simply wedded couples'y Cannon in 1962 compatibility to the test. Both shows slept on the environment into the mid-1970s and spawned numerous sequels ("The All-New Going out with Game" and "The Fresh Newlywed Game").

Mr. Barris's next game shows were less successful, and it seemed he was shedding his touch, he came across the concept that would catapult him to a new level of popularity: "The Gong Show, very well which had its best on NBC in Summer 1976. The show included a series of artists, almost all of them amateurs, and a panel of 3 celebrity judges. Mr. Barris himself was your foolhardy, irritating host.

The performers, who were often terrible, would be allowed to go on until one of the family court judges couldn't stand it any more and sounded a tantán, putting an end to the spectacle. Those who weren't gonged were graded by the judges on a 1-to-10 scale. In keeping with the ridiculousness of the proceedings, the prize amount they vied for was ridiculous: $516. 32 on the day version of the show, $712. 05 on the prime-time edition.

The show, which ran on NBC until 1978 and then in syndication (with revivals in later years), became a cultural experience. Critics complained about the crassness and cruelty, but Mr. Barris, like purveyors of burlesque and spectacle sideshows in earlier decades, knew there was a huge audience for lowbrow. In one point the regular version was attracting 80 percent of viewers 18 to 49.

"In my opinion, a good game show review is the kiss of death, inches Mr. Barris said in a Salon interview in 2001. "If for some strange reason the vit liked it, the population refuses to. A really bad review means the show will be on for years. "

The ghost of "The Gong Show" is evident in several reality-television shows of newer vintage -- the early rounds of any given season of "American Idol, " for instance.

Mister. Barris always bristled at the "King of Schlock" label that was put up on him as much back as "The Going out with Game. " In a 2003 interview with Newsweek, he noted that shows just like the ones he created were by the 21st century being received differently.

"Today these shows are accepted, very well he said. "These shows aren't seen as reducing any bars. "

By simply the end of the 1970s, thanks to "The Gong Show, " Mister. Barris's television set production company was busy and profitable, but he was itching to try something more. What he tried, disastrously, was "The Gong Present Movie, " which this individual directed and, with Robert Downey Sr., wrote. This was released in May possibly 1980 and flopped.

Mister. Barris little by little withdrew from television, selling his coopération, spending almost all of his amount of time in Italy and turning to writing. He had already written one book, "You and Me, Babe" (1974), a novel about a tv set developer whose marriage failed; it drew heavily on his own rocky marriage to Lyn Levy, a relative of the powerful CBS TELEVISION STUDIOS chief William S. Paley, in the 1950s. They will were divorced in 1976.

That first book sold well, but it was the next the one which would give Mr. Barris yet another burst of notoriety: "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (1984), a supposed life in which he stated that although traveling in his role as a television set manufacturer in the 1960s having been also an cannibal for the C. We. A.

The book received only a smattering of attention, but it trapped some eyes in Artist, in addition to 2003, after many delays, a film version came out, directed by George Clooney and glancing Sam Rockwell as Mister. Barris. (Charlie Kaufman published the screenplay, embellishing Mister. Barris's tale. )

The film brought Mr. Barris, by now in his 70s, a brand new round of publicity and endless versions on the evident question: Was it true? Mister. Barris generally played coy, delivering elliptical answers that neither confirmed nor refused. The C. I. A. was more direct: Different spokesmen said Mr. Barris had not do with the agency.

In later years Mr. Barris extended to write books, among them the comic books "The Big Question" (2007), about an outlandish game show where the blind levels are literally life or death, and "Who Murdered Art Deco? " (2009), about the murder of your wealthy young man.

In 2010 he turned to a much more serious subject with "Della: A Memoir of My Little girl, " telling the tale of his only child -- from his relationship to Ms. Levy -- who as a young lady sometimes turned up on "The Gong Show. inch She died of a drug overdose in 98, at 36.

Mr. Barris's second marriage, to Robin the boy wonder Altman, resulted in divorce in 1999. He is survived by his partner, Mary Kane.

Which of his few professions was his top pick? In 2007, amid an appearance at the Book Passage book shop in Corte Madera, Calif., he managed the question.

"When you go to that extraordinary diversion appear in the sky," he asked himself, "would you rather be referred to as a creator or as a TV amusement indicate maker?"

"That is the least demanding inquiry of all," he reacted. "I would love to be known as an essayist, in any case I don't trust it's made that that is the way it will be. I think on my gravestone it's quite recently going to state, 'Gonged finally,' and I'm screwed over thanks to that."