The South We Saw in the Bandit
Forty-six years ago, some young Southern boys watched “Smokey and the Bandit” and saw a region where the little guys could win. Were we looking at it wrong?
I’m westbound and down, four wheels a-rolling. I’m going to do what no one says can’t be done.
I’ve got the pedal to the metal and my foot on the floor, or would if this I-85 traffic would clear. I’ve got a long way to go but plenty of time to get there. The boys are thirsty in Atlanta, probably, and there’s beer in Texarkana, I assume. I’m on my way to see some of the places where they shot Smokey and the Bandit, a favorite movie of mine and many others’, a movie that Billy Bob Thornton said was “considered a documentary” in certain parts of the South.
I’m not bootlegging 400 cases of Coors because that would be pointless now, with Coors in supermarkets coast to coast. I’ve got no clock to beat or bet to win. I’ve got no runaway bride in my passenger seat and don’t plan on jumping any rivers and certainly don’t want no Texas county mountie on my tail.
I’m not even in a Trans Am, dammit.
All I’ve got are my old Toyota, some street addresses, and a fading memory. I’ve got the good old American road and my eyes and ears and the hope that all of them stay open. I’ve got a chance to live out one of my childhood make-believes—in a lame and middle-aged way—and an itch to find the nation and the South I could have sworn I saw in Smokey and the Bandit.
If you don’t know what Smokey and the Bandit is about, I’ve probably lost you already, but just in case: Smokey and the Bandit is a 1977 movie about making cars go fast and jump stuff. The excuse for making cars go fast and jump stuff is a challenge issued by two rich dudes, Big Enos Burdette and his son, Little Enos, to the legendary trucker Bo “Bandit” Darville, played by Burt Reynolds. They want him to go to Texarkana and bring them 400 cases of Coors beer—which they all know is illegal—back to Atlanta in twenty-eight hours or less.
The Coors is the MacGuffin, the irrelevant device that drives the plot, but to be honest, the plot itself is the MacGuffin, since—again—Smokey and the Bandit is about making cars go fast and jump stuff.
To meet the challenge and win the $80,000 Big Enos offers, Bandit gets his old buddy Cledus “Snowman” Snow (Jerry Reed) to haul the beer in the Bandit’s tractor-trailer while he runs blocker (distracting law enforcement by driving even faster than the rig) in a black-and-gold Pontiac Trans Am. They get the Coors and start back when a runaway bride named Carrie, played by Sally Field, flags down the Bandit and hops in with him. She’s being chased not so much by her jilted groom as by his father, Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), a buffoonish caricature of the stereotypical Southern lawman. In the scenes not about making cars go fast and jump stuff, the movie’s about hanging out with the coolest people you’ve ever met or watching the funniest volcanic eruption you’ve ever seen.
Burt was cool, but the Trans Am was the star. I knew without a doubt or mistake what the movie was about: to make that car go fast and jump stuff.
Long before I actually saw it, Smokey and the Bandit was an important part of my life. When it came out, I was not yet five years old. My parents might have let me ride around in the Cutlass without a seat belt, much less a car seat, sometimes perched up front between them on the armrest (they called it “the catbird seat”) while my dad smoked his Winstons, but they weren’t about to let me hear language like “sumbitch” or “I’m gonna barbecue your ass in molasses.”
The Bandit’s Trans Am, though, was everywhere I looked, printed on lunchboxes and Trapper Keepers, shrunk to model-kit and Hot Wheels sizes. My off-brand Big Wheel was that Trans Am when I jumped off plywood ramps and spun 180s in the driveway. I loved it so much I didn’t want to give it up for a bicycle until I got a hand-me-down black-and-gold banana-seat Schwinn from a neighbor. When at last I saw the movie, cut and dubbed for broadcast TV, Burt was cool, but the Trans Am was the star. I knew without a doubt or mistake what the movie was about: to make that car go fast and jump stuff.
Not until later, much later, did I notice and marvel at what all I’d absorbed, the grace notes in the background of that live-action cartoon. At the time I’d taken it for granted, assumed it was how things were and would be.
The Song of the Open Road
I’d have made it from Winston-Salem to the Atlanta Perimeter in under four hours if some gear jammer hadn’t wrecked on 85 South, probably paying more attention to their phone than the two tons of metal and combustible liquid they were piloting. I felt for the truckers, the sons and daughters of Bandit and Snowman, more stuck than I was. They were on the clock; I was only hungry. When the big road rose ahead of me I could see the semis stacked up, gleaming as teeth in the midday sun, lining the foothill like stones and almost as still.
Many viewers forget the Bandit makes his living as a trucker, not as a Trans Am stunt driver, and that the rig with the Coors is his and his buddy Snowman is only driving it. Want to see some good old All-American cognitive dissonance? Look at the mural on the side of the Bandit’s trailer, where a masked outlaw holds up a stagecoach in a John Ford desert. The man in black with his six-shooters is meant to be the Bandit, of course, but Bo Darville makes his living hauling loads as a commercial trucker. If there was a holdup on the open road, he would have been the stagecoach driver with his hands in the air. That is a real and continuing danger for drivers, which is why you should never ask a trucker what they’re hauling. They tend to assume you’re casing them for a stick-up.
Truckers are the unsung heroes of the American economy, except for a few years in the mid-1970s when they were, quite literally, the sung heroes, with Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear” and C. W. McCall’s “Convoy” roaring out of a country music sub-genre to become pop hits. That coincided with a wave of Hollywood “hicksploitation” flicks, of which Smokey and the Bandit was by far the most popular and transcendent. For a few years, a thick slice of Americans saw truckers as modern-day cowboys, somewhere between the hippies of the counterculture and the blue-collar “real Americans,” the last workingmen untethered to a clock and unwatched by a boss man. They might even have been the real winners of what historian C. Vann Woodward called the “Bulldozer Revolution,” the post-World War II transformation of the South.
“Once you took off, that was it. Nothing but you and space,” Calvin Sizemore told me. Sizemore, the brother of a friend of my brother’s, drove a truck for eleven years, after the textile plant where he’d worked “decided to take everything and send it to China.” From his base in northwest North Carolina, he’d make runs as long as twelve days to places as far as California, hauling flooring or lumber or “whatever” west and bringing produce back.
“Freedom” is what he liked best about it, he said. “Not having to punch a clock. Didn’t have no supervisor or anybody looking over your shoulder.”
Sizemore says he’d get behind the wheel this minute if his health and age would let him. “Takes a while to get over it, once you got the fever,” he said. “I get glassy-eyed seeing big trucks come down (Highway) 52.”
But onboard computers now let supervisors “watch” drivers even on the open road. The modern-day cowboys of Sizemore’s era, free on the open road, became unwilling pioneers on a new frontier of workplace surveillance. A 2012 federal law required transport companies to install Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) in their rigs. ELDs tell companies when their drivers are breaking the speed limit, skipping weigh stations, or staying behind the wheel too long, but they allow no leeway for an overcrowded truck stop or the other vagaries of the open road, or that a truck cab is both a workplace and, for many truckers, a home away from home.
“Even more fundamentally, truckers raised concerns about ELDs as an affront to their privacy, dignity, and independence. A common refrain was that the new rules treated them like criminals, cheaters, or children,” Cornell professor Karen Levy, author of the 2022 book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, wrote for Slate.
“The problem’s roots are economic—to make a living, truckers have little choice but to break the law and to put themselves, and the motoring public, in danger,” Levy wrote. “Truckers weren’t tired because they were able to falsify their logbooks; they were tired because the industry and its pay structure were set up in ways that necessitated them breaking the rules.”
Levy cites a study showing that the inflexibility of the ELD mandate may actually have increased large-truck crashes, as many truckers had to drive faster to complete their runs in time.
And they didn’t have a Trans Am blocking for them.
Still and all, Sizemore says he’d get behind the wheel this minute if his health and age would let him.
“Takes a while to get over it, once you got the fever,” he said. “I get glassy-eyed seeing big trucks come down (Highway) 52.”
I watch Smokey and the Bandit, I read any of dozens of American writers, I remember my summers driving a delivery truck and my years crisscrossing the South selling books for a regional press, and I have an idea of the fever he’s talking about.
But as I look at the palisade of semis around me, all stuck stacked up along I-85, I feel a whole different kind of fever, one that I can’t imagine missing.
Once, I loved to drive. Sometimes I still do. I love the open road, but while roads are more abundant than ever, that “open” part is harder to find. We fill them as soon as we widen them, erase more wetland or woodland, bypass another town. We fill them and we don’t seem happy about it, whether we enjoy the act of driving or not.
For most of this century, Michael Cody has written about road trips for his blog Last Chance Power Drive. He told me in an e-mail, “The road is much more crowded, and there is no give and take out there at all. I often think I'm the only person left who understands using headlights to signal a truck that he is clear to come over and other such long-forgotten courtesies of the road.”
Hell, I’m pleasantly surprised when drivers know that headlights flashing behind them mean to get back into the granny lane.
I’ve never been a car guy, exactly, but maybe car-guy adjacent, car-curious. I can change my own oil, battery, headlights, tires. My grandfather, though, built his first car out of junkyard parts. You can read that as American decline or American progress: that I can't, that I never had to.
I’ve never been a car guy, exactly, but maybe car-guy adjacent, car-curious. I can change my own oil, battery, headlights, tires. My grandfather, though, built his first car out of junkyard parts. You can read that as American decline or American progress: that I can't, that I never had to.
I’ve never raced, but since I started driving I’ve liked to drive fast. Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, I racked up more than a few speeding tickets. In college I was talking once with a friend about driving home and found out that what took me a little more than one hour took him all of two. We each looked at the other like he was crazy and then he said there was no way in hell he’d give any Highway Patrol such an easy excuse to pull him over. My friend was Black and I was stupid. By no means did he wake me up then but he did give me a nudge, the kind that begins to disrupt and detour the dream you’re having.
So I know how lucky I am to get to make this run, even in this lame and middle-aged sort of way. I’m white and male and able-bodied, my mental health more or less okay, not rich but not poor. I can pay for a tow if I need one, repairs if I need those. I can pay for a room in a safe and clean motel. I can call a lawyer. If I end up in a hospital I’m as screwed as any American, but if I die out here I have life insurance.
Stand on it, then, son. Put the pedal to the metal and your foot on the floor. Let it all hang out ’cause you got a run to make.
Seventies Secular Scripture
Hal Needham had established himself as one of Hollywood’s top stuntmen and second-unit directors when he came to Georgia to make Gator with his buddy Burt Reynolds. He noticed the hotel maid kept stealing the Coors a friend had brought him from California and got an idea. On a yellow legal pad, he hand-wrote what Reynolds said was “the worst script I’d ever read.” He wanted to star in it anyway. They got Pontiac to give them three Trans Ams and ad-libbed most of the dialogue.
Universal gave Smokey and the Bandit a big premiere at Radio City Music Hall, where it bombed.
The studio thought they had a turkey on their hands, so they dumped it on the South, showing it in only 386 theaters below the Mason-Dixon Line on Memorial Day weekend. By Tuesday, it had grossed more than $2.6 million dollars. By the end of June, Smokey and the Bandit had shown in every major market in the South; by the end of July, it had shown across the country; by the end of 1977, only Star Wars had sold more tickets.
Like the Bandit himself says, “When you tell somebody something, it depends on what part of the United States you’re standing in as to just how dumb you are.”
That line, delivered (and probably improvised) by the number-one box office star in America, turned a simple if spectacular action-comedy chase picture into a piece of secular scripture for a massive swath of the nation, an affirmation of other ways of knowing, a defense of tastes and preferences long looked down on.
The fastest way from Atlanta to Texarkana is not a straight line but an arc, either north or south, on the interstate highways. In fact, Interstate 20 can get you from Atlanta to Shreveport in about eight hours, and from there an hour on I-49 puts you in Texarkana, and that’s sticking to the speed limit: A good citizen with luck and a strong-enough bladder could make the Bandit’s run in less than twenty hours and never top seventy mph. They’re less than 700 miles apart, even in an arc, not nearly the 900 miles that Little Enos claims.
A big part of my grown-up fondness for Smokey and the Bandit are the two-lane blacktops, the small-town squares and Main Streets, the scenery of a red-dirt South not quite yet the “Sun Belt,” the South that so many of us remember from trips to Meemaw’s house.
Quibbling with the details of Smokey and the Bandit, though, is like nitpicking Looney Tunes.
Most—not all—of I-20 from Georgia to Texas was open by the time filming began in August 1976, but the Bandit and Snowman stick to smaller highways until almost the very end, just before they re-enter Atlanta. A big part of my grown-up fondness for Smokey and the Bandit are the two-lane blacktops, the small-town squares and Main Streets, the scenery of a red-dirt South not quite yet the “Sun Belt,” the South that so many of us remember from trips to Meemaw’s house.
The movie’s almost over before the Bandit and Snowman, in their Trans Am and Kenworth, spend any sustained time on a four-lane concrete highway. The gag with the convoy hiding the Bandit from Smokey wouldn’t work on a two-lane blacktop, but more importantly, Needham gets to use the ramps and overpasses and culverted medians as a life-sized Hot Wheels track, making the Trans Am and the cruisers and motorcycles jump ridiculous heights and lengths, land on the back of a moving flatbed, perform stunts not seen on film again until the Fast & Furious franchise went full CGI superhero. If what the Bandit does best is “show off,” then that’s what a four-lane highway lets Hal Needham do.
What’s most astonishing about those sequences now aren’t the stunts but that they shot them so close to Atlanta, about twenty miles north of town on I-85 near the Pleasant Hill Road exit in Gwinnett County and along Georgia State Route 400 in Forsyth County. Even knowing that they cleared the roads for filming, even knowing that this is a live-action cartoon about making cars go fast and jump stuff, the idea of that much emptiness in the Atlanta metro strains any suspension of disbelief. Where’s the Waffle House waiting at the top of the off-ramp? How can an overpass not hold a RaceTrac or a QT or even a Chick-fil-A? What kind of green Shangri-La did they manage to find, and where on earth is it now?
Back in the 1990s, a mere twenty years after the movie’s release, my work sent me to a training session at a hotel off the Pleasant Hill Road exit, and I swore I’d never go back of my own choice. Every acre was razed and paved to a barren commercial sameness void of landmark or sense of place. Every inch of street and road was jammed with motor vehicles, engines overheating in low gear. Now, the Gwinnett Place sits mostly empty and the big-box stores are dying, strangled by the endless algorithmic emporium of the internet.
Since then, I don’t know how many times I’ve passed Pleasant Hill Road, crossed and circled Atlanta by one route or another, at all times of day and night, and never once seen those highways in any condition other than crowded. After midnight? Just before dawn? Crowded. Midday on a weekend? Clogged. Midday in the work week? Choked within an inch of their lives.
My whole life, all across the South, I’ve heard “Atlanta traffic” spoken of like a haint or a beast, a demon lurking for unwary travelers who mis-time their trips. The only real challenge in driving to Texarkana and back in less than twenty-eight hours would be getting in and out of the Atlanta Perimeter.
A Diablo at the Choke ’n’ Puke
Just outside that Perimeter—Atlanta’s monstrously trafficked I-285—and just south of its Spaghetti Junction, in the bedroom town of Tucker, stands the last Old Hickory House on earth.
Once a chain of barbecue joints across the Southeast, an Old Hickory House stood in for the roadside “choke ’n’ puke” where Bandit plans to let Carrie catch a bus back to New York City, and runs into Sheriff Buford T. Justice at the counter. The sheriff hasn’t seen the Bandit’s face and doesn’t recognize his voice, but the Bandit recognizes Justice’s when he barks, “A Diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper, and make it snappy ’cause I’m in a got-damn hurry.”
The Old Hickory House where they filmed the scene was in Forest Park, south of Atlanta near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. That site’s now a weed-and-gravel lot, nothing of the restaurant remaining, an anonymous location “lost to industrialization,” according to Forest Park native Hannah Palmer, an urban designer and the author of Flight Path, a memoir about seeing her childhood homes swallowed by Atlanta’s airport.
In Tucker, surrounded by the sprawl of the last thirty years—big-box retail across the road, an apartment complex to one side and an escape room on the other, all built in the plasticky prefab compounds of this century—the last Old Hickory House on earth is like a time capsule or memory box from the 1970s (or ’80s, depending on what part of the United States you were standing in then). I walked in the front door and could picture not only Burt and Sally’s soulful would-be parting but the spaces of my own childhood, with all that wood paneling and Roy Rogers aesthetic. Inside and out, it’s supposed to evoke the little ol’ country cabin so many Americans wish they’d grown up in, especially if they never set foot inside a little ol’ country cabin.
The last Old Hickory House on earth is like a time capsule or memory box from the 1970s (or ’80s, depending on what part of the United States you were standing in then). I walked in the front door and could picture not only Burt and Sally’s soulful would-be parting but the spaces of my own childhood.
I didn’t see the Diablo on the menu, and when I asked my server Robin about it she gave me a little grin. The Diablo’s been a mystery to fans since the movie came out: some say it’s an east Texas peculiarity, a Sloppy Joe with extra spice. The Old Hickory House’s Diablo is a chopped pork sandwich, Robin said, “with Tabasco.”
She should have said it was Tabasco with a chopped pork sandwich. A couple of bites in I began to wonder about that grin she gave me.
The walls hold their share of Smokey prints and memorabilia, including one autographed by Burt Reynolds, but you could eat there and not realize its connection. Robin told me that they get “lots of tourists” coming in for Diablos, and have hosted reenactments and tributes like The Bandit’s Run and The Snowman’s Run.
I’d have sat at the counter like the Bandit did, but it was full. The whole place was full, in fact, with the kind of demographic mix that defines a good barbecue joint as much as slow cooking over wood: an almost-even split between white and Black customers, along with Latinx and Asian; office workers in suits or golf shirts; manual workers in jeans or twill, red clay sunbaked into the fabric; suburban moms and grandmas; retirees in vented fishing shirts.
When I had powered my way through my Diablo, I walked past the mounted longhorn rack, the poster from the 1987 Winston Cup All-Star race at Charlotte Motor Speedway, and all the other unabashed, unironic cowboy nostalgia on my way to the men’s room, to blow my free-running nose. When I left, I double-checked that I wasn’t trailing the toilet paper.
Was the Disappointment That Bitter?
I am uptight and prone to overthinking, about as unlike the Bandit as a white man with facial hair can be, so I’m not used to strangers smiling at me the way they do when I tell them I’m writing about Smokey and the Bandit. On Rotten Tomatoes the movie has a 74 percent “fresh” ranking from critics but an audience score of 85 percent, with more than 50,000 ratings. Facebook hosts more than 30 Bandit fan pages, the biggest of which has more than 31,000 members. Smokey and the Bandit fans might not be as numerous and famous and geeky as Trekkies or Disney People or would-be Jedi, but they’re out there, and they’re out there.
Courtney Hurst, the coordinator for the Arts Clayton Gallery in Jonesboro, located in the former warehouse where the Bandit and Snowman picked up Big Enos’s Coors, said they get “probably about fifty” people a year who visit the gallery because they know its role in the movie, including cosplayers in character costumes and some in their own Trans Ams.
“They’re really chill people,” she said of the Bandit fans, who “seem to be a really fun and inclusive fandom.”
David Hershey and Dave Hall of Restore a Muscle Car LLC in Lincoln, Nebraska, organized the first Bandit Run for the movie’s thirtieth anniversary in 2007, leading a fleet of Trans Ams from Texarkana to Atlanta.
“That first year we started with forty-seven cars but ended up with over a hundred by the time we hit Atlanta,” Hall said. Automotive media like Car & Driver and Hemmings Motor News got wind of the Bandit Run and “just showed up,” spreading the word to Smokey and the Bandit fans, Trans Am and muscle-car enthusiasts, and eventually to Reynolds himself. Today, the Bandit Run gets 150-250 cars or more. In milestone anniversary years, they recreate the Texarkana-to-Atlanta run; in off years they tour other parts of the country.
Why do so many of us white men seem so happy to have grown up into Buford T. Justice instead: blustery, gluttonous bullies? Are we that deluded? Did we get that old that fast?
Georgia’s Tyler Hambrick and Ron Franks manage The Snowman’s Run, a nonprofit continuing Jerry Reed’s support for wounded veterans. They, too, organize road trips, open to all vehicles and fans of Smokey and the Bandit, and they too were able to include Reynolds in some of their events before his death in 2018. In 2017, Reynolds came back to Jonesboro for a fortieth anniversary celebration of the film with a barbecue, a car show, and an outdoor screening. Both the Bandit Run and the Snowman’s Run rolled down Main Street, with Hambrick driving a replica of the Kenworth rig and loaning memorabilia from his collection to a special display in the Arts Clayton Gallery.
Search online for “Smokey and the Bandit filming sites” and you’ll get dozens of hits, on websites about movies and websites about cars. Jay Busbee, a senior writer for Yahoo Sports, wrote for his Substack Flashlight & a Biscuit about searching for “the true story” of the Diablo sandwich that Buford T. Justice orders at the “choke ’n’ puke,” which led me to the Old Hickory House in Tucker. Several websites for car enthusiasts have run articles about how to find the movie’s settings. Michael Cole wrote on Last Chance Power Drive about taking a road trip with his son to tour the locations of his “favorite movie.”
“I found a website several years ago called Atlanta Time Machine that had a tremendous amount of information about the Atlanta area, including filming locations for…Smokey and the Bandit,” Cole told me via e-mail. “I pulled some info from various other sources around the internet and built out a trip plan. It was honestly one of the most fun trips I’ve ever made. Having my son along for the ride, who is also a huge fan of the movie, made it really rewarding. My dad worked in the transportation industry, so I've always had a fascination with eighteen-wheelers, as well as fast cars.”
When I told the writer W. Ralph Eubanks—a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Institute Fellow; the former director of publishing for the Library of Congress; and the author of the memoir Ever Is a Long Time, about growing up Black in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement—that I was writing about Smokey and the Bandit, he told me that it’s one of his favorite movies, too, with much the same grin that Hurst and Robin at the Old Hickory House gave me.
“It’s just a piece of 1970s nostalgia for me. I have great memories of watching it in Oxford with a group of friends,” Eubanks said. That group, he said, included friends both white and Black, and that “Jackie Gleason’s cartoonish Southern sheriff character resonated with all of us.” He added that he had rewatched it last summer, and it “made me feel nineteen years old and carefree. Sometimes you just need a dose of nostalgia to feel younger.”
I know that nostalgia, not just for my Trans Am fantasies and country-road Americana. When I watch Smokey and the Bandit now, I feel a nostalgia for the kind of country I thought this was, or was becoming, or would be someday soon.
When I was a boy, the dominant mode of white manhood was the benign outlaw: the Bandit, Han Solo, Bo and Luke Duke, Willie and Waylon, quicksilver, working-class underdogs, antiauthoritarian and far more friendly with African Americans than anyone we ever saw in real life. To them the top dogs, the Boss Hoggs, the big-money corporate interests were the real enemy, and the white working class had common cause with other marginalized groups. Like Waylon sang on CBS every Friday night, the Dukes of Hazzard were “fightin’ the system like a true modern-day Robin Hood.”
So why do so many of us white men seem so happy to have grown up into Buford T. Justice instead: blustery, gluttonous bullies? Are we that deluded? Did we get that old that fast? Was the Reagan Revolution that successful, that thorough?
Was it when Jimmy Carter called the U.S. “the most wasteful nation on earth,” put solar panels on the White House, pushed through a law that wouldn’t let workplaces set their air conditioning lower than 80 degrees, made clear he actually expected Americans to sacrifice to try to fix the broken world? Was it when he let the Panama Canal go, or when he couldn’t get the hostages out of Iran? Were Reagan’s “welfare queens” that convincing a scapegoat? Was a little bit of comfort—air conditioning, cable TV, cul-de-sacs—that corrupting? Was the disappointment of finding out that no, you can't be as badass as Burt Reynolds—that you can’t really outrun Smokey, that even a Trans Am can’t really jump a river—that bitter?
Scarlett and the Bandit
To get to the other filming sites near Atlanta, the two-lane blacktops and small-town backdrops, I traveled through the kind of industrial and commercial landscapes where big-rig truckers like the Bandit and Snowman would have spent much of their working lives: car dealers and chemical manufacturers, parts distributors and self-storage, industrial parks and dollar stores, fast food and low-end retail. At one exit, between the Liberty Industrial Park and a distribution center, a man held a cardboard sign, asking for money so he could move “somewhere with more resources.”
Some of the settings are as gone as the Forest Park “choke ’n’ puke”: Snowman’s house in Jonesboro is now government offices; the brick hut on the small-town square in McDonough that Bandit hid behind to slip the movie’s first cop—where Burt broke the fourth wall with a devilish grin—was razed years ago. The joint where the bikers beat up Snowman—and he flattens their choppers with the Kenworth in return—really was a gas station and soul food café in McDonough, but now it’s just a concrete-block ruin, abandoned as traffic and commerce shifted west toward I-75.
The stretch of road where Sheriff Justice slid his cruiser beneath the concrete T-beam (“Daddy, the top came off!”) and the grassy shoulder where he got his horn stuck are within a half-mile of each other, where Main Street merges with Tara Boulevard in Jonesboro. The roadside’s weedier, the bright commerce you can see in the background of those scenes now diminished, more subdued, the fluttering pennants long gone. Further south, from the concrete bridge across the Flint River, just before the Chevron and the self-storage, you can see the last few rotted pilings of the old wooden “Mulberry bridge” that the Bandit jumped—the centerpiece stunt and, if we’re being honest, the emotional core of the movie.
On Jonesboro’s southern edge, Mundy’s Mill Road might once have been the country road it seemed to be when Carrie flagged down the Bandit on one stretch, and Sheriff George Branford set a roadblock on another less than a mile away. Mundy’s Mill itself, built in 1890 by Andrew Jackson Mundy and his son Erasmus, sat picturesque behind a cop car sent flying into the millpond during a later chase, but was burned down by an arsonist in 1986. Its namesake road looks pretty much the same if you drive it fast enough, but like so many others around the South, it’s stuck somewhere between suburban and semi-rural, brindled with subdivisions built during and since the filming, given names like Willow Bend and the Lake or the Landings at Mundys Mill. Watch the movie an unhealthy number of times and you might notice the wooden sign advertising “DISTINCTIVE BRICK HOMES / WILLOW BEND / CLAYTON COUNTY’S FINEST” over Branford’s shoulder as he tells Buford T. Justice via CB that his being a sheriff “is not germane to the situation.”
One cartoonish but defining silver-screen myth of the South was filmed in the same exact place where an earlier cartoonish myth of the South was set, which is the same place that defeated yet another cartoonish myth of the South and the nation.
(Say it with me, friends: “The got-damn Germans got nuttin’ to do with it!”)
The building where Bandit hid and Burt broke the fourth wall—which, I’m told, was a police substation, which just makes his grin that much more delightful—might be gone, but McDonough Square, where it stood, seems thriving, bustling even in the dog days of August, circled by boutiques and restaurants, an art gallery, and a bookstore. Oak trees shade park benches and picnic tables. In warm months, the town offers movies and community concerts on the square.
The movie used downtown Jonesboro’s Main Street as its “Texarkana,” where Bandit and Snowman get Big Enos’s Coors. Then and now it looks small-town All-American, all square-jawed storefronts and cornices, church steeples rising beyond. Even without two bootlegging good ol’ boys racing through, mid-morning traffic is heavy.
The movie’s “warehouse” has expanded since 1976, a new façade standing closer to the street, the bay door that the Bandit drove “any forkin’ thing” through to load the beer now an arch between the Arts Clayton Gallery and its offices in back. The smaller door he kicked in is bricked up, its outline visible. In the summer of 2023, the gallery hosted a touring exhibit of “Good Trouble Quilts,” textile artworks celebrating John Lewis, the civil rights legend who represented part of Clayton County in the U.S. Congress for more than 30 years.
Until I started figuring out how to see the filming sites, I didn’t know how many of them were in Clayton County.
That’s almost too on-the-nose even for this ridiculous decade, because Clayton County is where Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara was supposed to have been, and because in 2020, Clayton County broke the solid electoral red of the Deep South.
In other words, one cartoonish but defining silver-screen myth of the South was filmed in the same exact place where an earlier cartoonish myth of the South was set, which is the same place that defeated yet another cartoonish myth of the South and the nation.
Not a single character in Smokey and the Bandit would have been welcome at the Wilkes’ barbecue at Twelve Oaks, not even those upstarts Big and Little Enos. In Scarlett’s eyes, the Darvilles and Snows and Justices would be, at the very best, equivalent to the yeoman Benteens. More likely she’d see a whole movie populated by those white-trash Slatteries. To drag in a more profound and potent myth, Smokey and the Bandit happens four-square in a South overrun by the Snopeses, the wily, grasping commoners who take over William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Bayard Sartoris may have liked to drive fast, but Lord knows what Faulkner would have made of the Bandit (probably something immemorial and outraged and implacable).
Needham stuck a big TEXARKANA sign on the Jonesboro train depot for the Bandit and Snowman to pass as they rolled into town. The depot was built of Georgia granite in 1867, replacing the one burned in the Civil War, and now houses the Clayton County Welcome Center and Road to Tara Museum. In the museum, Smokey and the Bandit gets only a single small display case, shared with the album cover from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s debut, shot along the depot’s wall. In fact, the museum barely mentions the county’s actual history or the Margaret Mitchell novel that distorted it into an American myth: the “Road to Tara” leads only to Hollywood and the 1939 blockbuster. It has costumes and posters and state proclamations declaring Clayton County the “home of Gone with the Wind.”
To its credit it also has images of NAACP picket lines protesting the movie’s release and the Socialist Workers’ Party’s call for a boycott of the film, which it describes as “loaded with social dynamite,” giving the lie to the old excuse “that’s just the way it was,” showing that “it” never really “was,” and wasn’t “just” as in “simple” or “just” as in “justice.” The museum has displays dedicated to Butterfly McQueen and to Hattie McDaniel, who became the first African American to win an Academy Award, Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mammy in the film. It is converting what once was the “Civil War room” into an exhibit focusing on the film’s Black cast members. The museum is a regular stop for the charter-bus tours that come to Clayton County for its Civil War battlefields and antebellum mansions, for the tourists still looking for the “Old South”—or whatever they imagine it to have been.
In part because of Tara’s real-life counterparts, in part because of how Atlanta boomed, Clayton is the “Blackest county” in Georgia, with more than seventy-three percent of its population identifying as “Black alone” in the 2020 census. Both its U. S. Representatives, all five of its county commissioners, and the chief of the Clayton County Police Department are Black. Willow Bend, the subdivision advertised over Sheriff Branford’s shoulder, looks just like the all-white middle-class suburbs I grew up in, but the majority of its homeowners are African American.
The algebra of contemporary American politics means “Blackest county” is usually also “Bluest county”: in 2020, 87 percent of Clayton County’s votes were cast for Joe Biden. Those votes—cast and collected in Scarlett O’Hara’s home county, on the same land where the Bandit ran from Smokey—swung Georgia’s electoral college votes and the presidency to the Democrat, flipped the state from red to blue, and set the stage for the forty-fifth president of these United States to turn himself in to the cops in Fulton County just up the road.
Born at the Wrong or Right Time, One
About all that keeps Smokey and the Bandit from being a perfect movie is that it doesn’t have a more specific sense of place (not to mention more banter between Reynolds and Paul Williams as Little Enos). It has less specificity than an ancient oral epic, and takes place not on the road between Georgia and Texas but on a generic American Road in a generic Rural South that was as much a fantasyland then as it is a funhouse mirror now. In real life, the Bandit would have passed Cheaha Mountain and the Talladega Superspeedway, climbed the last of the Appalachians, crossed the Mississippi Delta and the Mississippi River, twice.
Maybe if Universal hadn’t sent a hatchet man shortly after filming started to cut a million dollars from Needham’s budget, he’d have shot across more of the actual South.
Lakewood Fairgrounds is where the story and the run begin and end, the Bandit’s start and finish line. The first time we see the Bandit, he’s at Lakewood, napping in a zebra-print hammock (as we all did in the ’70s), getting $25 a day “so all his loyal fans can look at him” at the Truck Roadeo. (The first of many jokes more subtle than you might expect: He’s getting paid to be looked at, but he’s lying down with his hat over his face.) The last time we see him before the credits roll, he’s hightailing it out of Lakewood in Big Enos’s Cadillac, Carrie and Snowman with him, Buford T. Justice still in “hot puh-soot.” Lakewood’s the only location in the movie that played itself, and the only location I can’t get to, because they’re making movies there.
The fairgrounds opened in 1916 as the home for the Southeastern Fair. For most of the rest of the twentieth century families came to enjoy rides and circuses, the Greyhound wooden roller coaster, stock-car races at the one-mile dirt-track Lakewood Speedway, even an ice-skating rink for a while. In time, the fair and the speedway closed, and the City of Atlanta let Hal Needham demolish the Greyhound for the climax of Smokey and the Bandit II, a cash-grab I saw in my early teens and am bound and determined never to see again. For a while the Spanish Colonial-style exhibition halls, built to showcase livestock and visible behind Big Enos when he challenges the Bandit to get the Coors, were used for a monthly antique market. In 2010, though, the Atlanta City Council voted to lease the Lakewood Fairgrounds to Screen Gems Studio. Much of Black Panther and Stranger Things and many other series and movies have been filmed there, but the grounds are fenced and gated and off-limits to tourists, no matter how big a fan of Smokey and the Bandit they are. Lakewood was a place for people from all over the South to gather for entertainment, but now we’re locked out so we can have entertainment delivered to our screens. Even for this ridiculous decade, that seems too on-the-nose.
Of course the only overt racist, in this car-chase movie made by unabashed good ol’ boys, is the bad guy, Buford T. Justice, a bully and a fool. That’s what I—and, I’d have thought, millions of other young white males—got from Smokey and the Bandit without quite realizing it. Only fools and bullies hold onto the racism of the recent past.
Search online for Smokey and the Bandit and you’ll find dozens of think pieces, far thinkier than this one, praising the movie for its progressivism, its stick-it-to-the-man working-class solidarity; or damning it for its conservatism, its centering of white men who know no authority greater than their whims. You’ll find clips crudely edited to show Trump as the slick Bandit and Biden as the befuddled Buford T. Justice. You’ll find clip compilations presenting Justice as a great American hero, and I can’t tell if they’re meant to be ironic or not. You’ll find a whole lot loaded onto a movie that’s only about, once more, making cars go fast and jump stuff.
The point and the glory of Smokey and the Bandit is that it isn’t trying to make any got-dang point, no statement or message. It’s not mindless, but it ain’t exactly mindful, either. Had it preached, had it been about anything other than making cars go fast and jump stuff, it would have been harder to absorb, harder to accept as the way things were, or would be, or could be. Snowman hugs a Black man, and the point hits home because it’s not hammered home. Needham and Reynolds were too smart not to have known what they were doing—Reynolds had co-starred in 100 Rifles, the first Hollywood studio movie with an interracial love scene, and was friends with Ossie Davis, who gave Malcolm X’s eulogy; Needham’s Stunts Unlimited was the first such trade group to admit women and people of color—and they were too smart to make a big deal about it. They included these scenes as a matter of course. Of course Snowman and Sugar Bear would be friends. Of course a Black man could be an Arkansas county sheriff, the only competent cop in the whole picture. Of course even the Bandit needs help from his friends, from his community of all colors, against the rich and powerful. Of course the only overt racist, in this car-chase movie made by unabashed good ol’ boys, is the bad guy, Buford T. Justice, a bully and a fool.
That’s what I—and, I’d have thought, millions of other young white males—got from Smokey and the Bandit without quite realizing it. Only fools and bullies hold onto the racism of the recent past. Only fools and bullies wouldn’t or couldn’t be friends with Black people. Only fools and bullies reject Black people in positions of power and authority.
Of course, only the white man gets to be the hero, gets the money and the girl, gets the center of the frame and the story. Of course, in the second half of the movie nearly every other line from the Bandit’s mouth is “I owe you one” to someone who’s helped him, but we never see him pay what he owes (except, as one trucker tells him, by not getting caught). Of course, just getting along with people of other races is absolutely essential and absolutely insufficient. Of course, the history of this country is so dire that an expression as limp as “just get along” recalls violence and the failure of justice.
I was naïve, but I was a child, born at the exact wrong or right time, one. I became aware of the wider world right when Jimmy Carter was its most powerful person and Burt Reynolds was its biggest movie star. How was I to know how brief that moment would be?
Smokey and the Bandit was only ever a live-action cartoon, but now the central premise is such nonsense that a remake would be offensive. I don’t mean bootlegging Coors, which wouldn’t be bootlegging since Coors is available coast-to-coast. I don’t mean CB culture in the age of smartphones—most truckers still use CBs—or muscle-car culture in this age of EVs and fortress-sized Overcompensation Special pickup trucks.
I don’t mean guys hotdogging some ridiculous feat for fun or money or glory. I don’t mean Bandit and Snowman roaring down the South’s rural blacktops and not a single old-timer pulling out in front of them, doing forty in a sixty-five zone. I don’t mean a rich dude burning cash on an absurd whim, like 400 cases of a particular beer for him and his friends: that’s commonplace to the point of boring now.
I mean the notion of a hero, even a white one, defying and besting and humiliating agents of the state from the Texas line to Atlanta and not getting blown off the highway. In the movie the cops set up roadblocks with their cruiser sedans but don’t roll out a single spike strip. The Snowman plows the Bandit’s Kenworth right through the blockade set up in front of Lakewood and not a single cop fires even a warning shot into the air.
I can’t imagine that police today, armed and armored with the discounted surplus of the Forever Wars, wouldn’t meet his Trans Am with a tank.
The Bad Guys Would Be the Heroes
Needham was a former Army paratrooper who’d spent his career doing the actual jumping and punching and falling the Hollywood stars pretended to, but in Smokey and the Bandit power and violence belong to the bad guys: the bikers who beat up Snowman, Buford T. Justice with his outrageous threats. The Bandit is more Bugs Bunny than John Wayne, more Tom Sawyer than Jesse James, but because he’s still a white American male in the American Century he’s got football-player biceps and a V8: the Trickster, turbocharged.
In a few years, though, Smokey and the Bandit’s bad guys—the cops, the bikers—would be the heroes of most major action movies. It wouldn’t be all that hard to reframe Smokey and the Bandit to make the Bandit a deranged maniac endangering countless innocent motorists, and Buford T. Justice the classic rogue cop who “breaks the rules but gets results, dammit.” Fire Gleason, get Stallone on the line.
Where I see an argument for anti-racism and community versus corporations, others see a lone ranger in a Stetson and boots doing what he damn well pleases, as he damn well should. They cheer on the Bandit, outrunning Smokey and sticking it to the Man, but see far different stand-ins for Smokey and the Man. Having to bootleg Coors from Texas, after all, was because Coors was unpasteurized and liable to spoil. Who would dare take away a man’s God-given right to risk a little food poisoning for a cold beer, make the public roads his playground to win a bet, spread an airborne pathogen during a pandemic? Like Justice said of Carrie jilting his son, “that’s nothing but pure and simple old-fashioned communism.”
It wouldn’t be all that hard to reframe Smokey and the Bandit to make the Bandit a deranged maniac endangering countless innocent motorists, and Buford T. Justice the classic rogue cop who “breaks the rules but gets results, dammit.” Fire Gleason, get Stallone on the line.
Smokey and the Bandit celebrates the outlaw, the cowboy, the independent man free on the open American road, but Bandit and the Snowman never would have made it without communal action by others: the convoy that hides him, the hot rodders who block the road for him, the funeral train that holds up Buford T. Justice. That may seem like irony or contradiction, but it’s neither.
The point that the movie gets—but never once tries to make—is that you can’t have communal action without community, and you can’t have community without connection, and you can’t have connection except between individuals, even if it’s only over a CB radio using made-up names. We can argue over what freedom means, its golden ratio of rights to responsibilities, its most effective method of delivery, but if we don’t start there we aren’t going anywhere.
Eastbound and Down
Me, I’m going home. I’m eastbound and down, not fooling anyone, including myself, anymore.
I’m feeling the heat of the noonday sun soak through my windshield and overpower my AC. I’m scanning the FM dial but every other signal seems to have the same preacher, syndicated out of Minnesota, calling for war against the demons in the nation and not using “demons” as a metaphor. I’m cramping my foot and ankle, playing the gas and the brake according to the whims of some driver far ahead of me, who may or may not be watching the road.
Every time I’ve watched Smokey this century I’ve done more projecting than an IMAX. I’ve made too much of an actor just trying to make a buck in Hollywood and have a good time doing it, and of a movie that was about nothing more than making cars go fast and jump stuff. I’ve scooped some oily coins from the floormat and thought them a fortune, knowing nostalgia and wishful thinking make for terrible history. Smokey and the Bandit was as much a fantasy as that other big movie from 1977, the one with the space wizards and their laser swords.
I once worked with a (white) man who, as a teenager, about the time Smokey and the Bandit came out, road-tripped down to Daytona Beach, where the pretty girls distracted him and he rear-ended a police car. He told me, with a chuckle, that they took him to jail and beat him within an inch of his life. In March 2023 the Feds sent the (Black) former sheriff of Clayton County to prison for multiple civil rights violations of those in his custody.
The Trans Am that jumped the Flint River had a rocket strapped to its back and fell apart when it landed. By the end of filming the last of Hal Needham’s black and gold Trans Ams was so damaged it had to be pushed into the frame.
The Bandit may not even have been bootlegging. The whole idea that Coors was actually illegal east of Texas might have been a myth, a barroom legend born from distribution licensing, various state laws, and a 1974 Federal Trade Commission injunction against the Adolph Coors Company for restraint of trade.
From 1978 to 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the average compensation for CEOs grew by 1,460 percent, while average worker pay grew by 18.1 percent. The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay went from twenty-to-one in 1965 to 399-to-one in 2021. Big Enos just kept on getting bigger.
The roads to Meemaw’s I see in the movie and miss so much would have been, to my grandparents, signs of progress, welcome or not but either way unrelenting, ground taken in the Bulldozer Revolution.
From 1978 to 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the average compensation for CEOs grew by 1,460 percent, while average worker pay grew by 18.1 percent. The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay went from twenty-to-one in 1965 to 399-to-one in 2021. Big Enos just kept on getting bigger.
The planet’s on fire and every gallon I’ve combusted has fed it. Every mile I’ve put on my old Toyota is a mile closer to having to trade it for a new, computerized car that’ll spy on me and want to do the driving itself, that’ll shake when I change lanes and beep so I don’t have to watch my mirrors. Give me rail lines instead: I’ll trade in my solitude for privacy, my steering for trust in my fellow Americans. We can argue over what freedom means, and how much of it any of us can or ought to have, but it damn sure doesn’t mean a computer driving for you, freeing you to be a bigger dumbass.
But when the road ahead is open a while, when the engine hums steady and the wheels are rolling free, the white lines zim past and I’m burning up the miles: for those minutes, however many or few, I feel a freedom and control so elusive and illusory that this might just be the last feeling I’d like to have before I die.
Smokey and the Bandit came out in a nation woozy from economic crisis and a foolish, futile foreign war; from civil unrest and reckoning; from high crimes committed by the sitting president. It captured that turmoil by not mentioning it, by mocking the kind of lawmen who’d turn fire hoses on children, by grinning at (and during) the commission of multiple felonies, by keeping a native and unquestioning faith that no problem can’t be outrun on the good ol’ American open road.
O, for that faith.
O, for that road.
O, to put that hammer down and give ’em hell.
Ed Southern grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Greenville, South Carolina, and was educated in their public schools. He is the author of Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South (2021, Blair), a finalist for the 2022 Southern Book Prize (no relation). His shorter work, in a variety of genres, has appeared in storySouth, the North Carolina Literary Review, the North Carolina 10×10 Festival, South Writ Large, The Dirty Spoon, the Asheville Poetry Review, and Wake Forest Magazine, among others. Since 2008 he has been the executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, one of the largest writers’ organizations of its kind in the country. In 2015 he won the Fortner Award for service to the literary arts in North Carolina.
Thank you for this, Ed. I grew up in Atlanta when the movie was filmed and came of age driving past many of the other film locations you left out on Memorial Drive and Glenwood Avenue. I am also quite familiar with downtown Jonesboro having long ago worked for long-gone newspapers there. There used to be the most wonderful Jewish Deli across from the depot. I have never forgotten it. That is a lost world and a lost South. It is all gone forever, like Coors or Budweiser being American beers, Pontiac as a marque. Southern rock, politicians who see us as human beings, good churches and the idea that a man as precious and good as Jimmy Carter could be president.
Hi Ed,
As a lifelong beach girl with no interest in fast cars that jump stuff, Smokey and the Bandit was not a favorite movie. However I, like every other Southern teen, saw it. Thank you for helping me see the movie today in a very different way. Your observations make me think about relationships, and the global issues we face that are becoming increasingly difficult every day. Most of all, your keen eye helps me see hope – hope that kindness and decency and leadership like that of President Carter – can come again. As a longtime member of the NC Writers’ Network, I’m proud to see your byline on the pages of Salvation South.