Chuck Barris

Charles Hirsch "Chuck" Barris was an American game show creator, producer, and host. He is best known for hosting The Gong Show and creating The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. He is also a songwriter, who wrote the hit "Palisades Park", and the author of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a story about himself that became a film directed by George Clooney.

Barris was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended Drexel Institute of Technology where he was a columnist for the student newspaper, The Triangle. He graduated in 1953.

Barris got his start in television as a page and later staffer at NBC in New York City, and eventually worked backstage at the TV music show American Bandstand, originally as a standards-and-practices person for ABC. Barris soon became a music industry figure. He produced pop music on records and TV, but his most successful venture was writing "Palisades Park". Barris also wrote or co-wrote some of the music that appeared on his game shows.

Barris was promoted to the daytime programming division at ABC in Los Angeles and was put in charge of deciding which game shows ABC would air. Barris told his bosses that the pitches of game show concepts were worse than Barris' own ideas. They suggested that he quit his ABC programming job and become a producer.

Barris formed his production company Chuck Barris Productions on June 14, 1965. Barris first became successful during 1965 with his first game show creation, The Dating Game, on ABC. The show would air for eleven of the next fifteen years and be revived twice in the 1980s and 1990s.

The next year Barris began The Newlywed Game, originally created by Nick Nicholson and E. Roger Muir, also for ABC. The combination of the newlywed couples' humorous candor and host Bob Eubanks's sly questioning made the show another hit for Barris. The show is the longest lasting of any developed by his company, running for a total of 19 full years on 'first run' TV, network and syndicated.

Barris created several other short-lived game shows for ABC in the 1960s and for syndication in the 1970s, all of which revolved around a common theme. Barris also made several attempts through the years at non-game formats, such as ABC's Operation Entertainment; a CBS revival of Your Hit Parade; and The Bobby Vinton Show. The latter was his most successful program other than a game show.

Barris became a public figure in 1976 when he produced and served as the host of the talent contest spoof The Gong Show. The show's cult status far outstripped the two years it spent on NBC (1976–78) and the four years it ran in syndication (1976–80).

Barris continued strongly until the mid-1970s, when ABC cancelled the Dating and Newlywed games. This left Barris with only one show, his weekly syndicated effort The New Treasure Hunt. But the success of The Gong Show in 1976 encouraged him to revive the Dating and Newlywed games, as well as adding the $1.98 Beauty Show to his syndication empire. He also hosted a short lived primetime variety hour for NBC from February to April 1978, called The Chuck Barris Rah-Rah Show, essentially a noncompetitive knock-off of Gong.

In Barris's biography, he claims to have worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an assassin in the 1960s and the 1970s. A 2002 feature film version, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell, depicts Barris as killing 33 people. Barris wrote a sequel, Bad Grass Never Dies, in 2004.

Barris published Della: A Memoir of My Daughter in 2010 about the death of his only child, who died in 1998 after a long struggle with drug addiction.