What made Sally Field a standout choice for "Smokey and the Bandit" despite her reputation as a serious actress after "Sybil"?

She worked cheap.

The original budget for Smokey & The Bandit was $5.5 million. However the studio got cold feet and demanded that they give back $1 million, or the film wouldn’t get made. Burt Reynolds was the biggest cost in the budget and he would NOT take a pay cut. That left trimming down much of the story, some of the effects, and bringing stars like Sally Field and Jackie Gleason for “reasonable” amounts of money. At the time she was known for Sybil, Gidget and The Flying Nun, all of which played off her “innocence” not the fact that she was an attractive adult woman. Fields manager got her to take a budget wage and her Hollywood film career began in earnest.

I remember some of the movie reviews disparaging Field as not being “sexy” enough and her character being poorly written. However when you watch the film, you realize that Reynolds wouldn’t have played off a “sexpot” actor, nor would a more dramatic female actor have worked. Field “fit” the role as written and she demonstrated that again in the first sequel. Her career took off, her personal relationship with Reynolds began, and the rest is history.

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Question: What made Sally Field a standout choice for "Smokey and the Bandit" despite her reputation as a serious actress after "Sybil"?

Seriously.

Basically Sally Field fit the budget and that’s why she was hired and retained.

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