Smokey and the Bandit is a 1977 movie starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Reed, Pat McCormick, Paul Williams, and Mike Henry. It inspired several other trucking films, including two sequels, Smokey and the Bandit II (originally known as Smokey and the Bandit Ride Again in the U.K.), and Smokey and the Bandit Part 3. There were also a series of 1994 television movies (Bandit Goes Country, Bandit Bandit, Beauty and the Bandit and Bandit's Silver Angel) from original director/writer Hal Needham loosely based on the earlier version, with Emmy-winning actor Brian Bloom now playing Bandit blank">http://imdb.com/name/nm0624102/. The three original movies introduced two generations of the Pontiac Trans Am. The film was the second highest grossing film of 1977, beaten only by _Star Wars.

The movie was filmed primarily in Georgia in the cities of McDonough and Jonesboro. The scenes in Texarkana were filmed in Jonesboro and the surrounding area, and many of the chase scenes were filmed in the surrounding areas and in McDonough. The scene at the race track was filmed at the old Lakewood Fairgrounds on the south side of Atlanta. The roller coaster seen in the movie was the Greyhound. It had not been used for some time and was repainted for the first Smokey and the Bandit film. It was destroyed in the second film and a flash back scene used in the third.

The film made use of five modified 1977 Pontiac Trans Ams that were each built according to the required stuntwork. All were damaged during the rigors of filming the stunts. The particular car used to jump over the river towards the middle of the movie was reportedly totaled doing the stunt.

Bandit and Cledus are two truck-driving southerners who accept a dare from big-shots Big and Little Enos to pick up a truckload of beer from Texas and return it to them within a specified amount of time. Picking it up is simple enough, but as they are leaving Texas, Bandit unwittingly picks up Carrie, a hitchhiking bride-to-be who just left her groom, Junior, at the altar. Junior, however, is the son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice. And when Buford and Junior discover what has happened, they go on a "high-speed pursuit" across the Southeast to catch the bandit. Written by

In the summer of 1976 "Big Enos" Burdette, a flamboyant aspiring Georgia politician, needs a vast quantity of beer for a rally in his honor, but the brand of beer he needs is west coast beer that at this time cannot be legally transported across the Mississippi, and at least one attempted shipment has already been intercepted by police. To get this job done, Burdette recruits modern day moonshiner Bo Darville, nicknamed Bandit for his previous exploits, for a hefty six-figure payment. Darville in turn recruits his pal Cledus Snow and his eighteen-wheeler for the job, entailing driving from Georgia to Texas, picking up 400 crates of west coast beer, and returning to Georgia, all in a span of twenty-eight hours. To draw off the heat of snooping state police, Darville will drive interference for Cledus in a hot Pontiac Trans-Am, the two of them maintaining contact via citizen's-band radios and the seemingly bizarre lingo used within. The trip to Texas and loading of beer goes without interruption, but the trip back to Georgia begins to pick up complications when Darville is stopped by a runaway bride, Carrie, who is fleeing a forced marriage to the son of a full-of-himself Texas county sheriff, Buford T. Justice. Sheriff Justice's pursuit of his prospective daughter-in-law soon becomes an interstate high-speed pursuit involving police from four states and also the intervention of varied interstate truckers aiding Darville and Cledus as they close on Enos Burdette's Georgia bash. Written by Michael Daly