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“Gong Show” creator & TV pioneer Chuck Barris dead at 87

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Ron Tom/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Chuck Barris, the TV producer responsible for The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and most famously, The Gong Show, which he hosted, has died, a family rep confirmed to ABC News.  He was 87.

 

Barris was born in Philadelphia and got his start in TV working for American Bandstand.  He formed his own production company in 1965 launching The Dating Game that year, and The Newlywed Game the following year. 

 

While his shows became fixtures of American pop culture, Barris himself became a star in the 1970s with the launch of The Gong Show, a talent show he hosted with his own inscrutable, wacky style. It featured the schlockiest acts imaginable whose task was to stay on stage long enough not to be gonged off by panelists.

 

In 1984 Barris published a purported autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in which, among other things, he claimed to have been an assassin for the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s.  The book was adapted into a film in 2002 that was George Clooney’s directorial debut.

 

Barris also was a songwriter, composer of Freddy Cannon’s #3 1962 hit “Palisades Park.”

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