One day in the late 1970s, when he was at the peak of his fame, Burt Reynolds took a short drive with a couple of friends, the character actors Charles Nelson Reilly and Dom DeLuise. Starting from Italian Farms, his 160-acre ranch outside Jupiter, Florida, Reynolds stopped his Cadillac on Indiantown Road, a single unpaved lane near a truck stop on U.S. Highway 1, and announced that he was going to build a theater on that very spot.
Now home to Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and about half the PGA Tour, Jupiter was at the time “a sleepy little hamlet with dirt roads,” says actor Gareth Williams, who grew up nearby. “I used to call it ‘Mayberry on the beach.’”
