Contributed photoActor Burt Reynolds, left, and Dalton High School graduate Gordon Whitener worked together on Reynolds' latest movie, "The Last Movie Star."

DALTON, Ga. — A 1981 graduate of Dalton High School, Gordon Whitener grew up in the era when Burt Reynolds dominated the movie box office.

Reynolds was named the top moneymaking star in an annual poll of theater managers from 1978 to 1982 and was in the top 10 in that poll from 1973 to 1984.

“‘The Longest Yard,’ ‘Smokey and the Bandit,’ all those movies, if you were a young man, especially in the South, Burt was who you wanted to be,” recalled Whitener.

Brett Thomason graduated from Dalton High School a generation later, in 2004, but he says Burt Reynolds was just as big a part of the culture for him.

“Oh, yeah, I grew up on his films, too,” Thomason said. “I didn’t see them in the theater, but I remember sitting on the couch with my dad watching ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ and ‘The Cannonball Run’ and all those films. Those were Southern traditions that got handed down.”

That’s why the two men, now partners in the Knoxville, Tenn-based media and marketing company The Whitener Co., say it was such a thrill to have spent the last two years working with Reynolds as producers of his latest film, “The Last Movie Star.”

“It’s based loosely on his life and career,” said Whitener. “It really was a labor of love for everyone involved. And it really was like working with the last real movie star. He is such a professional, such a gentleman.”

The film had its Hollywood premiere last week at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre. It is to premiere in Knoxville (where 90 percent of it was shot, according to Whitener) tonight and is scheduled to open in 31 cities Friday night. It is also now available on DirecTV and at Amazon.com and on various streaming services.

Whitener says they got involved with the film a couple of years ago after he took his daughter to Los Angeles to look at colleges.

“I met a guy named Neil Mandt, who is also a producer on this film,” he said. “He and I started doing some media business together. We’d both done a lot of sports media, so we had a lot in common. He showed me this script. He said, ‘I know the guy who wrote this (veteran writer-director Adam Rifkin). He would be the director and Burt Reynolds is attached to it.’ I read the script. My wife read the script. We both loved it. We went back to Los Angeles and sat down and met with Neil and Adam Rifkin. Adam’s passion for the project and my history of growing up in Georgia watching Burt Reynolds made it easy for me to say yes.”

The film also stars Chevy Chase and Ariel Winter from the TV show “Modern Family.”

Reynolds plays Vic Edwards, an aging screen legend traveling to Nashville, Tenn., to receive an award at a film festival, and Winter plays his driver.

“Ariel Winter is now a big star herself, and she comes on the set. She obviously knows who Burt Reynolds is, but I don’t think she really understood what a legend Burt Reynolds is,” Thomason said. “One of the first scenes we were filming was in Nashville. They were going down the street in the back of a car, and people were literally jumping out of cars and running across the street to get a glimpse of Burt Reynolds. They were yelling his name. And I think at the end of the day, she really realized just what an icon he is to so many people.”

Thomason said one of the highlights of working with Reynolds was the opportunity to reintroduce him to fashion designer Manuel Cuevas.

“Manuel dressed everyone in Hollywood back in the day, and he and Burt were very good friends. But Manuel moved to Nashville about 40 years ago, and they lost touch,” Thomason said. “But we took Burt to Manuel’s shop while we were in Nashville one Saturday and watching the two of them catch up was so great.”

Thomason calls Reynolds a “true Southern gentleman.”

“I don’t know how he does it, but any time a woman comes around, there’s magically a white rose in his hand. He gives a single rose to everyone who comes by. That’s the sort of guy he is,” he said. “He must have gone through 300 or 400 roses during the filming of this movie. If you did something nice for him or something went really well during the day, you could expect a nice, handwritten note and a bottle of champagne in your hotel room at the end of the day.”