Chuck Barris | Chuck Barris, Producer and Personality of ‘Gong Show’ Fame, Dies at 87
Chuck Barris, the “Gong Show” creator, songwriter and novelist who sought to add to his already eclectic résumé with a made-up — or was it? — story about being an assassin for the C.I.A., died on Tuesday at his home in Palisades, N.Y. He was 87.

His death was announced by a spokesman, Paul Shefrin.

“The Gong Show” was just one of Mr. Barris’s hit game show creations. In the 1960s he came up with “The Dating Game” and “The Newlywed Game,” making a spectacle of his contestants’ romantic yearnings in the first case and their honeymoon-period bliss, adjustments and foibles in the second.

Mr. Barris might have earned a brief mention in the obituary pages with one of his earliest accomplishments: He wrote the pop song “Palisades Park,” which became a hit for Freddy Cannon in 1962 and an emblem of that period of good-time rock ’n’ roll just before the genre’s harder, louder side emerged.

Decades later, in 2007, Mr. Cannon, a Massachusetts native, wanted to rework the song into a rally ditty for his favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. But, he told The Boston Globe, he received a complaint from Mr. Barris, a Yankee fan, and so “Down at Fenway Park” ended up being a Cannon original rather than a repurposed Barris.

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