Chuck Barris, the game show producer, emcee, author, and songwriter, passed away in his home on Tuesday, March 21, 2017. He was 87 years old.

Charles Hirsch “Chuck” Barris was born on June 3, 1929 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Drexel University in 1953, Barris was accepted into a management training program at NBC in 1955. Throughout this period, he found himself unsuccessfully trying to sell devices then known as Teleprompters.

During the payola scandals of the 1950s, Barris was hired to keep a young ABC star, Dick Clark (American Bandstand), out of trouble. At the same time, he began writing and producing music, most notably “Pallisades Park.” This song later became a hit for Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon in 1962, peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard charts.

Following this music stint, Barris was promoted to ABC’s director of West Coast daytime programming in 1959. Still, all Barris really wanted to do was create his own television shows. In 1965, he came up with The Dating Game, in which a bachelorette or bachelor would choose a date from three unseen members of the opposite sex after asking them questions.

The very next year, Barris created The Newlywed Game, another question-and-answer show that put just married couples to the test. Both shows stayed on the air into the mid-1970s and spawned assorted sequels including The All-New Dating Game and The New Newlywed Game. After a few unsuccessful game shows, Barris came up with a concept that launched him into pop culture fame, The Gong Show. The show, which premiered on NBC in June 1976, featured a series of performers and a panel of three celebrity judges. Barris himself served as the brash, irritating host.

The show ran on NBC until 1978 and then in syndication with revivals in later years. Although critics often complained about its crassness and cruelty, The Gong Show became a cultural sensation. Gradually, Barris withdrew from television and began spending most of his time writing in France. He had already written one book, You and Me, Babe (1974), which drew heavily from his marriage to Lyn Levy in the 1950s. The pair were divorced in 1976.

While that first book sold well, it was the next one that would give Barris another burst of notoriety, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984). This supposed autobiography claimed that while Barris served as a television producer in the 1960s, he was also an assassin for the CIA. In 2003, a film version of the book came out, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell as Mr. Barris. Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay, embellishing on Barris’ tale.

In later years Barris continued to write books, including the comic novels The Big Question (2007), about an outlandish game where the stakes are literally life or death, and Who Killed Art Deco? (2009), about the murder of a wealthy young man. In 2010 Barris wrote Della: A Memoir of My Daughter, which told the story of his only child, from his marriage to Levy. His daughter sadly died of a drug overdose in 1998 at age 36.

Barris’ second marriage, to Robin Altman, also ended in divorce in 1999. The following year he married Mary Clagett, who survives him.