Bankrate: Next to "The Gong Show," many people know you as a maybe-CIA agent in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," the film of your "unauthorized autobiography" directed by George Clooney. How much truth was there in that?

Barris: I'll never really get into that, to tell you the truth. "Confessions" I wrote as "Confessions," and if people enjoyed it, fine; if they didn't enjoy it, that's OK, too, and that was that and then I moved on. The questions about the CIA and so forth have just been done to death.

Bankrate: What would you have rather done, looking back?

Barris: I don't know. There was a lot of stuff I would have liked to have done. I always saw myself as some kind of a foreign correspondent. I worked at NBC News for a while under a guy named Reuven Frank and he was terrific. He started me out as a reporter, but things changed. I thought that might have been good. Or maybe be a doctor. But when you get right down to it, I think that I did what I did and that's what I did.

Bankrate: Perhaps the title "entertainer" best fits you?

Barris: I was a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none, and I think I just went through life kind of being that. When I look at Bob Barker on "The Price is Right," I couldn't have been a Bob Barker if you put a gun to my head. I could never have done something that long. I probably made a mistake to sell my company when I did and get out of television because right after I did, in 1986, it just exploded with all this reality television. But I always wanted to write and I've written, so I've experienced the things that I wanted to experience.