FILE - In this Nov. 28, 1980 file photo, Chuck Barris, host of the television's "Gong Show," and Robin Altman leave the Pierre Hotel in New York. Game show impresario Barris has died at 87. Barris, the... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Nov. 28, 1980 file photo, Chuck Barris, host of the television's "Gong Show," and Robin Altman leave the Pierre Hotel in New York. Game show impresario Barris has died at 87. Barris, the madcap producer of "The Gong Show" and "The Dating Game," died of natural causes Tuesday afternoon,... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — Chuck Barris, whose game show empire included "The Dating Game," ''The Newlywed Game" and that infamous factory of cheese, "The Gong Show," has died. He was 87. 
 
 Barris died of natural causes Tuesday afternoon at his home in Palisades, New York, according to publicist Paul Shefrin, who announced the death on behalf of Barris' family. 
 
 Barris made game show history right off the bat, in 1966, with "The Dating Game," hosted by Jim Lange. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date. Sometimes the process was switched, with a male questioning three females. But in all cases, the questions were designed by the show's writers to elicit sexy answers. 
 
 Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin and a pre-"Charlie's Angels" Farrah Fawcett, introduced as "an accomplished artist and sculptress" with a dream to open her own gallery. 
 
 After the show became a hit on both daytime and nighttime TV, the Barris machine accelerated. New products included "The Newlywed Game," ''The Parent Game," ''The Family Game" and even "The Game Game." 
 
 At one point Barris was supplying the television networks with 27 hours of entertainment a week, mostly in five-days-a-week daytime game shows. 
 
 The grinning, curly-haired Barris became a familiar face as creator and host of "The Gong Show," which aired from 1976 to 1980. 
 
 Patterned after the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show that was a radio hit in the 1930s, the program featured performers who had peculiar talents and, often, no talent at all. When the latter appeared on the show, Barris would strike an oversize gong, the show's equivalent of vaudeville's hook. The victims would then be mercilessly berated by the manic Barris, with a hat often yanked down over his eyes and ears, and a crew of second-tier celebrities. 
 
 Occasionally, someone would actually launch a successful career through the show. One example was the late country musician BoxCar Willie, who was a 1977 "Gong Show" winner. 
 
 He called himself "The King of Daytime Television," but to critics he was "The King of Schlock" or "The Baron of Bad Taste." 
 
 As "The Gong Show" and Barris' other series were slipping, he sold his company for a reported $100 million in 1980 and decided to go into films. 
 
 He directed and starred in "The Gong Show Movie," a thundering failure that stayed in theaters only a week. 
 
 Afterward, a distraught Barris checked into a New York hotel and wrote his autobiography, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," in two months. In it, he claimed to have been a CIA assassin. 
 
 The book (and the 2002 film based on it, directed by George Clooney) were widely dismissed by disbelievers who said the creator of some of television's most lowbrow game shows had allowed his imagination to run wild when he claimed to have spent his spare time traveling the world, quietly rubbing out enemies of the United States. 
 
 "It sounds like he has been standing too close to the gong all those years," quipped CIA spokesman Tom Crispell. "Chuck Barris has never been employed by the CIA and the allegation that he was a hired assassin is absurd," Crispell added. 
 
 Barris, who offered no corroboration of his claims, was unmoved. 
 
 "Have you ever heard the CIA acknowledge someone was an assassin?" he once asked. 
 
 Seeking escape from the Hollywood rat race, he moved to a villa in the south of France in the 1980s with his girlfriend and future second wife, Robin Altman, and made only infrequent returns to his old haunts over the next two decades. 
 
 Back in the news in 2002 to help publicize "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," Barris said his shows were a forerunner to today's popular reality TV series. 
 
 Born in Philadelphia in 1929, Charles Barris was left destitute, along with his sister and their mother, when his dentist father died of a stroke. 
 
 After graduating from the Drexel Institute of Technology in 1953, he took a series of jobs, including book salesman and fight promoter. 
 
 After being dropped from a low-level job at NBC, he found work at ABC, where he persuaded his bosses to let him open a Hollywood office, from which he launched his game-show empire. He also had success in the music world. He wrote the 1962 hit record "Palisades Park," which was recorded by Freddy Cannon. 
 
 Barris's first marriage, to Lynn Levy, ended in divorce. Their daughter, Della, died of a drug overdose in 1998. He married his third wife, Mary, in 2000. 
 
 ___ 
 
 The late Associated Press writer Bob Thomas contributed biographical material to this report. ||||| Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Caro reflects on the career of Harold Ramis, who passed away at the age of 69. 
 
 Harold Ramis not only may be the most successful comedy writer-director that Chicago has produced, but some wouldn't even confine that statement to Chicago. 
 
 “Harold was clearly the most successful comedy writer-director of all time,” said Tim Kazurinsky, who followed Ramis at Second City and later became his friend. “The number of films that he has made that were successful, that were blockbusters, nobody comes close. Even in light in of that, he was more successful as a human being.” 
 
 Ramis' career was still thriving in 1996, with “Groundhog Day” acquiring almost instant classic status upon its 1993 release and 1984's “Ghostbusters” ranking among the highest-grossing comedies of all time, when he decided to move his family back to the Chicago area, where he grew up and had launched his career. 
 
 On Monday, Ramis was surrounded by family in his North Shore home when he died at 12:53 a.m. of complications from autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a rare disease that involves swelling of the blood vessels, said his wife, Erica Mann Ramis. He was 69. 
 
 Ramis' serious health struggles began in May 2010 with an infection that led to complications related to the autoimmune disease, his wife said. Ramis had to relearn to walk and suffered a relapse of the vasculitis in late 2011, said Laurel Ward, vice president of development at Ramis' Ocean Pictures production company. He never fully recovered. 
 
 Ramis leaves behind a formidable list of achievements, with writing credits on such enduring comedies as “National Lampoon's Animal House” (which upon its 1978 release catapulted the film career of John Belushi, with whom Ramis acted at Second City), “Stripes” (1981) and “Ghostbusters” (in which Ramis also co-starred), plus such directing efforts as “Caddyshack” (1980), “National Lampoon's Vacation” (1983), “Groundhog Day” and “Analyze This” (1999). 
 
 Previously he was the first head writer (and a performer) on Second City's groundbreaking television series “SCTV,” and more recently he directed episodes of NBC's “The Office.” 
 
 Ramis' comedies were often wild, silly and tilting toward anarchy, but they also were cerebral and iconoclastic, with the filmmaker heeding the Second City edict to work at the top of one's intelligence. This combination of smart and gut-bustingly funny led a generation of comedic actors and filmmakers — including Judd Apatow (“The 40 Year Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up”), Jay Roach (“Meet the Parents,” the “Austin Powers” movies), Peter Farrelly (“There's Something About Mary,” “Dumb and Dumber”), Jake Kasdan (“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” “Orange County,” both of which featured Ramis in small roles) and Adam Sandler (who starred in his own wacky golf comedy, “Happy Gilmore”) — to cite him as a key inspiration. 
 
 “When I was 15, I interviewed Harold for my high school radio station, and he was the person that I wanted to be when I was growing up,” said Apatow, who would cast Ramis as Seth Rogen's father in “Knocked Up” and would produce Ramis' final movie, “Year One” (2009). “His work is the reason why so many of us got into comedy. We grew up on ‘Second City TV' and ‘Ghostbusters,' ‘Vacation,' ‘Animal House,' ‘Stripes,' ‘Meatballs' (which Ramis co-wrote). He literally made every single one of our favorite movies.” 
 
 Ramis also left behind a reputation as a mensch and mentor. 
 
 “He's the least changed by success of anyone I know in terms of sense of humor, of humility, sense of self,” the late Second City founder Bernie Sahlins, who began working with Ramis in 1969, said of him in 1999. “He's had enormous success relatively, but none of it has gone to his head.” 
 
 Ward recalled that when she first began working for Ramis 15 years ago as his assistant, he had to be in California for a month, and he told her that although he didn't need an assistant out there, she should go anyway because it would be a good experience for her, and he'd make sure her expenses were covered. 
 
 “He just did it for me,” she said. “He loved teaching people. He loved helping people. He loved seeing people succeed.” 
 
 The son of Ruth and Nathan Ramis, who owned Ace Food & Liquor Mart on the West Side before moving the store and family to Rogers Park, Ramis graduated from Senn High School and Washington University in St. Louis. 
 
 For his first professional writing gig, he contributed freelance arts stories to the Chicago Daily News in the mid-1960s. 
 
 Richard Christiansen, his Daily News editor (and later Tribune theater critic and entertainment editor), recalled one assignment in which Ramis covered a rock concert attended mostly by authority-scorning teenagers. “When it was over, he noted that the kids came out of the concert, and the parents were waiting for them in their cars to drive them home,” Christiansen said with a laugh. “It was a gift for noticing life's ironies and twists that distinguished his writing eye at the very earliest.” 
 
 Ramis also wrote and edited Playboy magazine's “Party Jokes” before and during his Second City days. After some time away from Second City, he returned in 1972 and came to a major realization while acting alongside a relative newcomer in the cast. 
 
 “The moment I knew I wouldn't be any huge comedy star was when I got on stage with John Belushi for the first time,” he said in a 1999 Tribune interview. “When I saw how far he was willing to go to get a laugh or to make a point on stage, the language he would use, how physical he was, throwing himself literally off the stage, taking big falls, strangling other actors, I thought: I'm never going to be this big. How could I ever get enough attention on a stage with guys like this? 
 
 “I stopped being the zany. I let John be the zany. I learned that my thing was lobbing in great lines here and there, which would score big and keep me there on the stage.” 
 
 With his round glasses lending a professorial air, Ramis would become the calm center of storms brewed by fellow actors, playing the bushy-haired, low-key wisecracker to Bill Murray's troublemaker in “Stripes” and being the most scientific-minded “Ghostbuster.” Later roles included the sympathetic doctor of James L. Brooks' “As Good as It Gets” (1997) and the charming “Knocked Up” dad, whose dialogue, Apatow said, was almost all improvised.
– Chuck Barris, whose game show empire included The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and that infamous factory of cheese, The Gong Show, has died at age 87, per AP. Barris died of natural causes Tuesday at his home in Palisades, New York, according to publicist Paul Shefrin. Barris made game show history right off the bat, in 1966, with The Dating Game, hosted by Jim Lange. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date. Sometimes the process was switched, with a male questioning three females. But in all cases, the questions were designed by the show's writers to elicit sexy answers. Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin, and a pre-Charlie's Angels Farrah Fawcett. The grinning, curly-haired Barris became a familiar face as creator and host of The Gong Show, which aired from 1976 to 1980. The program featured performers who had peculiar talents and, often, no talent at all. When the latter appeared, Barris would strike an oversize gong, the show's equivalent of vaudeville's hook. As The Gong Show and Barris' other series were slipping, he sold his company for a reported $100 million in 1980 and decided to go into films. He directed and starred in The Gong Show Movie, a thundering failure. Afterward, a distraught Barris checked into a New York hotel and wrote his autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. In it, he claimed to have been a CIA assassin, though the book (it was made into a 2002 film) was widely dismissed by disbelievers who said Barris had allowed his imagination to run wild. (Watch Barris and "Gene, Gene, the Dancing Machine" here.)