Untitled

Chris Barnes's last full-length on-camera appearence was in a film called Four Bears which was produced in 1989 by Southern Illinois University student Michelle Madison. The film reunited Chris with fellow BNB alumni David Stambaugh, Scott Firestone and Jeff Starr, and was screened at the 1990 Ann Arbor Film Festival. It was never officially released and only a handful of VHS copies exist in private (mostly Bears) collections. Madison subsequently went to work as a "film loader" and "second assistant camera" on such productions as Dazed and Confused and This is Garth Brooks and is now a film editor.

The half-dozen or so years following high school look like they weren't the most productive for Chris: he spent a total of six years at two universities (Saint Bonaventure and Mount Saint Mary's) without even having declared a major, and from some posts I've seen and emails I've gotten I get the impression he was quite the party animal for a while. He took several Theatre Arts courses in college, so it looks like he still wanted to sharpen his skills. He continued doing commercials but was never able to land any more parts in movies or TV shows. He left college in 1989 and moved to Greenwich Village for a while, apparently still trying to find work as a serious actor but without any luck. I believe that he also worked behind the scenes on a few productions during this time, and I'm still trying to verify that.

This period is where the story changes; it seems like this was when Chris decided to move on to other things and purposefully avoid any kind of publicity. He landed in Washington, DC around 1994 and finished his Bachelor's Degree there at the Catholic University of America in 1996. Shortly thereafter he moved to or was known to hang out in Park City, Utah and apparently still spends at least part of his time in that same general vicinity..

Chris has put some effort into making it hard to track him down, and in fact ESPN Classic was unable to locate him at all for a special showing of The Bad News Bears they did in November 2003. He also declined to participate in features done by TV Guide and Sports Illustrated marking the twenty-fifth anniversery of BNB in 2001. He resurfaced briefly in 1998 as told in the infamous "working in a flower shop" article which you can read by clicking on the headline to your left. The story's true, too! I talked to someone who knew Chris and his brothers when they were growing up and has stayed in touch over the years, and he was able to verify that Chris actually did work in a flower shop at one point.

I was very fortunate to be able to talk to Chris’s mother in October of 2004. She was very nice to me under the circumstances, and sounded like a genuinely warm, optimistic person. (She had just gotten home from Pittsburgh where she’d been helping vicitms of the flooding due to Hurricane Ivan the month before.) Her first reaction was, “Oh now, that was thirty years ago! Why are you still interested in that?,” and “What would be on a web site about Chris?”