#although I had been playing around with a Burt Reynolds Cinematic Universe before this

[doctorbluesmanreturns]

The 1980 heist comedy Wyatt was one of the first to actively reference Goncharov; director Mel Brooks was a fan and inserted a set piece where the band of thieves led by Wyatt Leigh (Burt Reynolds) and F.C. Jackson (Madeline Kahn) have to steal the priceless Portrait of Katya Goncharova so that master forger Simon Petheridge (Marty Feldman) can make a perfect copy of it to replace it with; Cybil Shepherd cameos as his assistant, whose resemblance to the painting’s subject ends up making the extremely difficult heist well-nigh pointless. Brooks had wanted to get Robert De Niro involved as well, but he was ironically enough filming his then-latest collaboration with Martin Scorsese, Raging Bull, at the time.