Paternity on AllMovie

The directorial debut of actor and stand-up comedian David Steinberg concerns a single man who decides that he wants to be a dad -- without the complication of a wife. Burt Reynolds stars as Buddy Evans, the manager of Madison Square Garden. A longtime lothario, Buddy has always been very content as a bachelor, but he has begun to feel lately that he'd like to experience fatherhood. His yearnings receive plenty of fuel from his best friends Larry (Norman Fell) and Kurt (Paul Dooley), and from his parental-mentor relationship with a young boy, Tad (Peter Billingsley). So Buddy decides to seek out a woman who will bear his baby for a price, with no strings attached. He finds Maggie Harden (Beverly D'Angelo), a beautiful young music student working as a waitress and yearning for the financial resources to study in Paris. She agrees to serve as Buddy's temporary companion, but as the months pass and her pregnancy progresses, Maggie begins to fall in love with Buddy, who doesn't return her affections -- at first. Steinberg would go on to have greater success as a television sitcom director, calling the shots for several episodes of hit series in the '80s amd '90s.