Deliverance to the - Charles Bethea

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Mountain Men Continued from page 105 sarah rickman, eighty-five, was married to Frank Rickman, now deceased, who built sets and found filming locations in North Georgia. She lives in Clayton. John Boorman had pink knitting thread holding his glasses. He was English and his wife was German. boorman I was pretty hot at the time. I read the manuscript and knew exactly how to do it. Burt and Jon were both not very hot at the time. Burt had done three TV series, which had all failed. Living in Ireland, I didn’t realize that. Voight had been in Midnight Cowboy, but little else of note. Reynolds had been in movies that, by his own account, “made you run out of the theater screaming if you saw them twice.” These included Caine and Skullduggery. Voight and Reynolds were joined by two Shakespearean actors who’d never done movies: Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox. The film’s budget was $1.8 million. chris dickey Burt wanted respect. He wasn’t coming from the stage, or from an Academy Award–winning film. He was a former stuntman, and he wanted to be a star. reynolds I was crazy and young and thought I was totally indomitable. Deliverance saved me in terms of being thought of as a serious actor. ed spivia, seventy, was the state’s first film commissioner and is now chairman of the Georgia Film, Video, and Music Advisory Commission. He lives on Lake Lanier. Dickey kept slapping Burt on the back and calling him Lewis. I think Burt punched him out. reynolds He was about six foot seven, 240. He didn’t want to get physical with me. He was big, but I was crazy. After fighting the river, Dickey would have been a cinch. The Chattooga was a dangerous, largely unknown river forty years ago. And the men expected to paddle down it were novices in canoes. boorman It was a location film, and I chose the river. It was the most suitable place to shoot, so we did it there. I’ve filmed in more remote places, like the Amazon. reynolds I hadn’t paddled a river until we did the movie. None of us had. At that time, no one had done the Chattooga in a canoe. Just rafts that crashed and burned. buzz williams, sixty-one, was an early paddler of the Chattooga. Now the executive director of the Chattooga Conservancy, he lives in Long Creek, South Carolina. In 1968 I was a high school senior in Pendleton, South Carolina. A couple fellas were transferred to a mill down here, and they had kayaks. Nobody here knew what a kayak was. They found this great river and asked me to go with them. It was the Chattooga. reynolds The first day the four of us went out, I had Ned Beatty in the front of my boat—which was not a good idea—and Jon had Ronny in the front of his boat and we were in this little pond and the boats tipped over. I remember two old paddlers sitting on the beach saying, “This is going to be a long summer.” claude terry, seventy-four, was a technical adviser and body double for Jon Voight. He cofounded American Rivers and Southeastern Expeditions guiding service. He lives in Atlanta. They had me up for a day to teach canoeing, and Burt wouldn’t come. They had Fred Bear teach archery, and Burt wouldn’t do that either. williams You could get seriously lost, or killed. It was one of the few remaining wild places in the southern Appalachians. james dickey Letter to Larry DuBois, April 8, 1971: This is going to be some thing, and some movie. If we just don’t get everybody’s brains knocked out on those rocks! They are pure murder, I can tell you. woodward From Wherever Waters Flow: We might be called on for technical advice, such as, “Where can we find a rock face with a swift current running past, that Jon Voight can be clawing at for a finger hold—and where we don’t lose him down river!” Thus the naming of “Deliverance Rock.” kyle weisbrod, thirty-two, guided Southeastern Expeditions raft trips in 2000 and 2001. He lives in Seattle. Most of the Chattooga shots were from Deliverance Rock and Screaming Left Hand Turn. They use Screaming Left Hand Turn three or four times. They didn’t touch Bull Sluice. The set was a diverse place, as many of the smaller roles were filled by mountain people in North Georgia. betsy fowler, seventy-six, was married to John Fowler, now deceased; in the film, he played a doctor who tends to the injured canoers. She has lived in Rabun County for the past forty-eight years. Boorman told Frank Rickman to go out and find all the people in Rabun County who were challenged in any way—physically and mentally. boorman Frank was a bulldozer man. spivia Frank knew those mountains and rivers better than anybody. His father was sheriff of Rabun County and used him as a catch dog for moonshiners. Frank found the buck dancer at the gas station. And he’s the one that put the pig-squealing in it. Governor Carter ended up appointing him to the film commission. rickman They wanted a snake to swim through the river and hold its head up. Frank knew exactly which snake to get. Frank didn’t go to the movies, but he liked making them. spivia He was a red-clay Michelangelo. Billy Redden, fifteen years old at the time, played Lonnie, the creepy boy in the dueling banjos scene. billy redden, fifty-six, lives in Dillard, Georgia, and works at Walmart. A couple casting directors came into our school and they picked me out. They just said, “Sit there and be natural.” There was another local boy behind me, Mike Atlas, playing the banjo. I just had two scenes: sitting on the porch, then the bridge. The rest of the movie I don’t know nothing about. I left. boorman [Redden] didn’t play the banjo, you know. That was another boy, reaching through his sleeve. We didn’t put him in the credits. The set attracted a lot of attention; much of it came from Reynolds’s harem of women, but there were also tourism officials interested in promoting the state. spivia I was editor of a little state publication called Georgia Progress. I went up to Clayton to see what they were doing with Deliverance. I nosed around and found out they were buying property along the river, and hotels, and food. Helping the community. It was an eye-opening experience. Georgia was having a downtime, and I thought more films would be a good way to get more money spent on Georgia. woodward From Wherever Waters Flow: Nightlife in Rabun County revolved around the Clayton Dairy Queen and the Tiger Drive-in Theatre. The Tiger showed grade-B films that were so bad they were actually good entertainment. reynolds I went to Atlanta a lot. I was dating a lovely lady and driving back at four in the morning to work on the weekends. Jon, he probably was out being a horticulturalist. I think he was testing plants. He’s always trying to further his brain. rickman I was stacking wood out on the carport and Burt drove up. I said, “Hold on, Burt, don’t come and don’t try to kiss me, I’m all sweaty.” He said, “I don’t care.” terry We went into his house and I looked over and there’s a big stack of photographs of Burt in a wet suit top. He said, “Those are for autographs.” The director and principal actors stayed at Kingwood Country Club & Resort during the production, while the crew lodged at the Heart of Rabun Motel. Dickey and Boorman began to butt heads. chris dickey From Summer of Deliverance: My father had been handed the shooting script that he thought he’d approved. But this one started with a terse note: “Scenes 1–19 omit.” This was going to be an action movie that began and ended on the river. Real clean. Real simple. boorman Film is different from a novel. terry We were at Kingwood, having drinks. I was talking to Boorman and Jim 1 1 8 | at l a n ta | s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1 s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1 | at l a n ta | 1 1 9
Dickey comes in drunk. He flops down and says, “God, they’re ruining my fucking movie, ain’t they? They’re not doing my book.” I said, “I don’t know, Jim.” I look at Boorman, and Jim repeats, “They’re ruining my book, ain’t they?” Jim grabs me by the shoulders and says, “You look at me when I talk to you.” boorman He was drunk a lot, and he had become very overbearing with the actors. Eventually I had to ask him to leave. We carried on. reynolds From his autobiography: I just couldn’t handle his act—his Jim Bowie knife on his belt, cowboy hat, and fringed jacket. rickman Boorman and his wife, Christel, rented a house down at Kingwood, and boy, she threw the best parties. She’d go to Atlanta and get a complete hoop of blue cheese. She also bought all the lemons in town and made bowls of fresh lemonade that she took to the set. She rode around Clayton in a yellow convertible. Conflict with locals began to brew. It became clear that the film wasn’t going to be a pretty postcard from North Georgia. fowler Every character, with the exception of my husband [who played the doctor] and the four men going down the river, was portrayed as very limited. And that didn’t make us feel good. or something. It was a very happy shoot in my recollection. Everybody was very collegial. The locals were extremely helpful. woodward From Wherever Waters Flow: Warner Brothers had found their “perfect” backwoods cabin and gas pump location for shooting the “That river don’t go to Aintree” scene. When they returned a week later, they were met by the owner who quickly sent them packing with, “I just read the book and you’re not shooting that filthy story on my place!” king The two things that really made Deliverance last are the concept of the modern man with the primitive weapon against the primitive man with the modern weapon. It was also an unprovoked attack by a rural element against an urban element. chris dickey The book and the movie played with the tension between the new South and the old South. The new South was Atlanta. The old South up in the mountains was a whole different world. You didn’t have to drive far to hit it. williams The whole history of the southern Appalachians is of impoverished people in a land that was just abused and worn out and overrun. That’s why they’re suspicious. Then, on top of all that suffering, to have someone come in and make fun of you? They deeply resented it. boorman Most of the people who lived up there were like that. chris dickey From Summer of Deliverance: Hollywood paid these people and treated them as gently as it knew how to do, but it was hard to get over the feeling as the lights went on and the cameras rolled that souls were being stolen here. As the production wore on, the risk-taking and off-set drama intensified. Voight climbed hundreds of feet above Tallulah Gorge, and Reynolds voluntarily slid down a waterfall. boorman Jon was in a very depressed state when I found him; he wanted to give up acting. He says that I saved his life and then spent the whole film trying to kill him. james dickey Letter to Jacques de Spoelberch, who edited Deliverance the novel, June 26, 1971: Yesterday we were filming the part where Ed climbs the rock-face, and if there was ever a harrowing piece of filmmaking, this was it. Jon Voight did as much of the actual climbing as he was able to, and wanted to do more, but Boorman was as frightened for his life as I was. I am deathly afraid that somebody will get hurt on this film, because there is no doubt that it is the most dangerous one ever made. If we can just get out of the gorge. king The woods represented a sort of mystery to Jim. He wasn’t very comfortable. They told me if I got caught in the hydro flow, swim to the bottom and it’ll shoot you out. They didn’t tell me that it would shoot me like a submarine torpedo! They couldn’t find me for five minutes. A mile down the river, they saw this nude man stumbling, crawling towards them. I’d had on these high boots and they were gone, the pants were gone, the underwear was gone, the jacket was gone. I said to Boorman, “How’s it look, John?” He said, “Like a dummy going over the waterfall.” rickman Frank had built a walkway and put strong poles and a large rope along the sides of the gorge for you to hold on to. So there were some precautions. chris dickey From Summer of Deliverance: To shoot that scene, a little deer was brought in from an animal park, and heavily tranquilized so it could be controlled. There was never any question of hurting it in any way. But it died. It had been given an overdose. Boorman and his assistants were in a quiet panic. “This is all we need,” I remember one of them saying. reynolds You think that right in the middle of the fact that you may be drowning, somebody’s going to say “cut” and you’re going to be all right. I don’t know if you could find four actors quite that crazy to do it now. And Boorman was right there with us most of the time. terry There were hours of hanging on the branch above a big rapid “waiting for cloud.” The cinematographer wanted everything overcast and then put a brownish wash on the film to make it even darker. It seemed dark enough. Filming the scene in which Ned Beatty’s character is raped took more than a day. The set was closed. chris dickey From Summer of Deliverance: It was a rain forest, right here in the mountains of Georgia. Its floor was so shadowed that small plants found it impossible to grow in the thick loam of the rotting leaves. The mountain laurel was not shrubbery but a collection of trees twisted like gnarled fingers reaching for the light. The whole effect was beautiful and threatening. This was where the rape scene was going to be filmed. The script called it “Resting Place.” woodward From Wherever Waters Flow: [Chris] was to “stand-in” for Beatty at all the critical marks—climbing the leafy bank, bending over the log. chris dickey Nobody was sure how far it would go, or how convincing it would be. I wasn’t in my underwear. I was fully clothed. But it was a very unpleasant sensation, lying over a log with your ass up in the air in a scene that’s eventually going to be a rape. rickman Frank [the local location scout] did say that was the thing to do. And they did it. Oh gosh. He was proud of it. He thought saying “squeal like a pig” was real funny. chris dickey Herbert “Cowboy” Coward [who plays the “Toothless Man” in the rape scene] was not an actor at all. He’d try to get into the role and he would say the most ridiculous things. He ends up saying, “He’s got a real pretty mouth, don’t he?” williams There was already conflict between the people that traditionally used the river and people coming in from the outside. Deliverance was like dropping an atomic bomb on the whole thing. boorman When I was looking for locations up there, before we shot the film, I ran into the odd guy aiming a shotgun at me. But on the whole, they were very helpful. chris dickey Life magazine asked my father to write something about the making of the movie, and he said, “Have my son write it.” I was nineteen and thought it was a great chance. So I took tons of notes and sat down and wrote a few thousand words. They didn’t publish it, but I kept the notes. boorman Chris was fourteen years old I couldn’t get through to my father. All of a sudden everybody’s encouraging you to be crazy, harddrinking, eccentric . . . you do that. And he did. —Chris Dickey reynolds I was Southern, and the rest of the crew weren’t. I had a real touch with those people. And not because I was trying to talk like Erskine Caldwell. There was no way we could have made that movie without their permission. They let us shoot. They weren’t above blowing up canoes. james dickey Letter to Jacques de Spoelberch, June 26, 1971: Burt Reynolds, who plays Lewis, cascades down about ninety feet of hurricane-rushing water. Burt did this, and the shots of him doing it are hairraising indeed. reynolds They sent a dummy over the waterfall and it looked like shit, like a dummy. So I went over the waterfall and hit a rock about a quarter of the way down and cracked my hip bone and my coccyx. 1 2 0 | at l a n ta | s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1 s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1 | at l a n ta | 1 2 1
Page 1 and 2: In the summer of 1971, Hollywood ca
Page 3: Above, Jon Voight’s climactic cli

Deliverance to the - Charles Bethea

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