WHAT WENT WRONG - Deliverance

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Dangerous stunts performed by unqualified actors, broken bones, and a screenwriter “crazy about being drunk”. This week Lizzie takes Chris downriver on this uniquely American story, directed by a Brit, cast largely with first-time actors… and how it gave us one of film history's most horrifying moments.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. So quarantining with my parents, which is great. Carmela and I are up in Seattle. My parents got a puppy, though. Two things. One, puppy is immune to potty training. Very cute, but just peas everywhere. In front of us, looks us in the eye while it's happening.

Just goes for it. Also, turns out my dog, just total asshole to young puppies. My mom bought this puppy, like, bone after bone after bone. And Louie just takes them from the puppy and hides them in a little bit. a corner of the room. And then if the other dog tries to go into that corner, Louis attacks him like he's smog from the Hobbit. So it's always sobering when you realize that your child, uh, dog child in this instance. It's just a real garbage. So that's what's going on with me. But Lizzie, we're back this week for another episode of what went wrong. I am super excited.

I am thrilled at the movie that you picked. It was even better than I remembered it in my opinion. But yeah, I'll let you hop into it. Yes. So this week, I am again thrilled because I again got to watch a movie that I really love and same experience as Chris. It was even better than I remembered. This week, we are talking about one of my all-time favorite movies. What I would absolutely argue is a horror movie, which is probably my favorite genre. A hundred percent of horror movie. And that movie is, of course, as you may have noticed by the banjos at the beginning of this episode, Deliverance. Very briefly before we get into this, I'm so excited. this episode. There's a lot to talk about with this movie. But what was your reaction to having watched it again? I hadn't seen it in a couple years and it blew me away again. I hadn't seen it in almost 20 years. Oh, wow. Wait, you were like 11 years old when you saw this? I was 12 or 13. Oh, no. And I watched it with my dad. No. And he was like, this is a great movie,

which is true. It's a very weird movie to watch with your dad in middle school. And I think we were both just like, we're not going to talk about this for a little while afterwards. And, you know, so because I saw it at such a young age, I did not appreciate a lot of the incredible filmmaking. I think really subtly woven in themes, the great acting from every performer, Ned Beattie, Ronnie Cox, and then obviously John Boyt and Bert Reynolds. I thought it was outstanding. I especially thought the first 45 minutes or so were like nearly perfect filmmaking.

And then the ending I found also incredibly haunting as well. So yeah, really I was stunned. I also though, as I was watching it, thought, what a nightmare to make this movie. Half the movie is them on canoes literally going through rapids. And it didn't look like stunt. doubles. It looked like it was them. Hold that thought, Chris, because you're not wrong. I just thought, oh my God, that seems so

stressful and dangerous and time-consuming, and it all looked amazing. So they clearly did a great job. But, man, I was not envious of any of them having to go through that process. I'm going to say it was a combination of them doing a great job and them being very lucky that no one died.

So we will get to all of that later. A little bit of background on the movie that we're talking about. if you have not seen it. Deliverance was released July 30th, 1972. It was directed by John Borman, written by James Dickey based on his own novel of the same name. We're going to spend quite a bit of the episode on James Dickey.

It stars, as Chris said, John Boyt, Bert Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Ronnie Cox. It is probably most famous, well, for two scenes, one of which that I'll mention at the top, which is the audio reference you heard at the top of this episode, is for the inclusion of a song called dueling banjos, which is also important to remember, as we will get to that a little later as well. It was nominated for three Oscars, Best Film Editing, Best Director, and Best Picture. It lost Best Director to Bob Fawsey for Cabaret, which like pretty good. That's okay. And it lost Best Picture to the Godfather. So quite a year. Yeah, tough year. Yeah, but it was in good company. In 2008, it was entered into the National

Film Registry at the Library of Congress. This movie is amazing. So just to get this right out of the way for anybody that doesn't know, probably the most famous scene in the entire thing outside of the banjos is that there is a very upsetting male rape scene. It is unlike anything I have ever watched. It was shocking then. It is shocking now.

Shocking to watch with your dad. Yeah. Not something I would do. I watched this with my mom, though. She loves deliverance. She has great taste in movies. So it is an incredibly shocking scene to watch. It also does bring a different level of gravity and importance to a movie that otherwise may have sort of just been like a camping adventure or camping horror movie.

And we will talk about that a little later as well. Chris, since you just watched it, do you want to set up the plot of deliverance a little for anyone that hasn't seen? seen it. Sure. So the story follows four friends played by Bert Reynolds, John Voight, Ned Beatty, and Ronnie Cox. Bert Reynolds plays Lewis, who's the most outdoorsy slash Hunter Mountain Man. Allegedly, yes. Yes. Yeah. Allegedly. Bow Hunter, very muscular, very masculine. John Voight plays Bobby. He's Ed. So John Voight's character is actually the narrator, in the book. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And he's caught between the two worlds, right? He has, he has a family and a child, and he benefits from the system and he likes the system, but he's clearly

there's an allure to Lewis and the outdoorsman and the thorough life that he feels drawn toward. Ned Beatty plays Bobby, who's the kind of like... The jokester. Jokester, fat guy. And then the moral compass. of the group is Ronnie Cox's Drew, and the four of them head down the river in Appalachia. I'm not sure. Yeah, we'll get into it. It's set in the same place that the book is, which is in North Georgia, which is very rural.

But yes. Yeah, a very rural area down a river that's going to be flooded with the construction of new dams. And they have a run-in with locals that becomes quickly violent, and then it becomes a fight for survival and a fight to cover up what happened for multiple reasons as they continue to head downriver and attempt to make it to their vehicles waiting for them. That's actually what I forgot about this movie is that most of the movie is them kind of trying to decide

what to do and how to handle it because they're like, we can't really go to the police. Like everybody in this town is related to each other potentially and we're going to get totally screwed if we go in front of a jury here. And then after that, they realized that they're kind of maybe it's ambiguous, but maybe being hunted by the guy who got away. And it's also Ned Beatty's Bobby doesn't want it to get out that he was violated by another man. Yeah, that's his motivation for sure.

Bert Reynolds is, I don't want to go on trial in front of these people's families. So, yeah, they make the potentially disastrous call to try and hide the bodies and continue downriver, which then ends with another one of them. dying. Yeah, the entire second half of the film, everything that happens is ambiguous. Yeah. And that's what I think is so well done. It's kind of grotesquely ambiguous in a way that leaves these characters deeply uneasy as they end the film. Yeah. So as we mentioned, it was shot on location in Rabin, sorry if I'm mispronouncing that, Rabin County, Northeastern Georgia, which is where the book is set as well. So we're going to begin our journey, our journey down river where deliverance begins, and that is with James Dickey. So the film is based on the novel of the same name by James Dickey,

who also wrote the screenplay, which we'll get to a little later. So James Dickey actually has a cameo in the movie. You may remember at the very end, he shows up twice, but the sheriff who comes and talks to him at the car, that is James Dickey. So that is both the author and the screenwriter. He's incredible. His role in the movie, essentially, he's a sheriff. It appears clear that he knows some foul play went on, but at the very end of the movie,

he goes to the men and basically just tells them leave and don't come back. He has one of my favorite lines in the movie. He says, I'd like to see this town die peaceful and just tells him to go. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1923. That is where he grows up. After some time spent in the army as a radar operator during World War II, and in the Air Force in the Korean War, he ends up going to Vanderbilt. He graduated Magna Cum Laude with an English degree.

He's super smart. Interesting to note that there are a lot of accounts saying that he greatly exaggerated his time in World War II, having claimed to have been a fighter pilot when there are no records of that. There are records of him being a flight navigator or radar operator. So that's kind of our first indication that James Dickey has a tendency to embellish and be a bit larger than life. He ends up becoming an English professor at Rice University in Texas and later at University of Florida. He also becomes a bit of a madman and does some copywriting for both Coca-Cola and Lays, which would have been in the late 50s, early 60s. He also starts publishing poems in the early 60s, and he won a ton of awards, including the National

book award for poetry. In 1970, he writes his first novel, which is deliverance. Though it's never mentioned explicitly in the book or in the movie, actually, it is assumed that the four main characters are from Atlanta and that it does take place in rural northern Georgia. Interestingly, about the story, James Dickie was famous for going up to people and saying, don't you dare ever tell anybody this, you know, like, I'll get you if you tell anyone this, but everything in that story happened to me. And then someone else would have a conversation with

someone, they'd be like, oh, yeah, they told me that too. Oh, got it. Nothing, none of this is true. None of this happened to him. Yeah, he was a total lunatic about stuff like that. He just liked messing with people. And he knew that the subject matter of the book was so disturbing that people would be like, wait, what? And he could just walk away. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. With a great exit. The river mentioned in the book and the movie is the Kahulawesi River, which is fictional, but it pretty closely resembles the Chituga River, I believe it is, which is in Rabin County, Georgia, and that is exactly where they filmed deliverance. All this is to say that the movie does not stray that far from the source material. So far, it's very close. So in 1970, just before the novel's release, a former student of James Dickies named David Giler, who was working, for Warner Brothers got an advanced copy of the manuscript. And when he finished it, he basically sprinted to the executives at Warner Brothers and was

like, you need to acquire the film rights to this immediately before it releases, which they did. I was wondering how the movie would come out in 72 if the book was releasing in 70. So they got the rights before it ever came out. They paid $100,000 for the movie rights, which was a lot. And they also agreed to let Dickie write the screenplay, which is something that they would probably come to regret. However, Warner Brothers quickly realized they had made a gamble that was already paying off. When the book released, it was an immediate massive commercial success. And James Dickey was quickly becoming a household name. So they begin production on the film

less than one year after the novel is released. They're like, we need to capitalize on the interest of this. We're going to go into production right away. Something else about James Dickey. in addition to being a larger than life individual, he was also a bit of a crazy drunk. This is a direct quote from him. He said, quote, I am crazy about being drunk. I like it like Patton-liked war. So crazy drunk is just what he calls themselves.

That's good to know. Yeah, no. He loved it and he leaned into it. Also, he's a funny man, a bit of a dick. When it came to other writers and poets, he referred to Robert Frost, as a quote, super jerk. Okay.

Compared Sylvia Plath to Judy Garland, and he would also hold random press conferences where he'd just start ripping Dylan Thomas a new asshole for like no apparent reason. So he just, he doesn't do anything halfway, let's say that. Love it. Now, James Dickey had a very specific director in mind for this project, and it wasn't John Borman. He wanted a man named Sam Peckinpah, who had just received a ton of acclaim. Who makes perfect sense for this movie? Right.

He's a much more natural fit in terms of like what he had made previously and what he was interested in. Peckinpah had just received a ton of acclaim for his 1969 Western, The Wild Bunch. As a person, he was a much better fit for the movie. He's more of an outdoorsman. He's like a Western tough guy. And Dickie wanted him really badly. However, evidently Peck and Paa had gone extremely over budget on his 1970 film, The Ballot of Cable Ho. and Warner Brothers said, no way.

They did not trust him to keep deliverance at the budget that they had intended it for, which was not big, like even despite the amount of press around this. So eventually Warner Brothers and Dickie agree on John Borman, who had just won the best director award at Cannes for a movie called Leo the Last. Now, Borman was a really interesting choice for this movie because, first of all, he's British. Right. Which is, when you think about it, like... Very unusual.

It's such an American movie. It is such an American movie. I would never have guessed that the director was British. He had some experience adapting novels to screen, however. He'd made point blank in 1967, which was based on a Richard Stark novel, and that's where he first worked with Lee Marvin, who he would work with again on Hell in the Pacific, and who will show up in this story in just a minute.

Now, he was by no means a huge name when he signed on for deliverance, but he was plenty experienced, and he knew what it took to bring a book to the screen. much to James Dickie's dismay. The first version of the screenplay that James Dickie delivered was reportedly something like 700 pages long. Of course. Of course. An author. Cut some of your own book out.

No, no. Let me add some. Yeah, exactly. Hear all the scenes that the editor wouldn't let me put in the book. Yeah, that's pretty much what he did. So he basically just chopped up the novel and called it the day. Dickie himself said that it was very good, but he estimated it would run about seven hours. Yeah, that makes sense.

Which I love that he's like, no, y'all are going to love it. It's going to be seven hours long. Exactly. So the first third of the book is all focused on the four men living their relatively comfortable lives in Atlanta. And Dickie had kept all of that in the screenplay. Oh, no. Yeah.

So John Borman describes this as their first big disagreement. He said, you can't do that in a film and you don't need it. Talking about the characters, he argued that, quote, through action and behavior, they define them. themselves, which is such a great quote. Borman obviously won this argument because the movie begins. They're already in the cars on the way to the trip. Yeah. And he was, in fact, you hear all their dialogue without seeing their faces for the first few minutes. Dickie's own son comes right out and says, quote, Borman had a much better sense of how to put a film together, which is true. I mean,

it was his job. That's what he was hired to do. And this would really be the crux of the issue between the two men. Borman knew what he was doing and it really kind of irritated Dickie. As John Voight put it, quote, you tried to figure out who the hell you were dealing with, referring to Dickie. He had great confidence in his persona more than I have. I'm a person who questions everything myself, most of all.

Dickie didn't have that gene. I also want to say here, I forgot to say it at the top. I pulled a lot of this information from some really excellent oral histories of deliberance. One was in Garden and Gun magazine. Another was in Atlanta magazine. and there was a third for The Guardian, all of which were really great. It's really cool to hear from everybody involved, well worth reading.

So now it's time to start casting the movie. John Borman goes to Warner Brothers, and they tell him that he needs to get two massive stars attached to this project. Like, that is his job. Of course. Two big ones. So he's like, all right,

I'm going to do it. He goes out, and he actually manages to get Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando to sign on. So it would have been. been Jack Nicholson for Ed, which is John Boyt's character, and then Marlon Brando for Lewis, the Bert Reynolds character. Which I would have loved to watch that version of the movie, too. That sounds really fun. I don't know if I would have loved Jack Nicholson, but Brando sounds interesting. Well, as we know, yeah, interesting is probably the word for dealing with Brando in a canoe.

I don't know if you want to sign up for that. Brando, who like didn't have an agent, I don't think, only agreed to do it on the condition that he be paid whatever Jack Nicholson was paid. And then Jack Nicholson heard that and he was like, all right, I want $500,000. Okay. Yeah. So Borman's like, all right, whatever. Like they said get two big stars. I got two big stars.

Yeah, that's not Borman's job. No, so he walks back into Warner Brothers and he's like, great news. I got Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando will do it for whatever we pay Jack Nicholson. They're like, great. How much are we paying Jack Nicholson? He's like, 500,000. And they like scream laughed him out of the room and they were like, we're not paying. They said we might consider paying that for Jack Nicholson.

There's no way in hell we're paying that. for Marlon Brando. Oh, interesting. I would have guessed it would be the opposite. No, Jack Nicholson was a much bigger star at this point. He was like one of the hottest stars in Hollywood. And Marlon Brando was considered box office poison. They were like, absolutely not.

So Borman's like, I did what you told me to do. I don't understand. And then they're like, you know what? Screw it. Make the movie for $2 million total and make it with unknowns in the lead. So they just do a complete 180. And they're like, I don't know if this is because they were losing confidence in Dickie's ability to write the script or what. Yeah, they got a 700-page script, like a British director. They're probably just like, well, let's just make it and see what happens. Yeah, I think at this point they're like, this is going to be a nightmare and probably isn't going to be that good. So just make it with people nobody's ever heard of. Well, I think also once you have two stars approach a project and then they have word gets around town that they said no to those stars because they couldn't pay them enough, it probably takes the luster the project for other people at the comparable level.

Yeah. So the first two actors they end up casting are, in fact, unknowns. And those are Ned Beatty and Ronnie Cox, who are two of my favorite people in the whole movie. I love them. I love both of them since then. They're amazing. So Ronnie was a stage actor who was struggling in New York, and Ned Beatty was a regional theater actor working in D.C. at the time.

Really? Yeah. Neither of them had ever acted on camera before. in their lives. That's incredible. This is not just that they were unknowns. They had never done it. Wow.

It's their first IMDP credit. Could Ronnie really play the guitar? Yeah, he could. It looked great. Okay, good. Yeah, it was like. It's him play. You're not hearing him, which we'll get to, but it is him playing.

I would also imagine that Ned Beatty's part in particular was especially difficult to cast because he is the one who has to be involved in the rape scene. Yeah. A lot of actors that they met with said, absolutely not. I will never be able to be a leading man after I do that. scene. It's like 1970s Hollywood. And it's for the same reason that the character doesn't want it to get out. I'm sure that an actor playing that role, doesn't want to do it. Not only, I'm going to be emasculated, but he doesn't get any sort of heroic triumphant come up and says a character either.

No, but, and I expected to sort of see that like, oh, we had to convince Ned to do it. Not the case at all, which I think is really interesting. And here is Ronnie Cox talking about how Ned Beatty understood the scene and continues to discuss the scene. I think it sheds some light on why he had absolutely no problem signing up for it. This is, in many ways, a quintessential man's movie. What do you think deliverance has to say about manhood? Well, Ned said this earlier, is that this is a film that in many ways women got way before men did, because women had for centuries had to deal with the concept of rape. But this was the first time that men had had to come to grips with that rape, not necessarily being an act of, a sexual act, but of control and of violence.

And dumb, absolutely. And so because of that, as Ned has said, that women got this film on a level way earlier than men. I think men are just now starting to catch up. Yeah. So, you know, props to Ned Beatty for being like, yeah, I'll do this. this. And I think it's interesting that he and Ronnie Cox were coming from a theater background and potentially more willing to explore it because of that. Also, the casting director, Lynn Stallmaster, didn't realize that Ronnie Cox and Ned Beatty knew each other. They had done something like 20 plays together in the theater circuit and were actually good friends. So a lot of the friendship you see on screen is real. Now, some interesting other folks who were in the mix that

might have made the film look very different. Dickie wanted Gene Hackman to play. Ed. The director wanted Lee Marvin. He actually almost got Lee Marvin, but Lee Marvin read the script and said, I'm too old. Like, you don't want me in this. Yeah, he would have been like 20 years too old to put in that role. He said no. Other names that came up for Lewis in particular, Steve McQueen, Donald Sutherland and Charlton Heston. I believe all of whom turned it down. Charlton Heston, I think he had a conflict at the time. And Donald Sutherland is the only one who was expressed regret for not taking it. He would have been an odd choice for Lewis. I would have seen him more as an ad that's interesting.

He's kind of menacing. I could see him as Lewis. Other names considered were Robert Redford, Henry Fonda, George C. Scott, and Warren Beatty. So Bert Reynolds loved the script as soon as he read it. He signed on pretty quickly, even though he had some concerns that the rape scene might end his career. He kind of didn't care. He'd done three failed TV series at this point. He was really looking for a break into serious acting and movies in particular.

and he basically just said, fuck it. He was like, I like this. I'm going to do it. John Voight was the last one to join the cast. And that's probably because he was the most established at that time. He's not a huge star. However, he had done Midnight Cowboy and Catch 22. And he was a little hesitant.

Allegedly, John Borman had to call him on the phone. And he was like, listen, I'm going to count to 10. You have until I count to 10 to say yes to this movie. And like on 9, John Boyt was like, I'll do it. So you might be wondering how they cast the support. characters in this film because they look very real, let's say. Do indeed. And that is because, with the exception of the main Mountain Man, who is the one that rapes

Ned Beatty's character, he was from Pasadena by way of Tennessee. But the rest of them are all locals. Oh, wow. So the banjo kid was played by a local child named Billy Redden, and he was cast exclusively for his, let's say, distinctive features. The casting director was taken to a local grammar school to cast the part. He looked in a window. He saw Billy from across the room.

He called John Borman and he was like, I don't know if this kid can play the banjo, but this is your kid. So it turns out he cannot play the banjo at all. Like, could not play a single note. Literally can't even, didn't know how to hold it, can't play it. It's not him playing it. Which is amazing because when you watch it. Yeah, it looks very convincing.

That's because they actually had to sew an extra sleeve into the shirt that he's wearing and another child who could play the banjo is reaching through and playing for him. That's an incredible trick. Yeah. They really pulled it off. They did. They did. They did.

Very sold. Well, and something else that's interesting is that I think it adds to the creepiness of the scene, because his face doesn't really match what his hands are doing. lightly about those of a good typist. The music was just there. So it actually ends up matching the book really well because he didn't know how to play. A little fun fact here, you know, the weird, like, quick head turn away that he does? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, when he tries to shake his hand. Yes. So that, apparently, they couldn't get the kid to do that to Ronnie Cox because he loved Ronnie Cox and they, like, got along really well, but he fucking hated Ned Beatty for no apparent reason. So that's why Ned Beatty is in the shot. That's why he walks up also?

Yes. They had Ned Bady just like walk up and stand there and say something to him so that he would turn his head away. That's awesome. So as we discussed, the like main mountain man guy was played by Bill McKinney. He was an actor living in California, but he was originally from Tennessee. Here, however, is Bert Reynolds talking about the casting process for the absolutely terrifying other hillbilly, the toothless one. And I said, I know a guy. He can't read and he can't write her. anything but he I'm telling you if we can get him we got something special so I said let me bring him in his name is Cowboy and he'll just talk to you and you see

if you like him so he came in and I introduced him and he said did you tell I can't read I said yes I told me and the director went just read this first line here at Cowboy and he went and he looked over at me like oh I'm to get to beat out of me. You know? And he said, well, the first line, the first line cowboy is get over against that tree and take your pants down. And he said, get over against that sapling and take your panties down.

And the director said, you got the pants. And in case you're wondering how or why Bert Reynolds knew this man, they were friends. And that is due to the fact that Bert Reynolds had several years earlier spent a summer working at a local amusement park called Ghost Town in the Sky in Maggie Valley, North Carolina in the 60s. That is where he met Herbert Cowboy Coward. Coward and Bert Reynolds were both like fake gunslingers at this amusement park. and by the way, Cowboy had lost his front teeth at Ghost Town when he was smacked in the face

by what we can only assume was a real pistol. Yeah. Poor guy. So the casting of locals, unknowns, and quote-unquote non-actors ended up resulting in some of the movie's most famous lines, actually. Many of them were complete accidents.

Squeal like a pig came from Ned Beatty and Cowboy, both of whom had... Yeah, they had experience tying up hogs. In fact, in the original script, Ned's character didn't fight or try to run away at all, but John Borman felt that wasn't realistic. So Ned, who had some experience hog tying, came up with the idea of Bill McKinney grabbing him, quote, like a hog, and the rest is history. Let's hear did Ned Beatty talk about it. It scripted. It was just the fact that I gave in to what the situation was, and I made myself available to whatever he wanted to do to me. me but John Borman didn't believe that he would thought well you are you going to try to do something so what he really wanted for is for me to run and when I ran I remembered how we when I was in the

situation we were dealing with big boar hogs and how this older man would have to grab one of the back legs and I would have to hit it with the tackle and then roll up on top of it and then put the rope around the legs and all this stuff was going on and that's when we came to the squealing of the pig thing. Wow. So already you're seeing that there are some departures from not just the novel, but also James Dickie's screenplay. Granted, they are departures that have become probably the most iconic moments from the movie, which you can imagine also probably didn't sit particularly well. Yeah, I'm sure James loves it. Yeah. By the way, you sure got a pretty mouth. That is also cowboy. Oh, really? Not a good.

in the screenplay. Interesting. Yeah, that's all you need to hear it. I know what's coming in that scene. You sure do. It is terrifying, especially when he has zero teeth. So one would have to imagine that all these changes in this level of improvisation on set probably didn't sit too well with the film and novels over the top author. So let's talk about James Dickie on set because he was on set the whole freaking time. Very unusual to have the screenwriter on set. You know, you don't need him there. No. You don't. You don't.

So while they were rehearsing, the casting crew was staying at the Kingwood Country Club in Clayton, Georgia. At night, they would go and grab drinks at the bar. But remember, who loves to drink more than Patton loves war? Yes, that's correct. It is James Dickie. So Dickie starts getting just absolutely shit can wasted every night. And he would insist on calling all of the actors by their character names whenever they would come into the bar. So one night, Bert Reynolds is sitting at the bar and he starts to hear this, Lewis, Lewis coming from across the other side of the bar.

So Bert Reynolds is like, I'm not going to respond. And he doesn't look at him. He won't say anything. And the bartender is like, hey, I'm pretty sure he's talking to you. And Bert Reynolds is like, my name's not Lewis. And so, of course, Dickie like lumberes over. By the way, James Dickie was like six three and a half. He's enormous.

Yeah, you said he was a sheriff. He's a big guy. He's a thick dude. Yeah, he is thick. Yeah. He comes over to Reynolds and he's like, hey, you know, I was talking to you, Lewis. And Bert Reynolds goes, uh, no, Lewis works between seven and five tomorrow. My name's Bert.

I think Bert Reynolds is the only one that was like, listen, you might be bigger than I am, but I'm insane and I'll, I'll slap you in the face. Like, which as we know, Bert Reynolds could do. And then Dickie apparently paused and goes, that's exactly what Lewis would say before he's solders off. response. I had to respect Dickie in that situation. Here's the thing about James Dickie that made me sad when I was reading all of this. He was an unbelievable writer.

I mean, he must have been. The story's amazing. The story's amazing. The vast majority of the dialogue and deliverance is his. Oh yeah. The script is obviously very well written. It makes me want to read the book. First book. First screenplay. That's crazy. Yeah. Just a total psychopath in real life. But, I mean, extremely talented. In particular, Dickie's offset antics really,

bothered Ronnie Cox. So he pulled the same stuff with him, always calling him Drew and trying to get Cox to perform scenes for other drunk guys in the country club bar, telling them basically like that, you know, like, come come see what they're doing with my movie and, you know, like,

let me show you what my actors can do and what he's treating them sort of like puppets and he just wants them to perform. And they did not like it. So John Borman gets wind of this and decides that he asked to ask Dickie to leave and come back for his cameo as the show at the end. John Borman and all four lead actors confront Dickie because I think they were all

terrified of them. Like he, this guy is a complete loose canon. And Ronnie Cox talking about it, he said it was like watching James Dickie play all four of the characters from the movie at once, kind of like vacillating between the different. So when it came time to stay as peace, Beatty, who seemed to have the least issue with Dickie of all the four of them, said, quote, I really love your book and what you've done with the script, but what we do is such a totally different exercise that there's just no way we can compromise. Rather than acting out something like you think, we do it together. We play off one another. You're going to have to let us be free to do that. Very reasonable, thoughtful, measured response. I can't wait to see how Dickie's going to fly.

Well, so there are varying accounts of what happened next. However, it would appear that it's point after James Dickey had gotten significantly more hammered that night, he punched John Borman straight in the face and broke his nose in two of his teeth. Oh my God. Wow. So this is a little hard to verify, but I saw it in enough places that I think he did that. Was John Borman older than him? No, he was younger than him. No, he was slightly younger, but the thing is John Borman is not like, he's not a super young guy. He was 40. He's not as old as, he's 40 yet.

He was about 40 when this movie was made. So he was older than the actors, but younger than James Dickey. Yes. So even though James Dickey swore that if he left, he would never return for his cameo as the sheriff. You know, you get yourself another boy is what he said. Man, he crawled right back because he could not resist having a cameo. And of course, he also writes himself a map. massive monologue to deliver as the sheriff.

Now, at this point, John Borman has got his number. So he's like, great, beautiful. I love the monologue. It's absolutely perfect. When you deliver it, I want you to deliver half of the monologue at the front of the car. Like, kind of on the hood of the car. And then those last two lines I really like, lean in and say them in the close up. He's like, I want you to stop.

And then I want you to walk around. I want you to finish the monologue. So guess which chunk makes it into the movie. He just cut the whole first half. Because he realized there was nothing he could do other than just get rid of them on the cutting room floor That's the way to do it But he does deliver one of my favorite lines in the whole movie Which is when he says I'd kind of like to see this place die peaceful

And he's very good He's a good actor I was stunned to learn that that was That was him and that he was also probably drunk And then he was a non-actor You know And they did it He was very very good

Well one of those things is correct And that he was probably drunk So as you mentioned earlier This is a pretty stunt heavy movie. Early on in the movie, when Bert Reynolds and John Boyd are in the car headed towards the river, Bert Reynolds says, I've never been insured in my life. I don't believe in insurance. Yes, indeed.

Now, it would appear that this was also the belief of the production, because in order to cut costs, not only did they not insure the actors, but they also had them do all of their own stunts. John Borman's like, if one of them dies, we're just going to, We're going to sink them just like these other guys in the movie. Literally, he's like, we're going to put rocks on him and sink him in the river. It'll be fine. Wow. As you may be able to tell by watching the movie, that is all four of them doing all of the canoeing on what was.

It looks, you're gripping your seat while you're watching it. It just goes to show you that knowing that something's real and happening with the real actors, as opposed to even a convincing stunt double or a CGI replacement, it just ups the stakes because you're watching these guys through not the crazy rapids, whereas, you know, we've seen more modern movies of people jumping off of waterfalls, but we know that it's not real, so you lose that tension. To be honest, though, these actually are crazy rapids. No, they are. The first couple are small, and then by the end, you're just like, no way they're doing these things.

Well, also, it should be noted that the river they shot on, the Chetuga River, was not a river that people took canoes out on. Right, exactly. This was not, like, this is not a tourist-friendly river. is not a place that people frequently do this. In fact, it was most notorious for people going rafting on it and just getting completely destroyed and like having their rafts just shatter on the rocks. So only one out of the four leads had any experience whatsoever in a canoe. Can you guess who that was? I'm guessing Ned Beatty. You were right. It was Ned Beatty. He looked very, he looked actually comfortable at the front of that canoe. He was acting uncomfortable, but he

looked, whereas the other guys were kind of panic. You know what I mean? They don't know what they're doing it all. He knew what he was doing. Ned Beatty actually did play a trick on Bert Reynolds at one point, apparently because Ned Beatty knew what he was doing, Bert Reynolds had gotten a little lazy in the back of the canoe at one part of it. And Ned Beatty was asking him to paddle in a certain direction. He looked behind him to see that Bert Reynolds was asleep. So he sees like some minor rapids coming up. And Ned Beatty is like, I'm going to mess with this guy. And he jumped out of the canoe and hid so that when it would go over the rapids, it like kind of, you know, Bert Reynolds, like, fell out of the canoe and he came out and he's like, you know,

Ned, Ned, oh my God. And Ned Beatty is just like hiding underwater laughing. And then he pops up and he's like, well, I'm doing fine. Like, what are you doing? And Bert Reynolds was so mad. Yeah, of course. It's like a little kid that hides from their parent in the grocery store and the parents like, oh my God, my child's been abducted.

And the little kid's like, this is how funny. I've been behind the cans the whole time. Yeah, mom. So there are some scenes where the. canoes were supposedly on tracks under the water. I don't know if I buy that. I know in one indication they said that they actually had dammed the river a little higher up so they would drain it so that they could put some tracks in in some of the crazier rapids. They didn't for some of the like sort of mid-range rapids, but they did allegedly put them on tracks for some of the bigger ones.

I'm guessing like when they had to have, you know, one hit the other to split it exactly. Yes. That stuff. Probably was on tracks. But that was on track. uncontrolled. It was. But so even when it was on tracks, when they damned the river, it reached a point where apparently John Borman was getting really impatient and just felt like they should just go. So they actually released the river too early and it like completely capsized all of the boats. And he was like, we're lucky that we're still alive. But you're talking about some of the sequences where it's clear that it looks very like amateur. Like there's some moments where there's a moment where I think Ned Beatty and John Voider in the canoe together. and they turn it around backwards and go down that that's real um that was a moment where that's just how they went down the rapids and that's why ned badie's like it's a little unorthodox is because like it was not planned um so also one of the more famous shots in it is bert reynolds when he's kind of going down the waterfall like you can see him sliding yeah so that's like that's real yeah They launch him out of a canoe

And then he slides down the rapids So the first time that they did it They were doing it with a dummy Because it is obviously That is a dangerous shot Someone on set After watching back the dailies was like That looks like a dummy

So Bert Reynolds was like I want to do it Like just let me do it I don't want this to look like a dummy It's going to ruin the movie If that's a situation So they're like whatever And James Dickies in the back

Like that's what Lois was Sorry. James Dicky's the ones like shoving him back down the rapids. So he does it. He ends up breaking his coxics when he hit a rock about a quarter, a quarter of the way down. So he's literally, that's your tailbone. It's your tailbone. He shatters his tailbone.

He's not even all the way down. He has to keep going on the rocks. And then at the end of the waterfall, he got sucked into something called a hydroflow. Now, they had told him beforehand if that happened that he should not. not try to swim against it, but he should actually swim down. So he does this because they said if you do that, it'll just shoot you back up. What they didn't mention was that it shoots you up with a force that Bert Reynolds was not prepared for.

And it ripped all of his clothes off. So he shoots up out of the hydro flow completely naked with a broken tail bow. And all of the women on set and some of the men are just like, oh my God, the river just gave us naked Bert Reynolds. No, they couldn't figure out where he... Burnt from the water like a newborn child. Like Venus de Milo. They couldn't figure out like where he'd gone.

And then they see this like completely buckass naked man who just like hobbling down the side of the river. And then he comes up and still naked. Bert Reynolds is like, how does it look? And John Borman goes like a dummy going over the waterfall. No. Oh, poor. That sounds so painful.

Horrible. Another famous insane scene that I cannot believe they did themselves. Do you remember the moment where John Voight scales the cliff to go up? Yes. So that's John Voight. Well, yeah. So it looks kind of faky, but I realized that's just because they were doing day for night. They were shooting day and then they were just coloring the sky to look dark.

They actually did that for a lot of the movie because they wanted in particular the river water to look kind of black. like they put a filter over it. So in this scene, John Voight essentially like free solos his way up an enormous cliff face. And it's not him the entire time. There are a couple shots where you see someone. When he's repelling, he's clearly it's a stronger person for like one of the wide shots. Yeah, for some of the wides where you see like when it's really far back and you see a little guy just right in the middle of this enormous cliff, that's not him. But there are shots where you see John Voight and he's 40, 50 feet up on this.

thing, free climbing, and that is him. And they didn't have any harness on him. They had no ropes on him. It's insane. Like, he's, he was not a professional climber. And again, this is a situation where whether he volunteered, he enthusiastically agreed to do it because he knew that they needed shots where they could see his face. And so he was like, I'm going to do it, which is absolutely banana grams. Also, when they're lowering the body of the second guy. Yes, that's the sequence to me that stood out even more, because that looks, that's, That's just an actor. That's poor cowboy.

That's what I was going to say. It didn't look like they built a dummy of him. No. That's him. He talked about it. He was like, yeah, it hurt. It took about half an hour to like lower me off the cliff. Exactly.

By the way, Cowboy is still a bit of a local celebrity and has a pet squirrel named Angel. Oh. I like that. Yeah, he's having a good time. Ned Beatty also nearly drowned when he fell overboard and was sucked underwater by a whirlpool. A PA actually had to leap in and pull Ned Beatty out. And he said his first thought was, how will John Borman finish the film without me? And then the second thought was, the bastard will find a way.

And Burt Reynolds was just telling the PA, he's just faking it. Don't go down there. Yeah. Burr Reynolds is like, don't listen. They also evidently brought in a deer. This is sad. They brought in a deer from an animal sanctuary for that shot where John Boyd is trying to kill a deer at the beginning. Okay, well, you may wonder why it appeared so tranquil and slow.

that is because they thought that tranquilizing it would be the best way to get the shot, but they overdosed it and it died. No. Oh, it's terrible. I feel bad. I know. So even though Bert Reynolds loved the movie, when asked if he would do it again, he said, quote, not for $3 million.

So earlier on, we mentioned the iconic banjo sequence in deliverance. While the song is referred to as dullen banjos on the soundtrack for deliverance, it was actually a song that was first written and recorded in 1955 by Arthur Guitar Buggy Smith initially called Feudin banjos. Which I saw in the credits and I was wondering if you were going to talk about this. Oh, we're going to talk about it because it made its first major debut in a 1963 episode of the Andy Griffith Show. Now, despite the fact that Deliverance made the song iconic and it shot to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 charts in 1973, they neglected to ask for Mr. Guitar Boogie's permission to use it.

Wow. By the way, it sat behind Roberta Flax killing me softly on the Billboard charts. It just wasn't that good, but it was pretty good. What a weird summer for music. 1972, man. Oh, what a time. So this was not the first time that the song had been used without Guitar Boogie's permission, but it was the first time it had been used in a movie that was so commercially successful

or that an adaptation had gone to number two on the billboard charts. Yeah, of course. It made a lot of money. Yeah. So Mr. Boogie Smith filed a lawsuit against Warner Brothers because they had never asked if they could use it and also didn't pay him. I would like to state, I am fully team guitar boogie on this one. Yeah, guitar boogie, get your money.

Oh, he did. Evidently, when he filed the suit, a lawyer from Los Angeles called him and offered him $15,000, to which Mr. Guitar Boogie said, quote, I really appreciate the offer. You might be a good attorney in Los Angeles, but you wouldn't do too good in Carolina. And that was a no. Yeah, that was a big old FU. Yes. So needless to say, Guitar Boogie won his lawsuit big time.

And when asked how much money he made on the settlement, he apparently would point to a picture of a 42-foot yacht on his wall and said, Warner Brothers bought me the boat. He says, I bought this picture. He did not want to be credited in the actual film, though. You may notice his name does not appear. Yeah, I didn't see his name. Yeah, that's because he thought it was horrible. He thought it was a terrible movie.

He was like, no, no, I just want the money. I'm glad he got what he wanted. Well, so part of the reason that he thought the movie was horrible is something that a lot of people local to the area, a feeling that a lot of people local to the area shared. is that it was a detrimental portrayal of Appalachia. Now, when John Borman screened the film for Warner Brothers, the executives were just completely silent. They watched it.

They didn't say anything afterwards. And then just before they walked out, they told him, a movie with no women in it has never been successful at the box office. And then they just left. They were like, I don't know what I just watched. And I'm going to leave. What I love when they say things where it's like,

did you read the script? Yeah, like, what were you expecting? Did they think Ned Beatty's part was a lady? Like, what are they, like, what's going on here? I don't know. Apparently, the dead silence after finishing the movie was a very common trait amongst all audiences. However, Warner Brothers would eat their words. It became the fifth highest grossing film of 1972, bringing in over $46 million just domestically,

again, on a budget of around $2 million. Wow. Yeah. It was extremely commercially successful. And I will share with you what, so my mom saw this in theaters with her sisters and my grandmother. Now, they did not know. My grandma did not know what this movie was about. I think she thought it was a camping movie.

And so at the end of the movie, there was this quintessential sort of dead silence over the audience where no one knows what to say. And my grandma, who is from Texas, stood up, pointed out the screen. and said, I could have lived my entire life without seeing that. And then just walked out. Well, that's fair. Which is one of my favorite reactions to a movie. I don't agree, but I understand. Yeah.

She was pissed. Now, while pretty much everyone else involved in the film would go on to continued great success, the one person who would never quite recover from deliverance was the person who created it, and that is James Dickie. Yeah, I was wondering, I haven't really. heard his name elsewhere. Apparently he would walk up and down the lines of people waiting to see the movie, just reeking of booze and saying, you see that?

That's my movie. He would alternate between praising the movie, saying it was better than the book, and then also saying that it was terrible and that John Borman had ruined what he considered his film. He allegedly even went so far as to try and get his original screenplay made in the late 80s, but obviously there were no takers on that. He descended into deeper and deeper depths of alcoholism, expressing regret over what he'd done to the river once telling a friend, quote, say goodbye to the river for me. And this sentiment, I think, harkens back to what I mentioned just a few minutes ago, which is

that a lot of people local to North Georgia felt that the film had perpetuated stereotypes and painted this idea of a mountain man or hill person as an inbred monster, and they were appalled because they felt, you know, this is obviously not everyone. However, I don't think Dickie saw it this way at all. And in fact, he had included the scene at the end with all the people feeding Ed and Bobby because he wanted to show the kindness at the heart of these people. But still the story that he had created had become synonymous with sort of backwoods horror. So Dickie's son, who has actually written extensively about the making of deliverance because he was on set for a lot of it, said, quote, I couldn't get through to my father anymore and wouldn't

until more than 20 years later. If you're a writer, your ego is a big part of what you do. and if all of a sudden everybody's encouraging you to be crazy, hard drinking, eccentric, you do that, and he did. Dickie died of lung cancer in 1997 and was buried on Polly's Island, South Carolina. His tombstone reads a line from his poem in the treehouse at night, quote, I move at the heart of the world. He did not ever write anything else that had the amount of success or a claim that deliverance did. He just never quite came close.

So that about wraps it up. And I've got a what went right already. Well, let's hear it. So one thing that actually really good that came out of deliverance is that one of the people who went to one of the early screenings was Jimmy Carter. Oh, really? Yes. And when he saw all of the press that the movie was bringing to Georgia, kudos to Jimmy Carter because he watched this movie and everybody around him was like, oh, my God, I can't believe we're watching this with Jimmy Carter. he's going to freak out.

He actually was, regardless of the content of the film, he was thrilled for the amount of attention that it was bringing to his state. And he helped to establish a state film commission. Oh, he helps establish the Georgia Film Fund. Yeah, which fast forward to current day. And because of this, Georgia has become... It's at the end of every Marvel movie.

Yeah, has become a major hub for film and television production. So that's actually like due in no small part to deliverance. No, I believe it. Yeah. Deliverance and a peanut farmer, and that gets you a film fun. Yeah. That's a great what went right. I think there are a ton of what went rates for this one that are very obvious. So I'm going to pick a very, very specific one, which is that there's a very famous type of shot in film that you probably are familiar with called a split die after shot. And that's where you have something in the foreground close to the camera and something in the background that are one. sharing, you know, each half of the frame and somehow both are in focus, right? And they put a diopter over half the frame that brings something close in focus while something far away is in focus too.

And it is used to a very striking effect, like Hitchcock has used it. And usually I find it incredibly distracting. I think it looks terrible. However, in this movie, they use it twice when John Voight is holding the arrow and he can't take the shot at the deer and the camera's on him and both his face and the arrowhead are in focus. And it's so effective. And then they repeat it in the second half of the film

from his point of view. They show both the hunter and the arrowhead in focus as he's aiming the arrow. And I just thought it was a really brilliant use. And I thought so my bigger what went right is the cinematography in this movie is beautiful. I think it looks great. Whatever scan that they're using on Amazon,

which is how I streamed it, looks really good. The colors look gorgeous. It felt very modern, very lush. You could take so many shots from it, and they would just be beautiful photographs. So I would just say the cinematography was a huge what went right and a movie full of things that went right.

Yeah. If you haven't seen deliverance, we highly recommend that you watch it. Maybe not with your dad. Oh, I would just say, go for it. Family movie night. Oh, my God. You're in quarantine.

You don't want to talk about politics. No. Watch deliverance together. That's true. It might make you, I want to talk about politics instead. But, no, we can't recommend it more highly. And like Lizzie said, truly a horror film. Lizzie, anything else?

I'm hungry. Me too. Okay. Bye. Bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing in music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonouos.