Gopardi: Burt Reynolds on the set of Deliverance (Image: Getty)
Deliverance was a film that forever erased the tender cinematic depictions of the rural South as immortalized in Gone With The Wind.
The remote forests and rivers of northern Georgia, through the doomed adventures of four Atlanta suburbs and their ill-fated canoe voyage, become a brutal, untamed landscape of wild cliffs, wild locals, and hill-rappers in film, upon early viewing that even Governor Jimmy Carter is helpless. about speaking.
“It’s very tough, but it’s good for Georgia — I hope so,” said Carter, Georgia’s then-governor. The film would be the fifth most successful film released in America that year, earning it three Academy Award nominations.
However, the filming of the film, which turned an enigmatic B-Class actor named Burt Reynolds into a huge star, was so fraught with violence and danger that James Dickey, the author who based the film on his novel, wrote in a letter at the time: What’s in this movie, because there is no doubt that it is the most dangerous movie ever made. If we can get out of the valley.”
ICONIC: Lewis as Reynolds (Image: Getty)
A tale of how four middle-aged men (played by Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Petty and Ronnie Cox) become male rape victims, vengeful mountain men who take up guns, and the murderous rapids of the fictional Kahulawasi River (which is actually the real one). life Chattoga), challenge everyone who participates; Not least its British director John Boorman.
His clashes with Dicky (who is himself a local Georgian) ended up throwing punches and the 6-foot-4-inch author ordered off the set of the movie he helped create.
“(Dickie) was a lot drunk and became very arrogant with the actors. Eventually I had to ask him to leave,” recalls Bormann, now 89.
Tensions came to a head one night when a drunk Dicky punched Burman in the face, breaking four of the director’s teeth.
However, despite the quarrel, Dickie eventually returns to the group to play a disgruntled sheriff who faces the four canoeists after their horrific ordeal.
Reynolds (who died in 2018) wrote in his autobiography: “I just couldn’t handle[Dickey]behaviour.” “His Gameboy knife on his belt, cowboy hat, and fringed jacket…”
But the problems among the crew were nothing compared to the danger posed by the Chattoga River itself.
Located 100 miles from Atlanta in Rapun County, the actors who, apart from Reynolds, had virtually no experience in outdoor adventure sports, performed almost all of the stunts themselves.
The largely unknown actors of Ronnie Cox, Ned Petty, Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight (Image: Getty)
When Lewis wrote Reynolds’ character to go over a waterfall in a canoe, Burt (also a Georgia native) mocked the plan to use a doll, with potentially disastrous consequences as the actor later revealed.
“They sent a doll over the waterfall and it looked like a ****, like a doll. So I went over the waterfall and hit a stone about a quarter of the way down and broke my hip bone and coccyx. They told me if you got stuck in the water flow, swim to the bottom and it would shoot you.”
“They didn’t tell me she was going to shoot me like a submarine torpedo! They couldn’t find me for five minutes. A mile down the river they saw this naked man stumbling and crawling toward them. I said to Bormann, ‘How’s it going?'” See, John? “Like a doll walking over a waterfall,” he said.
Jon Voight, who became the movie’s hero as mild-mannered Ed Gentry, put himself in similar danger with a perilous sequence of rock climbing he did himself, and nearly collapsed off a cliff in the process.
“I was on my face about 10 feet, and it was slippery and almost vertical,” he later said.
“I told the two handles below me, ‘If you start to fall, I will push the rocks and they will catch me.'”
“I started slipping, I screamed and someone grabbed me.” When Voight was captured, a sharp boulder lay inches from his skull. Ronny Cox pla dr mo near aturb played the doomed Drew who drowned in a river early in the movie after apparently being shot. He also almost met a horrific end – he was swept away while filming another scene in the turbulent river.
To help make the Fierce Cliffs movie, the filmmakers released a gush of water from a nearby dam when they were ready to take one of these gushing waters off Cox from his boat, causing him to shake beneath the surface, making him unable to swim. for safety.
Without the force necessary to hold the safety rope that was placed on it, nor the second rope hanging near the waterfall.” , it took a brave crew member to jump a rope tied around his waist to save Cox from drowning over the waterfall.” herself to near certain death.
Ned Petty, who plays the bouncy character Bobby who becomes the victim of the hilltop rapists in the movie, was probably the tightest escape from death ever, just to avoid drifting down opposing slopes.
Bormann revealed how Betty (who died last year) became stuck in a raging stream, prompting a professional diver working on the group to find him when he finally showed up. Betty recalled the incident, “I thought, this is where I am [meet my end]and my wife was pregnant, and I thought how crazy she was because [perished] in a river in Georgia.”
Only later did the actors begin to realize why John Boorman, in addition to insisting that they paddle themselves, also, unusually, wanted to shoot the film in chronological order.
Burt Reynolds claimed that Bormann revealed to him that the motive behind filming each scene in sequence was: “If any of you drown, I can write that in script.”
However, although the actors survived, one of the members of Georgia Wildlife was not so lucky. A notable early scene in the film shows Louis Reynolds’ character shooting a deer with a bow and arrow.
Chris Dickey, the author’s son, who worked as a teenager on the film’s set, recalls the confusion that caused the deer to die.
He later wrote: “A young deer was brought from a zoo and so calmed down that it could be controlled.” “There was never any question about harming her in any way. But that is it [perished]. He was given an overdose. Bormann and his aides were in a quiet panic. “That’s all we need,” I remember someone said.
The massive success of the resulting film proved Bohrman’s choice to use all the unknown actors – rather than the original studio’s preference for Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando to play two canoes.
However, the film played a role in several real-life Chattooga deaths in the years since its release.
According to US Forest Service statistics, 17 people were killed on a hitherto unknown river in the four years since Deliverance appeared, mainly because movie fans wanted to bring back the expedition that Reynolds and his colleagues embarked on – likely without them being raped by mountain men in the operation.
Half a century later, the tale of the suburban men who pitted against nature’s most vengeful and dangerous elements and human degradation still seems important, as the story of how people confront violence and determine their responsibilities.
As Jon Voight later mentioned, the movie’s main message was never about fungus, banjo playing, locals in the Deep South or a dangerous waterfall at all.
“We leave the protection of others to some members of our community — the police and the military,” Voight said.
“But somehow we lose a part of our manhood by hiding, by pampering ourselves into believing we’re safe.”
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