But Burt, early in the shooting, was with a woman he referred to as “Numero Duo.”Īs I wrote afterward, she was “polite, good-humored, had too-black hair, long nails and large breasts.

Jon Voight and Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox were married. He wasn’t coming from the stage, like Ronny or Ned, or from an Academy Award-winning film like Jon.Īmong the chalets and cottages of the Kingwood Country Club, the director and the actors returned each night to lives of quiet domesticity. It meant more money, more work, more fame. “The making of Deliverance was a big break for everybody connected with it. The publicist on the set “gave me to understand that I made Burt nervous.”Īs I wrote in a memoir decades later, I think my father made everybody nervous, but Burt was in many ways the most fragile of the major players: “I think it was largely Burt,” my father said years later when we were going over that ancient history. Big Jim Dickey was too imposing in every sense and he acted as if this was his movie, which neither Boorman nor the actors were going to put up with for very long. They are Lewis Medlock, the role played by Reynolds, a survivalist determined to master nature single-handed Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), a friend whose only real acquaintance with the wild is what he sees reflected in Lewis’s fierce excitement Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty), a soft denizen of sales meetings and country clubs who’s just along for the ride and Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox), the conscientious family man who, like the rest, has no idea at all what he’s getting into.Ĭlayton was becoming something of a resort town and the stars were housed on the outskirts at a country club, as were my father, my mother, my younger brother, me, my wife and my infant son.īut after a few days, British director John Boorman told the author of Deliverance he had to go. The plot of the book and of the movie was simple and strong: four Southern suburbanites decide to go canoeing in the last remnants of the Appalachian wilderness. But I know that summer changed all of our lives, and I was reminded of it this week when I heard he had died, aged 82. I did not know Reynolds before then, and did not have any personal contact with him after. In the summer of 1971, Hollywood descended on the little town of Clayton in the mountains of North Georgia to make a movie out of my father James Dickey’s best-selling novel, Deliverance, a film that Burt Reynolds hoped would give him a reputation as a serious actor.

Deliverance by james dickey