On the set of 100 Rifles, Jim and I talked a lot about the differences between the North and the South, and he once told me that he’d rather have a Southern white man put his arm around him than a black man, because the Southern white man knows the consequences. I was with Jim on many occasions when he would say those exact words to people in a discussion. (When Jim Brown has a discussion, it gets real quiet.)
Jim is the least bigoted person I’ve ever known. He judges people on their own merits. Despite the discrimination he experienced, he’s managed to keep a sense of fairness. But if he’s challenged or insulted in any way, he reacts the way you would in the same situation . . . if you had the courage.
In 1999, Jim’s wife accused him of smashing the windshield of her Jaguar. She took it all back the next day, but the D.A. wanted to prosecute, and Jim was sentenced to one hundred hours of community service and three years’ probation.
“No thanks,” he said. “I’ll take jail. I’m not about to wear an orange suit and pick up litter off a freeway for something I didn’t do.” So, at the age of sixty-four, he served four months in the L.A. County Jail, without a peep of complaint.
—
ONE DAY I went to his house—we were going out somewhere—and he was crying.
“Is there anything I can do, Jim?” I said.
“No, I’ll be okay in a minute,” he said. “I just heard that a friend of mine died.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Was it someone you played ball with?”
“Yeah, it was,” he said. “He was white, and the finest man I’ve ever known.”
Well, Jim Brown is the finest man I’ve ever known.
John Boorman and Jon Voight
Early in 1971, John Boorman asked me to read for the part of Lewis Medlock in his next movie, Deliverance, based on James Dickey’s bestselling novel. I’d admired Boorman’s work, especially his last two pictures, Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific. After a few preliminaries, Boorman began describing the novel about four city boys from Atlanta on a weekend canoe trip that turns into a battle for survival against a raging river and two murderous mountain men.
“I read the book,” I said. “And I’ve read Dickey’s poetry.”
Boorman seemed surprised, and he missed a beat. “Can you do a Southern accent?” he asked.
I didn’t want to blow the part with a wisecrack, so I just said, “Yes.” I didn’t tell him that I’d spent twenty years trying to get rid of mine.
A week later I was in John’s office at Warner Bros., listening to him talk about this very Southern novel in his very English accent. He obviously had a feeling for the story and empathy for the characters. His enthusiasm was contagious.
I wanted to know which of my movies had made him think of me, so I began listing the pieces of crap I’d done. “Did you see me in Navajo Joe? Sam Whiskey? 100 Rifles?”
“Actually,” he said, “I saw you hosting The Tonight Show.”
It was my turn to miss a beat.
Boorman said that he’d been impressed by how I took charge of the show and that he thought I was fearless, just like Lewis in the novel.
“I’m too stupid to be scared,” I said.
Boorman said that he’d already cast Jon Voight in the part of Ed Gentry, and I was pleased. Jon was an accomplished actor, Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. Boorman asked if I knew Jon, and as I started to say that we’d met only once or twice, he opened the door to the adjoining office and Jon came in. He’d been in the other room all the time.
Jon and I proceeded to do an hour of improvisation that seemed like ten minutes. We clicked, and the chemistry must have been obvious to Boorman, but he never told me, “You’ve got the part,” so I broke down and said, “I feel good about the meeting, and I feel strange asking this . . . but am I in this movie or not?”
“You’re in the movie!” he said with a big grin.
Jon seemed genuinely happy for me. There was a sweetness about it. We were instant pals, and our friendship grew during the making of the picture.
Boorman had originally considered Lee Marvin and Henry Fonda for the roles of Lewis and Ed. The studio wanted Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford. It was rumored that both Charlton Heston and Gene Hackman had wanted to play Lewis. But Boorman being Boorman, he wanted everyone to do their own stunts, and with big stars they would’ve used doubles, so he decided to go with the much younger Voight and some of his contemporaries. Jon was the linchpin for Boorman, and he was for me, too. I don’t think I’d have been in the movie without his support.
—
I AGREED to $50,000 (with no back end) for three months’ work, a lot less than I’d been making on Dan August. But I didn’t care. It was a great script and a great opportunity. I knew I could get into Lewis’s skin and I saw the role as a chance to finally gain some acting credibility.
Boorman found Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox doing The Pueblo Incident at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and flew Jon and me there to see them. We agreed they’d be perfect for the parts of Bobby and Drew, and it was a thrill to be there when John told them he was casting them in what would be their first movie.
Voight is curious about everything. As an actor he wants to know as much as he can about the character because, more than anything, he wants to get it right . . . and for my money he always does. He taped hours of conversation with James Dickey and used it to get the Southern accent. He’s also meticulous about clothing. Actors can say a lot with what they choose to wear. Lewis is proud of his biceps, so I went to an army/navy store in Atlanta, bought a wet suit, and cut the sleeves off. (They didn’t sell them that way at the time.) Jon found just the right things for easygoing Ed, especially that little hat, although I thought the pipe was over the top.
Jon will do whatever’s necessary to be faithful to the character, including risking his life: To protect his buddies after Lewis breaks his leg, Ed turns into a predator who stalks and kills a man with a bow and arrow. In one of the most gripping scenes in the picture, he scales the vertical face of a 200-foot cliff. Jon did most of the climbing himself, and we almost lost him.
—
JOHN BOORMAN is probably the best director I’ve ever worked with. He certainly knows how to handle actors. Before shooting began, he took me aside and said, “There’s only one way this is going to work: Voight has to give the first half of the movie to you, and he will because he’s unselfish. He must let you take it, and you will take it.”
No director ever said anything like that to me before or since.
“But in the last half,” Boorman said, “after Lewis gets hurt . . . from then on you’re just a body in a boat. You’re totally worthless. You’ve got to give it to him.”
He was right, and I did.
He also gave me some good advice right when I needed it. “Don’t act,” he said. “Just behave. We’ll wait for you, because we can’t take our eyes off of you.”
I didn’t know he’d told the other guys the same thing.
John gave us the luxury of rehearsing every scene until it was right. The experience brought us together, and we got closer as the filming went on, talking endlessly about our characters and their relationships, not only with each other but with their unseen families, friends, and coworkers.
John started as a film critic, then made documentaries for the BBC before coming to the States in 1966 to make Point Blank. He knows his way around the camera and he’s particular about the visual quality of his pictures. For Deliverance, he thought the actual scenery along the river was too lush for the grim content of the film, so he had them wash the color out in post-production to make the landscape look more menacing. He analyzes every line of dialogue, every camera angle, every piece of business, but unlike a lot of directors, he’ll take suggestions from just about anyone.
Boorman came up with the best definition of the movie
business I’ve ever heard: “Filmmaking is the process of turning money into light and then back into money again.” As a writer-director, he isn’t afraid to take risks in the pursuit of his vision. Though he’s a master at turning money into light, he hasn’t always turned it back into money, but all his films embody his devotion to craft.
John came over in 2012 for the fortieth anniversary Deliverance reunion. Jon, Ned, and Ronny were there, too. We had a wonderful time and everybody was laughing and telling lies. The four actors have stayed close over the years. We did everything ourselves in the picture, and each of us almost drowned more than once. We saved each other’s lives, so we’re like guys who’ve gone to war together. And they still think I’m Lewis. They said, “When can we go to dinner?” I still have to tell them everything.
But I felt something amiss with Boorman at the reunion. I think it dated back to 1973, when he’d wanted me to come to Ireland to play the lead in Zardoz, the movie he eventually did with Sean Connery. I wasn’t crazy about the script, but that’s not why I didn’t go. I’d been sick and just wasn’t up to it. I think he felt that I let him down, and I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me for it. If I could do it over, I’d go . . . in a hospital plane if necessary.
—
JAMES DICKEY was a great poet, and his bestselling novel Deliverance is a masterpiece that usually shows up on lists of the hundred best American novels. But he was a man who, after he’d had a few martinis, made you want to drop a grenade down his throat. I think he fancied himself a two-fisted poet, a kind of down-home Hemingway.
He was a big, wild-eyed bear of a man with a flair for the dramatic. He’d act out scenes from Deliverance, playing all the parts himself. He’d tell the same stories again and again—the same way every time. And when he read his poems to an audience, he’d deliver them with what seemed like deep emotion, but he’d always break down in tears at the same place.
Dickey liked to hang around the set, and one day during rehearsals, after swearing me to secrecy and claiming he hadn’t told another living soul, he confided that Deliverance was autobiographical, that everything in it had happened to him. He warned me not to tell the others because, he said, I was the only one who could handle it. I was shocked, but honored that he would take me into his confidence, and the more I thought about it, the more I admired him for turning painful experience into great literature.
Of course I mentioned it to Voight.
“Do you know what Dickey told me?” I said.
“I don’t know what he told you,” Jon said, “but he told me that everything in the novel happened to him.”
We discovered that Dickey had also confided in Boorman, Ronny Cox, Ned Beatty, the cameraman, the archery coach, and probably the key grip. We’ve since learned that he made up all kinds of things about his background, falsely claiming to have been a college football star, a combat pilot during World War II, and a working-class child of the Depression. In fact he played only one season of freshman ball; was a radar operator, not a pilot; and came from a well-to-do Atlanta family. Nor was he the whitewater expert he pretended to be. On a pre-production jaunt down the Chattooga, he managed to capsize his canoe in calm water.
Boorman saw each of the four main characters in Deliverance as a different facet of Dickey’s personality: There was Ed, the cautious advertising man—Dickey had been a copywriter on the Coca-Cola account at McCann Erickson in the 1950s. Lewis, the macho survivalist, is the man Dickey wished he could be. The guitar-playing Drew is the poet. And as for obnoxious, overbearing Bobby . . . well.
I’m not sure I buy all that.
But I think Boorman did solve the mystery of Dickey’s allergy to the truth: “He used up all his honesty in his poems and had none left for his life.”
—
DELIVERANCE IS ABOUT men facing down their fears and testing themselves against nature. A magnificent wild river is about to be turned into a placid lake by a dam built to supply power for air-conditioners in Atlanta. As Lewis says, it’s the chance to see “the last untamed, unpolluted, un-fucked-up river in the South.”
We filmed along the Chattooga, in the remote mountain country of Rabun County, Georgia, with its dense forests and whitewater rapids. At one time Rabun supplied most of the moonshine for Atlanta. Jim Dickey called it “the home of nine-fingered people” because nearly everybody there was missing a body part, either from inbreeding or poor medical treatment.
Our base camp was in Clayton, the Rabun county seat and a popular resort for Atlantans (“Where Spring Spends the Summer,” according to the Chamber of Commerce). Clayton was already a popular movie location: The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), The Long Riders (1980), and Whiskey Mountain (1977) were all filmed there. After Deliverance, the area became a tourist trap where you could buy T-shirts that said, “Paddle faster, I hear banjos,” and where ill-equipped novices tested themselves against the “Deliverance River.” Dozens have drowned in the process.
Some people in Rabun County said the film unfairly portrays backcountry folks. That was never my intention, and I don’t think it was anybody else’s. Some of the reviews of the picture were condescending toward the locals, calling them “weasels” and hillbillies “inbred to the point of idiocy.” I think we may have been painted with that brush.
Our accommodations were a pleasant contrast to the working conditions. We stayed at Kingwood Country Club, with its condos, golf course, and clubhouse, which became our gathering place in the evenings.
One night I was sitting at the bar trying to ignore Dickey, who was across the room holding forth at a table with Jon and Ned.
“LEWIS!” he shouted. (Dickey called us all by our characters’ names.) “I’m talkin’ to ya, boy! Come ovah heah.”
I didn’t budge.
All of a sudden he was looming over me, all six-foot-seven of him, in full regalia: Stetson, fringed jacket, bowie knife. He locked his arms around my shoulders and bellowed, “LEWIS! How the fuck are ya, Lewis?”
I didn’t answer.
Dickey bent down so his head was next to mine. “Lewis, I’m talkin’ to ya, son. Why don’tcha answer me?”
“Because I’m not Lewis, I’m Burt. Tomorrow morning on the set I’ll be Lewis. Until then, get the fuck out of my face!”
The room fell silent, and for an instant I thought he might cut me with the bowie knife.
Instead he laughed and said, “By God, that’s just what Lewis woulda said!” Then he turned on his heels, went back to his table, and never came around me again.
But he did come around our rehearsals, usually with a drink in his hand and a bow on his shoulder. He wasn’t shy about voicing his opinions, and every time he opened his mouth, he pissed somebody off. We’d be ready to do a scene and at the last minute he’d pull Jon aside and tell him how to play it. It drove Jon nuts, and you could tell it was getting to Boorman, who with typical understatement termed his relationship with Dickey “turbulent and bruising.” Just like the Chattooga.
We called a meeting with Boorman and told him that we couldn’t stand the son of a bitch, and John kicked him off the set, but only after promising him the part of the sheriff. Dickey insisted on speaking to us before he left. He came to a rehearsal and said, “Gentlemen, I understand that my presence will be more expeditious by my absence.”
I asked Boorman, “Does that mean he’s going or he’s staying?”
Dickey came back two months later to play Sheriff Bullard, who has a few lines at the end of the picture. As an actor, James Dickey was a great poet, and Boorman had to work to extract a performance from him. After wrapping his last scene, Dickey wore the sheriff’s outfit around town. He claimed he was so convincing in it that he’d collected graft from the local whorehouse, adding, “That wasn’t all I got, either.”
—
AT A DUSTY backwoods filling station on the way into the wilderness, Drew (Ronny Cox) is idly picki
n’ a few notes on his guitar when an inscrutable boy on a porch answers back with his banjo. The exchange turns into a call-and-response between the two instruments, and as it builds to a crescendo, the boy comes alive. But when the song ends, he goes back into his shell. When Ronny tries to communicate with him, he turns away.
The boy (Lonnie) was played by twelve-year-old Billy Redden. Boorman had wanted a certain look and found Billy in the Clayton Elementary School. He had him made up to match the description in the novel: “an albino boy with pink eyes like a white rabbit’s.”
Billy may have looked right for the part, but he couldn’t play the banjo, so they cut a hole in his sleeve and a boy who could play stuck his arm through and did the fretting while Billy pretended to strum. Between takes, Billy would turn to the boy and say, “We sure can play this thing, can’t we?”
It was all dubbed by a pair of bluegrass musicians from New York, Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell. Warner Bros. released it as a single and it was a big hit. They paid royalties to Weissberg, and Boorman got a gold record that was later stolen from his house. It turned out that the melody was swiped, too, from “Feudin’ Banjos,” recorded in 1955. The rightful composer sued Warner’s and got a big settlement.
Variations on the “Dueling Banjos” theme serve as the score of the film. Boorman did it to save money: the studio was constantly on his neck about the budget, so he fired the conductor and orchestra in favor of just the two string instruments.
Billy appears once more in the film, as a ghostly vision on a log bridge over the river. As we pass under him in our canoes (in a nifty 360-degree turning shot), Drew breaks into a big grin and tries to make eye contact, but Billy only turns away, ominously swinging his banjo like a pendulum.
—
THE RAPE of Bobby (Ned Beatty) by a mountain man is the other signature scene in Deliverance. It’s a single shot that runs ten minutes on the screen. Boorman had five cameras rolling because he knew he could shoot it only once. He considered it the heart of the film and a metaphor for the rape of the river. (Lewis actually says it: “We’re gonna rape this whole goddamn landscape. We gon’ rape it.”) For John, the rape is nature’s revenge against the men who were violating the river. It figured to be one of the most powerful scenes ever filmed, but he couldn’t find an actor with an authentic Southern accent and no front teeth to play the accomplice.
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 8