Lightman happened to visit the Deliverance crew on-location not long after Reynolds' accident. “I slid down a 40′ waterfall the other day,” Reynolds told Lightman. “It looked simple enough, but I lit right on my tailbone, on a submerged rock, and bounced about five feet in the air. Man, did that hurt.
Did the actors in Deliverance really canoe down the river?
To minimize costs, the production wasn't insured, and the actors did their own stunts. Jon Voight climbed the cliff. Burt Reynolds broke his coccyx (tailbone) while going down the rapids when the canoe capsized. Originally, a cloth dummy was used, but it looked too fake, like a dummy going over a waterfall.
Did Burt Reynolds do his own stunts in Deliverance?
Burt Reynolds
However, Reynolds performed several stunts himself through his career, including one scene in Deliverance where his character rides a canoe over a waterfall. Reynolds had to go to the emergency room after hitting his head and cracking his tailbone in this shot.
In the original novel, just as in the film, there is no clear evidence about what happened to Drew. There is a wound on Drew's head which could be a bullet graze (this is what Lewis says) or could be from a bump on a rock. It's most likely he was NOT shot by anyone.
The film is remembered for two sequences especially: one of "duelling banjos" in which Drew and a local boy (Billy Redden) conjure up an impromptu duet between banjo and guitar, and an infamous scene where Bobby is sexually assaulted and ordered to "squeal like a pig".
Billy Redden (born 1956) is an American actor, best known for his role as a backwoods mountain boy in the 1972 film Deliverance. He played Lonnie, a banjo-playing teenager in north Georgia, who played the noted "Dueling Banjos" with Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox).
Jack Nicholson was considered for the role of Ed, while both Donald Sutherland and Charlton Heston turned down the role of Lewis. Other actors who were considered for the film included Robert Redford, Henry Fonda, George C. Scott and Warren Beatty.
What happens in the squeal like a pig scene in Deliverance?
This is, of course, the legendary “squeal like a pig” sequence in John Boorman's Deliverance (1972), in which Beatty's Bobby Trippe is forced to strip, humiliated and sodomised at gunpoint by a pair of leering rednecks, while his friends look on, powerless and appalled.
Some facts about the scene are that Redden did not know how to play the banjo, so another teenager was his hand double in the song "Dueling Banjos" while in the soundtrack, Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell were the musicians performing the song.
Ed manages to kill the hillbilly, whose dead body is tied down with weights and tossed into the river by Ed, Lewis, and Bobby to ensure it will never be found.
The banjo kid, real name Lonnie in the film, was played by Billy Redden who was 15 years old at the time of filming. Now Billy is 66 years old and he left the world of Hollywood behind.
In Deliverance (1972), during the “dueling banjos” scene, Billy Redden, who played the young banjo-playing local, didn't know how to play banjo. To make it look authentic, a skilled banjo player hid behind & played the chords with his left arm in Redden's sleeve while Redden picked with his right.
Only a few months after the book's publication in March 1970, a film adaptation confirmed its Georgia setting by filming on location in Rabun County and on the Chattooga. Released in 1972, the film became one of the most popular of the year.
At first, Boorman had courted Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to play Lewis and Ed, but they had proved too expensive. Others considered were Robert Redford, Charlton Heston and Donald Sutherland (who rejected the script as too violent). Boorman later made a virtue of using relative unknowns.
The film never tells the audience the origin or significance of the title Deliverance, but James Dickey's novel explains that its four city-dwelling protagonists, Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew, take their backwoods canoeing trip seeking “deliverance” from the stresses of their modern, day-to-day lives.
Ed has been injured with an arrow stabbed through his rib while firing another arrow at a hillbilly. Meanwhile, Bobby (Ned Beatty) comes out uninjured. In the end, Bobby and Ed part their ways and return to their families while Lewis stays back at the hospital.
What happened to the toothless guy in Deliverance?
Herbert Coward, known for his “Toothless Man” role in the movie “Deliverance,” died Wednesday in a crash on a western North Carolina highway, according to authorities. He was 85. The crash happened Wednesday afternoon as Coward and Bertha Brooks, 78, left a doctor's appointment, North Carolina Highway Patrol Sgt.
Co-star Burt Reynolds and Beatty struck up a friendship, and Ned was then cast by Burt in several other films together, including White Lightning (1973), W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975), and the abysmal Stroker Ace (1983).
Deliverance is at its core a very masculine film (there are basically no female characters) about overcoming adversities both physical and mental. There is also some thoughtful commentary on the nature of civilization, genetic classes of men, and the naïveté of urban people about life outside of cities.
What was wrong with the banjo playing kid in Deliverance?
The fact is that Redden was not in any way mentally challenged, he was simply hired by the director because he had the backwoods look they were after. They coached him, and used makeup techniques, to make him appear to be a witless boy in the film. Billy was 15 at the time the scene was shot.
After a while, Bobby and Ed pull off to the side to wait, and encounter a pair of unkempt hillbillies emerging from the woods; one toothless (Herbert 'Cowboy Coward), and one wielding a shotgun (Bill McKinney). The hillbillies are mildly hostile at first.
