For fiscal year 2011, the impact of the film industry in Georgia was $2.4 billion. Reynolds ultimately appeared in eight films made in the state.

It also set in motion four decades of film production in Georgia.

It is something of a miracle, you begin to realize, that this bunch made a Hollywood film on a wild river that almost no one had canoed, in a state where movies weren’t made, and that it became one of the most lasting depictions-to say nothing of its accuracy-of the rural South, and North Georgia in particular. Nearly half the cast were local mountain people. Scott were all considered for parts that went to newcomers Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds. Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, and George C. He was a director on the rise, having done Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific-both starring Lee Marvin-in the previous four years. Instead of Roman Polanski or Sam Peckinpah, who were both discussed, Warner Brothers chose the lesser-known John Boorman to direct. It’s a disappearing river, about to be dammed to generate power for the civilized folks from Atlanta. And then, still, the fictional egos of the four men in the two canoes who, led by the possessed Lewis, go down the fictional Cahulawassee “because it’s there.” There for now, that is. When I first read the book, at seventeen, it felt like a portal to manhood.ĭeliverance is a product of the male ego: the egos of the alcoholic-poet-turned-novelist (when the film was being made, Dickey wrote in a journal, “It seems to me that I am the bearer of some kind of immortal message to humankind”), a fearless English director, and, not least of all, a B-movie actor who grew up in Waycross, Georgia, whose name was Burton Leon Reynolds Jr. It’s about a canoe trip gone wrong on a remote river in North Georgia, but it’s also about “the measures that decent people may-or must-take against the amoral human monsters that are constantly amongst us, whether in the woods of North Georgia or on the streets of New York,” as Dickey wrote to William F. James Dickey wrote a dark, muscular novel, which became an even darker, more unsettling film.

Deliverance dickey