INTRODUCTION
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, quite simply, a classic. Surprisingly, when it opened in New York on September 23, 1969, the film– the most expensive screenplay in Hollywood history– didn’t steal everyone’s heart. The New Yorker titled their review “The Bottom of the Pit” and Time magazine fumed that “every character, every scene, is marred by the film’s double view, which oscillates between sympathy and farce.”
Of course, this story of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, set in the Wild West and Bolivia, went on to win Academy Awards® for William Goldman’s script, Conrad L. Hall’s cinematography, and Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” It also received Oscar® nominations for George Roy Hill’s direction and for Best Picture. Simply put, it has become a classic. Director George Roy Hill believes this is because it is “about some basic human condition that is bigger than all of us and will go on forever no matter what era it’s set in.”
CHARACTERS
Butch Cassidy
He is Butch Cassidy and hard to pin down. Thirty-five and bright, he has brown hair, but most people, if asked to describe him, would remember him blond. He speaks well and quickly, and has been all his life a leader of men, but if you asked him, he would be damned if he could tell you why.
Sundance
Sundance. The man does not make unnecessary motions; he stands now as before, silent and staring, eyes bright, ready.
Etta Place
She is in her middle twenties, and has dark hair pulled back tight into a bun. She wears neat, starched clothing, and it is impossible to tell what her figure might be like.
TALENT
William Goldman
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was William Goldman’s first mainstream screenplay, an effort for which he won an Academy Award®. He researched the characters for six years before writing the original script, and felt so connected to them that he once used Sundance’s real name, Harry Longbaugh, as a pen name. He has noted, “F. Scott Fitzgerald has Jay Gatsby say, ‘Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!’ Cassidy and Sundance were living proof that Fitzgerald was right.”
While other movies have portrayed the famous Wild West duo, none ever showed the South American portion of their story. Goldman believed this was because “Butch did something Western heroes simply do not do—he ran away.”
Goldman began his career as a novelist and entered the film world in 1965 when he wrote Masquerade. He won his second Academy Award® in 1977 for All the President’s Men, which he adapted from the bestselling book. His memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting contains one of the most quotes comments on Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”
Katharine Ross
Before her work in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Katharine Ross received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her work in The Graduate. Other prominent film roles include The Stepford Wives and The Final Countdown. She lives on a ranch with her husband, actor Sam Elliot.
Paul Newman
Looking back on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Newman admits, “I really didn’t think I could do comedy.” But George Roy Hill reassured him saying, “You don’t have to act funny. Just do the lines.”
The famously blue-eyed Newman’s career took off in 1956 with Somebody Up There Likes Me. Following his work in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he co-starred with Robert Redford in the smash hit The Sting, which was directed by George Roy Hill. His other notable roles include Absence of Malice; The Verdict; The Color of Money, for which he won an Academy Award® in 1986; Road to Perdition; and Nobody’s Fool.
In 1985, Newman was awarded an honorary Oscar® award in recognition of screen and philanthropic work, and three years later he founded The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a nonprofit residential Wild West summer camp for children with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.
He and his wife Joanne Woodward are the only couple to win acting Academy Award®s while married.
Robert Redford
Robert Redford so enjoyed working on the film that would make him a star that, he recalls, “I felt guilty getting paid.”
Charles Robert Redford Jr. began his career on screen in the early 1960’s, but was catapulted into fame by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. His impressive list of acting credits include The Candidate; The Sting, for which he earned an Oscar® nomination; The Way We Were; All the President’s Men; The Natural; and Out of Africa.
In 1980 Redford moved behind the camera with Ordinary People and won the Academy Award® for Best Director. This film marked a turning point in his career, and he began to devote more time to political and environmental causes, and he established The Sundance Institute, a year-round workshop for up-and-coming filmmakers. His other Directing credits include A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show. In 2002, he received an honorary Oscar® award for his contribution to Hollywood History.
Critic John Mahoney predicted Redford’s rise to stardom in his 1969 Hollywood Reporter review of the film: “Redford, whose contribution to the shrewdly timed comic interchanges with Newman are crucial and precise, profits most, with the best role he has had since Barefoot in the Park, a far better assignment and performance than that and one by which his stardom may at last be defined.”
George Roy Hill
Even though he earned an Academy Award® nomination for Best Director, George Roy Hill is the first to admit that he did not do a stand-up job on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Because he had sustained a painful back injury, he directed the picture lying down. Fearing that he would be pulled from the project, he never informed the studio of his situation.
Clearly, the injury did not affect his talent. Paul Newman recalls, “George was a director in the best sense. When you’re cooking he leaves you alone. When you get in trouble, he comes in and points you in the right direction, and that is very unusual.”
George Roy Hill began his career during the Golden Age of television. His first films were adaptations of plays he had directed on Broadway, and it was not until The World of Henry Orient that he showed his gift for directing actors in light-hearted situations. This talent is clearly seen in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and it eventually became his trademark. Hill’s other notable works include The Sting, for which he won the Best Director Academy Award®; Slaughterhouse-Five; and The World According to Garp. After retiring from Hollywood, he taught directing at Yale University. He died of complications from Parkinson’s disease in 2002.
MUSIC
The film’s score was composed and conducted by Burt Bacharach, who won an Academy Award® for “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” which he wrote with Hal David.
In his September 10, 1969 review of the film for The Hollywood Reporter, critic John Mahoney commented on this ubiquitous element but got the song’s title wrong when he wrote, “Another of the techniques… used with perfect aptitude in this film is the musical interlude, underscored by song. The song is ‘Raindrops Are Falling on My Head,’ with music by Burt Bacharach and lyric by Hal David, sung in lazy-daisy pop style by B.J. Thomas to underscore the carefree celebration of the two robbers on holiday, as Newman and Miss Ross try out a new-fangled bicycle in a woodland idyll.”
Roll Cameras…Shoot! THE SCENES
With Goldman’s incredible script and Hill’s fluid direction, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid revitalized the tired Western at a time in the cynical 1960s when most critics and executives had written off the viability of a critical success in that genre. But what most people remember from the movie are those indelible scenes that made this film unlike any other Western film before it:
Butch and Sundance Jump Off a Cliff to Escape the Superposse
BUTCH
(Big)
What’sa matter with you?
SUNDANCE
(Bigger)
I can’t swim!
(Blind mad, wildly embarrassed, he just stands there)
Cut to
Butch starting to roar.
Cut to
Sundance, anger building.
Cut to
Butch.
BUTCH
You stupid fool, the fall’ll probably kill you.
Shot along the breathtaking Animas River Gorge in Durango, Colorado, this scene expresses for the first time the vulnerability of Sundance’s character and his dependence on his friend at the very moment when certain death seems imminent.
The water at the location where the famous dialogue took place wasn’t deep enough for the stunt people to safely dive into, so a wooden platform was constructed for Robert Redford and Paul Newman to jump onto after their words to one another.
The actual jump into the swirling rapids below was shot several months later at the Fox ranch in Malibu. Two stuntmen were suspended from the top of a 70’ crane while the waters below were stirred up by a dozen outboard motors.
Bill Abbott, who was the head of Fox’s special photographic special effects department at the time, had painted a special glass sheet to mimic the cliffs of Durango, and the camera crew set up the camera to film the descent of the stuntmen through this glass and then pan down to where they hit the wild waters below. This footage was later flipped to match the film from the Durango shoot, and thus, a moment in cinematic history was born.
Butch and Etta on the Bicycle
What we see during the song is a series of shots of Butch and Etta on the bicycle at dawn, and they are having just a marvelous time. Once Butch gains confidence, he tries stunting for Etta and more often than not things don’t work out quite as gracefully as he planned, but you can’t win ‘em all. She laughs and he clowns and they are aware of each other. [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. p.52]
The scene where Butch Cassidy rides with Etta Place on the handle-bars of a bicycle is one of the most famous in cinematic history. He jokes with her, declaring, “I mean, you’re riding on my bicycle—in certain Arabian countries that’s the same as being married.”
The only house that needed to be built during the course of the production was the simple wooden cabin where Sundance and Butch are reunited with the free-thinking schoolteacher, Etta Place. This building was constructed specifically so that shots could be taken inside and outside of the house as Butch does his crazy bicycle riding early in the morning.
This famous scene also introduces the first of three musical montages that were included because the director and the screenwriter felt that Etta’s character, while crucial to the dynamics of the film, didn’t actually have a lot of on-screen time with the guys. The music allowed the actors to improvise without dialogue, and gave a unique insight into Etta’s feelings for both Sundance and Butch.
The bull who charges after Butch when he crashes into a wooden fence was shipped from Hollywood to Utah for that one shot. Named Bill, this creature was friendlier than most, and a special spray shot from a flip gun was actually squirted on to a very sensitive part of Bill’s anatomy in order to give him the impetus to run. Remarkably, he was still good-natured after the shoot.
The bicycle was purchased by Paul Newman at Sotheby’s in 1971, and it was later owned by Burt Bacharach. In 1991, it was sold at an auction to a private buyer.
Pre-Bolivian Trip to New York Montage
And it was an emotional time for them – kind of sad, since they were leaving their country; kind of exciting, since they were able to lead the sort of civilized life impossible in the West at this time. None of them had ever enjoyed such elegance before, and this feeling of elegance grows and grows….”
This unique sequence, filled with the longing and nostalgia for a bygone time, also uses one of the three musical sequences in order to express the emotion of the trip.
Director George Roy Hill had originally wanted to shoot this sequence in live-action, like the bicycle scene, on the gorgeous New York set from Hello, Dolly! (1969), which was still standing at Fox studios. Unfortunately, Butch was scheduled to be released to theaters at an earlier date than Dolly, and Darryl F. Zanuck, head of Fox, didn’t want the set to be viewed earlier than it was due.
So instead, Hill combined old still photographs of New York City during the late 1890s with pictures of the stars shot on various parts of the Dolly set. The whole sequence was then printed in sepia to give it the same period feel as the beginning of the film. They then shot it, one frame at a time, from an animation stand. The result was a sepia-tinged snapshot of a once-in-a-lifetime trip for the trio.
Final Freeze Frame
And as the sound diminishes, so does the color, and slowly, the faces of Butch and Sundance begin to change. The song from the New York sequence begins. The faces of Butch and Sundance continue to change, from color to the grainy black-and-white that began their story. The rifle fire is popgun soft now, as it blows them back into history.
Final fade-out.
Butch and Sundance’s last-stand in Bolivia was filmed in Tlayacapan, Mexico, about 30 miles south of Cuernavaca. This quiet farming community was transformed by the camera crew into a festive marketplace where a Bolivian cavalry makes its lethal attack.
The brief bursts of gunfire were intricately choreographed by director George Roy Hill, art director Phil Jefferies, and 2nd director Michael Moore well ahead of the actual day of shooting. As they worked through the scene, shot by shot, they created a cutting pattern for later use in the editing room as well as a visual continuity guide for camera position and movement.
The special effects team wired the table for the first bullet hit by drilling a hole into the table itself and putting a charge into it. This was then wired to a battery, which had another set of wires attached to the fingertips of an assistant nearby. As Butch and Sundance sit at the table waiting to be served their dinners, a special effects technician set off the charge with one hand and fired the gun with the other, effectively giving the actors the shock of their lives.
Although air guns that fired and dust pellets were used for most of the gunfire, there were also actual explosives in the walls themselves. These two techniques gave the impression of being assaulted from all angles, a crucial element to the last scene.
One of the more difficult parts of the scene was getting the shot where Butch rides between a horse and a mule across the square. Paul Newman had to be seen in most of this shot, but there were concerns that he could easily be injured during the dangerous task. For the mule to fall, the filmmakers decided to use a technique called “a flying w,” which is illegal in the US. The mule’s front feet were wired and then the wire was run up the saddle and out the back. As the mule built up a good run in the scene, the animal wrangler pulled the wires so that the animal’s front feet were pulled out from under him. There was a chance that the animal might break his neck during such a dangerous maneuver, but fortunately, everything proceeded without a hitch.
The same could not be said, however, for the sequence where the corrigador shooting Sundance from the top of an arch falls to the ground below. Paul Newman’s stunt double, Jimmy Arnett, was cast in the role. The cardboard boxes concealed behind a wall to break his descent weren’t strong enough, and he smashed through them, fracturing his pelvis in the process. It took him three months to recover.
The enigmatic final shot where Butch and Sundance fade into the end credits was tricky as well because the 35 mm movie camera couldn’t be mounted on the roof since the lenses weren’t long enough for a close shot of the guys as they run into the gunfire. The solution was an 8×10 still camera that was mounted on the roof as well as a 35 mm Panavision camera that was on a direct line with the door that Sundance and Butch ran from. First, they filmed Sundance and Butch running out the door, shooting. Then, they removed the motion picture camera and took several still shots of the set with nobody on it. Everything had to be done quickly so the shadows would be similar between shots. Back at Fox studios, the filmmakers froze the 35 mm action, bled the color out of the scene so it appeared sepia-tone, and pasted it on to a blow-up of the 8×10 still. After re-photographing the whole thing on an animation board, they pulled the camera back to reveal the actors as part of a still photograph of the scenery. This last shot of two heroes fighting for their lives has gone down as one of the most memorable in all of film history.
THE REAL-LIFE GANGSTERS
The real-life Butch Cassidy was born Robert Leroy Parker on April 13, 1866, in a small wood-frame cabin in Beaver, Utah. His parents, pioneering Mormons, later had 12 more children and young Roy, as he was known to his family, was frequently working on ranches to help support his siblings.
Legend abounds around Butch Cassidy, even from his early years. One report has it that his first run-in with the law was as a boy when he took a pair of jeans from a closed shop, leaving a note that promised to pay later. The shopkeeper didn’t find this form of IOU quite so agreeable, but ultimately all charges were dropped.
Mrs. Lula Betenson, Butch’s last surviving sister, claimed that he came by his unusual first name when he worked in a butcher shop in Rock Springs, Wyoming, when he was 18 years of age. Others claim that his last name was in honor of a shady local rancher, Mike Cassidy, who Butch had admired as a young man.
Butch’s checkered past took an interesting turn in 1889 when he moved from ranching and working as a cowpoke to robbing banks. The first hit was at the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado, for $20,000 – a phenomenal sum in those days. He and three cowboys got away from the crime by breaking ground on the Outlaw Trail, a meandering path across the West that was nearly impossible for lawmen to traverse. As Butch’s notoriety grew, he established his greatest hideout, the Hole-in-the-Wall, in central Wyoming and assembled a group of outlaw cowboys called The Wild Bunch. Among them was a young man from New Jersey by the name of Harry Longabaugh, better known today as “The Sundance Kid.”
The first robbery credited to The Wild Bunch was in Montpelier, Idaho, in 1896 and showed Butch’s skill at planning an attack with a minimum of actual bloodshed. From banks, the gang moved on to trains in South Dakota, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Nevada and took incredible sums of money in the process. By 1902, they had an extensive group of lawmen and Pinkerton detectives after them. It was time to disband and go their own ways. Butch, the Sundance Kid, and Etta Place fled to South America. The rest, as they say, is history.
Or is it? Shortly after the release of the film, Butch’s sister, Etta, claimed that her brother wasn’t killed in the shoot-out in Belize and actually died of natural causes in the United States in 1936. She claimed, “My brother did a lot of traveling the rest of his life under an assumed name when he came back to the United States in 1912. He never married. He worked as a trapper and as a cowboy. He spent some time in Alaska…. He visited me years after his reputed death. We heard from time to time through the years until he died. It’s my secret where he’s buried.”
Other historians believe that Cassidy returned to the US under the name of William Phillips and did indeed marry. The happy couple lived for a time in Arizona, where Williams fought at the side of Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution, before ultimately settling in Spokane, Washington.
One thing is for certain: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s legacies continue to hold a grip on the public’s imagination. In 1998, Paul Newman’s foundation, Newman’s Own, proposed giving a grant to the state of Utah to renovate Butch’s tumbled-down birthplace into a museum with artifacts from Cassidy’s life and times. The rustic site does still stand and has become a curiosity for many. Still others enjoy following the historic Outlaw Trail, visiting the sites of their infamous robberies, and walking in the footsteps of these truly fascinating characters from the past.
TRIVIA
- Twentieth Century-Fox paid the highest sum in film history for an original screenplay when it paid William Goldman $400,000.
- Robert Redford not the first choice for the role of Sundance. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Marlon Brando had been “virtually set” for the role but turned it down because he was “grievously upset over assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
- A notorious prankster, Paul Newman sawed George Roy Hill’s desk in half when the film’s production ended.
- Originally, the film’s title was going to be The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy, but this was changed to reflect the fact that newcomer Robert Redford hadn’t yet achieved Paul Newman’s celebrity status.
- The world premiere of the film took place at Yale, the alma mater of Paul Newman and George Roy Hill. This marked the first time that a film premiered at the institution, and the event benefited Yale Film Associates Group for Film Studies.
- Robert Redford maintained a friendship with Lulu Betenson, Butch Cassidy’s sister.
- The costume designer was Edith Head, the fashion icon perhaps best known for her contributions to Alfred Hitchcock films.
- Paul Newman’s contract stated that he would receive $1 million plus ten percent of the net profit over $7 ½ million.
- The original script had a scene in which Etta leaves Butch and Sundance. In the final version of the film, she states her intention to go, but the audience never actually sees it.
QUOTES
“Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true.” – Opening to Screenplay by William Goldman
“The future’s all yours, ya lousy bicycles!” – Butch Cassidy
“I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” – Butch Cassidy
“That crazy Harriman… if he’d just give me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him.” – Butch Cassidy
“Anything you ask of me I’ll do, except one thing: I won’t watch you die. I’ll miss that scene if you don’t mind.…” – Etta Place
“Y’know, every time I see Hole-in-the-Wall again, it’s like seeing it fresh, for the very first time… and whenever that happens I ask myself the same question: how can I be so damn stupid as to keep coming back here?” – Butch Cassidy
“Now how many times have I told you people: bad as they are, banks are better than trains. You can rely on a bank – they don’t move. They stay put and you always know there’s money inside…” — Butch Cassidy