Observations placeholder
Deliverance
Identifier
001684
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Deliverance - The attached clip shows an excerpt from the film ‘Deliverance’. According to a story about the film, the scene was not planned. The film crew stopped at a petrol station to fill up, one of the actors started to play a tune of the film on his guitar and an autistic boy who was watching heard the music. Quite spontaneously, he started to respond with notes from his banjo. And the camera man just let the camera roll. The two started an incredible dialogue of instruments and the autistic boy expressed himself in probably the only form in which he was prepared to communicate. This is how this scene, that was included in the film, was developed and filmed.
And this is how the story has been told ever since. But now we get the extract from Burt Reynolds biography 'But Enough about Me'.
The truth is a very elusive thing ........................
A description of the experience
Duelling Banjos
Burt Reynolds - 'But Enough about Me'.
The boy [Lonnie] was played by 12 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 Billie 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 Brothers released it as a single and it was a big hit. The melody was .... Feudin' Banjos recorded in 1955.