The world television premiere of the famous feature film starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross with Strother Martin, Jeff Corey, Henry Jones
You never met a pair like Butch and the Kid! The two most affable amiable outlaws in Western history are the subject of the most exuberant, exciting and engaging of all western movies - the story of Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longbaugh, otherwise known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Director GEORGE ROY HILL Films: pages 16-17
George Roy Hill, director of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", spent the first few weeks directing the movie on his back. He says:
'I fell and dislocated my spine, so the medics rigged up a stretcher, and I lay broiling under the desert sun giving horizontal directions. Newman and Redford thought it was quite funny - and I encouraged them, because they were total strangers before we began, and I wanted to create a kind of spontaneous humour. We had a lot of laughs on the set. At one point Paul had to say a line like "Just to think that 50 years ago there was nothing here." In fact. there was nothing there, and each time he said it he just broke up laughing. In the end we just had to give up. In fact, the locations were very important to the movie, and I made two separate trips within six weeks, hunting for good situations. Normally one leaves that sort of thing to a location scout, but on this occasion I literally covered hundreds of miles of Mexico.
The critics roasted the film. If it had been a play, we'd have closed in one night. Thank God for word of mouth and my scriptwriter - he said: " I gave you Shane and you gave me Gunga Din." What we really got was the Laurel and Hardy of Deadwood Gulch.'