Larger-than-life poet and novelist James Dickey wrote both the 1970 novel of "Deliverance" and the film's screenplay. He has a small but pivotal role toward the end of the film as Sheriff Bullard, the local officer whose probing questions begin to poke holes in the surviving men's story about just what happened on the river. In an oral history of the film published in Garden & Gun in 2015, director Boorman and stars Cox, Beatty, Voight, and Reynolds relate how Dickey was a constant, distracting presence on set when production first began, often drunk and holding court. It took a meeting with all five men to convince Dickey to leave until it was time to film his scenes as the sheriff.
"Jim was a very imposing figure," Boorman said of the confrontation. "He drew himself up in front of the four men and with his eyes blazing he said, 'It appears that my presence would be most efficacious by its absence.' And he left. Burt said to me, 'Does that mean he's going or he's staying?'"
Born in Georgia, Dickey served in World War II and worked as a teacher and copywriter before turning to writing full time in the 1960s. Many of his books of poetry, including "Into the Stone, and Other Poems," and "Buckdancer's Choice," which won the National Book Award in 1965, are powered by the same themes that drive "Deliverance": Masculinity and violence, the changing face of the South, the precarity of civilization and the power of nature, delivered in a formally innovative style he referred to as "country surrealism." He lived up to the two-fisted style of his writing, with an outsized personality to match his burly frame. Dickey died in 1997 at age 73.
