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THE PICTURES
THE RETURN OF BANJO BOY
Issue of 2003-11-17
Posted 2003-11-10
Billy Redden is synonymous with a singular type of movie role: the banjo boy. He got his start in the 1972 film “Deliverance,” which followed four urbanites on a canoe trip through rural Georgia. After a bit of exposition, the film really begins at a backwoods gas station, where Redden, as Lonny, sits with a banjo on a porch swing, arrestingly still, his pale, flat eyes and stony face those of a fledgling buzzard. (On a casting call at the local Clayton Elementary School, the filmmakers had chosen Redden for his insular look.) Ned Beatty’s character, Bobby, glances at Lonny and murmurs, “Talk about genetic deficiencies—isn’t that pitiful?” But when Drew, played by Ronny Cox, strums a chord on his guitar, Lonny answers it, and soon the two are locked in a gleeful call-and-response, the bluegrass hit “Dueling Banjos.” “Goddamn, you play a mean banjo!” Drew shouts, going to shake Lonny’s hand—whereupon the boy turns away. Redden’s scene-stealing inscrutability foreshadows the events to come, including Drew’s death and, notoriously, Bobby’s being forced to squeal like a pig.
As it turned out, though, there wasn’t much demand in Hollywood for banjo boys. Several months ago, when the director Tim Burton was on location in Montgomery, Alabama, shooting “Big Fish,” he kept asking where the boy from “Deliverance” was now, because he had a banjo-picking role in mind for him. No one knew. “The state film commissioners down there tried to placate me, or laugh it off,” Burton says. “But I was serious; the banjo boy was such an iconic figure to me. Whatever that visceral thing is in film, when you can’t explain why a scene grabs you—well, that scene had it.” Eventually, two “Big Fish” crew members drove through northeast Georgia one Sunday, asking, “Anyone know where the banjo boy lives?”
They finally found him in Dillard. Redden, who is now forty-seven, works ten-hour days as a cook and dishwasher at the nearby Cookie Jar Café, and he was hesitant at first about taking time off to appear in another film. For one thing, he had always regretted being the poster boy for “Deliverance”’s Gothic view of rural America. For another, he hadn’t enjoyed working with the film’s star, Burt Reynolds. “Burt didn’t want to say nothing to nobody,” Redden says now. “He wasn’t polite. And he made us look real bad—he said on television that all people in Rabun County do is watch cars go by and spit.”
What’s more, Redden’s relationship to banjos remained complicated. For starters, he didn’t know how to play. John Boorman, the director of “Deliverance,” had presented him with the instrument he used in the scene, declaring, “You pick a mean banjo!” Redden had always treasured the remark, particularly because—after he proved unable to convincingly fake the left-hand fretwork—Boorman had had to deploy another boy to hide behind the swing and slip his hand through Redden’s sleeve to finger the changes. But Redden’s mother, a custodial worker, had promptly sold the banjo. “I told her, ‘I’m not mad,’” Redden says. “My daddy had died when I was a baby, and she needed the money so bad for bills. It did mean something to me, though, that banjo.”
The envoys from “Big Fish” convinced Redden that their film—a picaresque fable about a travelling salesman—would be respectful of him and of small-town life. Redden was to be a part of the folksy welcoming committee in the Utopian town of Spectre, where the sun always shines. The sun never shone this spring in Montgomery, however, and Redden sat around the set for weeks awaiting his opportunity. When the sky finally cleared, Tim Burton says, “I didn’t give Billy any direction: I told him to be who he was—sweet and a little eerie, maybe—which he was doing all the time anyway. If you’re watching the film and you don’t recognize the solitary, enigmatic figure on the porch, that’s fine. But if you do—well, it just makes me so happy to see him, and I think other people will feel the same way.”
In the finished film, which comes out next month, Redden is onscreen for only a few seconds. We hear a hint of “Dueling Banjos,” and he is smiling, or almost smiling, and seems to be making amends for the moment, long ago now, when his character spurned an emissary from the larger world.
“Tim Burton said, ‘Just sit there and hold that banjo, that’s it,’” Redden says. “He was a real nice guy, a lot nicer than Burt Reynolds.”
— Tad Friend
Clarence "Tom" Ashley
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