Deliverance to play Lewis Medlock. Jack Nicholson was considered for the role of Ed, while both Donald Sutherland and Charlton Heston turned down the role of Lewis. Other actors who were attached to the project included Robert Redford, Henry Fonda, George C. Scott and Warren Beatty. The film is infamous for cutting costs by not insuring the production and having the actors perform their own stunts (most notably, Jon Voight climbed the cliff himself). In one scene, the stunt coordinator decided that a scene showing a canoe with a dummy of Burt Reynolds in it looked phony; he said it looked
Ned Beatty attended but did not graduate. In 1956, he made his stage debut at age 19, appearing in "Wilderness Road", an outdoor-historical pageant located in Berea, Kentucky. During his first ten years of theater, he worked at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia, the State Theatre of Virginia. Returning to Kentucky, he worked in the Louisville area through the mid-1960s, at the Clarksville Little Theater (Indiana) and the newly founded Actors Theater of Louisville. His time at the latter included a run as Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman" in 1966. In 1972, Beatty made his film debut as Bobby