The Sting "making of" featurette, "The Art of the Sting", included interviews with cast and crew. The film was released on Blu-ray in 2012, as part of Universal's 100th anniversary releases. The Sting The Sting is a 1973 American caper film set in September 1936, involving a complicated plot by two professional grifters (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) to con a mob boss (Robert Shaw). The film was directed by George Roy Hill, who had directed Newman and Redford in the western "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". Created by screenwriter David S. Ward, the story was inspired by real-life cons perpetrated
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in South America than they had been in the old West ... It's a great story. Those two guys and that pretty girl going down to South America and all that stuff. It just seems to me it's a wonderful piece of material. The characters' flight to South America caused one executive to reject the script, as it was then unusual in Western films for the protagonists to flee. According to Goldman, when he first wrote the script and sent it out for consideration, only one studio wanted to buy it—and that was with the proviso that the two lead