Trivia for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) More at IMDbPro »

• Paul Newman and Robert Redford really leaped off the cliff; however, they landed on a ledge with a mattress roughly six feet below. That now famous leap to elude capture was done earlier by Tyrone Power as "Jessie James" (1939).
  
  
• They tried to get Bob Dylan to sing Burt Bacharach's famous song for the movie. He declined.
  
  
• Dustin Hoffman was considered for the role of Butch.
  
  
• Katharine Ross enjoyed shooting the silent, bicycle riding sequence best, because it was handled by the film crew's second unit rather than the director. She said, "Any day away from George Roy Hill was a good one."
  
  
• Paul Newman did his own bicycle stunts, after his stunt man was unable to stay on the bike, except for the scene where Butch crashes backwards into the fence, which was performed by cinematographer Conrad L. Hall.
  
  
• The actual name of Butch and Sundance's gang was The Wild Bunch. However, when the Sam Peckinpah film, The Wild Bunch (1969), was released a few months earlier, the name of the gang was changed to the Hole in the Wall Gang to avoid confusion with Peckinpah's film.
  
  
• Body count: 30
  
  
• According to screenwriter William Goldman, his screenplay originally was entitled "The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy." Both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman read the script at approximately the same time, and agreed to do it, with McQueen playing the Sundance Kid. When McQueen dropped out, the names reversed in the title, as Newman was a superstar.
  
  
• Joanna Pettet was first offered the role of "Etta Place" but was forced to turn down the role due to her pregnancy.
  
  
• The real "Hole in the Wall Gang" hid in Brown's Park near the Green River. One of their bank robberies occurred in Delta.
  
  
• Actually before the real Butch and Sundance ended in Bolivia, they spent some time in Patagonia (Argentina), in a town called Cholila.
  
  
• In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #73 Greatest Movie of All Time.
  
  
• Ranked #7 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Western" in June 2008.
  
  
• Other actors that were under consideration for the role of Sundance were Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty. McQueen withdrew due to billing disagreements, and Beatty declined as he found the film too similar to Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
  
  
• Sam Elliott's feature film debut.
  
  
• Photographer Lawrence Schiller shot the location publicity stills for the film.
  
  
• Jack Lemmon turned down the role of Sundance because of a scheduling conflict with The Odd Couple (1968).
  
  
• This movie was filmed roughly the same time as Hello, Dolly! (1969), on the sound stage next door. Director George Roy Hill believed that the studio would allow him to film the New York scenes on "Dolly's" sets, since the two films' daily shooting schedules were totally different. After production started, though, the studio informed him that it wanted to keep the sets for "Dolly" a secret and so refused him permission. To work around this, Hill had Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Katharine Ross simply pose on the sets and took photos of them. He then inserted images of the three stars into a series of 300 actual period photos and spliced the two different sets (real and posed) together to form the New York montage.
  
  
• All the Bolivia scenes were filmed in Mexico, where almost the entire cast and crew, and the director, came down with Montezuma's Revenge (severe diarrhea caused by drinking Mexico's notoriously polluted water). Only Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Katharine Ross were spared, because they refused to drink the water catered on the set and stuck to drinking soda and alcohol for the duration of the shoot.
  
  
• The sister of the real Butch Cassidy often visited the set, and her presence was welcome to the cast and crew. During lulls in shooting she would tell stories about her famous brother's escapades, and was amazed at how accurately the script and Paul Newman portrayed him. Before the film was released, the studio found out about her visits and tried to convince her to endorse the movie in a series of ads to be shown in theatres across the country. She said that she would, but only if she saw the film first and truly stood behind it. The studio refused, saying that allowing her to see the film before its release could harm its reputation. Finally, at Robert Redford's suggestion, she agreed to do the endorsements - for a small "fee."
  
  
• Marlon Brando was seriously considered to team with Paul Newman for one of the roles.
  
  
• The river jump was shot at the studio's Century Ranch near Malibu, CA. Paul Newman's and Robert Redford's stuntmen actually jumped off of a construction crane by Century Lake. The crane was obscured by a matte painting of the cliffs. Newman and Reford start the jump in Colorado, but only land on a mattress.
  
  
• On the first day of shooting, involving the train robbery scenes, Katharine Ross came to the set to watch. There were five cameras and only four operators, so the DP put her on the extra camera. He showed her how to operate it, and how to move it to get her shot. Director George Roy Hill was furious, but said nothing the whole day. At the end of the day, however, he banned her from the set except when she was working.
  
  
• With nine wins it currently holds the record for the British Academy Awards (BAFTAs). It won for picture, actor (Robert Redford), actress (Katharine Ross, direction (George Roy Hill, screenplay, cinematography, film editing, sound and score.
  
  
• The bull's name in the film is "Bill". He was flown in from Los Angeles for the bicycle scene, which was shot in Utah. In order to make Bill charge, the filmmakers sprayed a substance on his testicles. Oddly, he didn't seem to mind and endured it through several takes (from The Making of 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' (1970)).
  
  
• During the 27-minute super posse chase, Butch and Sundance dismount and separate from their lone horse, start scaling rocky terrain to evade their pursuers. Butch asks, "What if they don't follow the horse?". Sundance: "Don't worry, Butch, you'll think of something." Originally Butch retorts, "That's a load off my mind." That line was kept in the movie right through the mid-'70s until it was broadcast on network TV (1976). For some reason it was omitted and has remained absent through every TV, cable, video, laserdisc and previous DVD release. It was reinstated back into the 2006 "Ultimate Collector's Edition" DVD and viewers are treated to it for the first time in 30 years.
  
  
• Two fictional western characters may have been derived from the name Butch Cassidy (1866-1908): Butch Cavendish, the arch rival of The Lone Ranger, and good guy Hopalong Cassidy, whose popularity exceeded many western heroes in the 1940s and 50s.
  
  
• That now famous leap off the ledge to elude capture was done earlier by Tyrone Power as Jessie James in the 1939 film Jesse James (1939).
  
  
• During filming Paul Newman had an affair with journalist Nancy Bacon, which caused him to separate from his wife Joanne Woodward for a time.
  
  
• Contrary to popular belief, the vocalists on the Burt Bacharach-penned song "South American Getaway" in this film were not the Swingle Singers. It was instead performed by the Ron Hicklin Singers, a group of Los Angeles studio vocalists best known as the real singers behind the background vocals on The Partridge Family recordings.
  
  

• SPOILER: Near the end of the movie there is a tribute to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Butch and Sundance are "caught" by a kid in the village who recognizes the brand on the rump of the gray mule that they have taken. The brand the kid sees is exactly the same as the brand that a kid in "Treasure" sees on seemingly the same gray mule and then runs to seemingly the same police station to report the theft.
  
  
• SPOILER: The climactic gun battle at the end of the movie was historically inaccurate. There were only a few uniformed police officers/officials present during the shootout (the rural town of San Vicente in southern Bolivia, where Cassidy and Sundance were supposedly killed, was a very small place back in November 1908, and didn't have many police officers). Plus, there were only three Bolivian soldiers who actually took part in the fight alongside the local police, not the hundreds shown in the film. In addition, the casualty count among the Bolivian policemen was nowhere near as enormous as shown (only one soldier and one police official were actually killed, plus another soldier and an unknown number of policemen and some local posse members were wounded), and most of the gun battle took place in the evening and at night, not in broad daylight as shown in the movie. These were the main reasons why the Bolivian government at first banned the film from being shown in that country.
  
  

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