“Kid, there’s something I ought to tell you. I never shot anybody before.”
Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Jack Lemmon were all considered for the role of Sundance. Lemmon had to turn it down because he was about to film The Odd Couple (1968). Dustin Hoffman was considered for the role of Butch. The actual name of the Butch Cassidy and Sundance gang was ‘ The Wild Bunch’. But when Sam Peckinpah’s 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. William Goldman’s screenplay originally was titled “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy.” Steve McQueen and Paul Newman both read the script and agreed to do it, with McQueen playing the Sundance Kid. But when McQueen dropped out and was replaced by Robert Redford, the names were reversed in the film’s title because Newman was an established movie star and Redford was still relatively unknown. Director George Roy Hill wanted to shoot live action for the New York sequence on the period sets from Hello, Dolly! (1969). But the studio refused because this film was being released before theirs and they didn’t want audiences to see the sets yet. So Hill had Redford, Newman and Katharine Ross pose on the sets for still photographs instead. Then strippedthe posed images into authentic period photos and edited them into a montage set to music. Forthe scene where Newman rides Ross around on the bicycle handle bars the studio asked Bob Dylan to sing the now famous Burt Bacharach song, “Rain Drops Keep Fallin’ On My Head”. He declined.
