George Roy Hill, 81; Gifted Storyteller Directed 'The Sting,' 'Butch Cassidy'

By Dennis McLellan

Dec. 28, 2002 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

George Roy Hill, who directed Paul Newman and Robert Redford in two of their biggest hits -- “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting” -- died Friday in his New York City apartment. He was 81, and had been battling Parkinson’s disease.

Hill, who won an Academy Award for directing “The Sting,” was best known as a gifted light-comedy director with a nice touch for romance in films that often reflected an ironic, bittersweet view of life.

A master storyteller, Hill worked in a variety of genres, including musicals and historic epics.

Among the 14 films he directed from 1962 to 1988 are “Period of Adjustment,” “The World of Henry Orient,” “Hawaii,” “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “The Great Waldo Pepper,” “Slap Shot,” “A Little Romance,” “The World According to Garp” and “The Little Drummer Girl.”

“He made a lot of charming movies,” said Time magazine film critic and film historian Richard Schickel. “His best vein was a kind of cheeky comedy with a little bit of undertone of some seriousness to it. I think that’s what he did best and that’s what he’ll be remembered for.”

Indeed, by the mid-1970s, Hill had become the first director to ever have two pictures on Variety’s list of All-Time Top 10 Movie Box Office Hits: “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (No. 10) and “The Sting” (No. 4), which besides winning him an Academy Award for best director also won the best picture Oscar. (Both films have since fallen from the list.)

In the wake of those two successes, Hill was credited by some for being in the vanguard of an industry trend to entertain audiences and return to straightforward storytelling after a period during which films emphasized atmosphere and symbolism.

“George Roy Hill’s pictures,” director Peter Bogdanovich said at the time, “have been an important influence in showing the industry that what the public wants is a good story.”

Director Arthur Hiller said of Hill’s films: “Each story was told in the way it should be told. He wasn’t trying to be stylized; he stylized it in its best storytelling manner.”

William Goldman, who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” as well as the script for “The Great Waldo Pepper,” said Hill “was the best director I ever worked with or ever will work with.”

“He was really smart and really tough,” Goldman said. “He was a Marine pilot in two wars and didn’t take [guff] from anybody. George was cranky and bright and could be very funny, and he was black Irish and all that that entails.”

Despite Hill’s success as a filmmaker, the general public knew little about the former Yale University music major who played Bach on the piano for an hour each morning and flew an open-cockpit biplane built in 1930. Hill deliberately shunned publicity and rarely gave interviews to promote his pictures.

“I find publicity distasteful and I don’t think it does the picture any good to focus on the director,” he said in an interview in Edward Shores’ 1983 book “George Roy Hill,” an examination of Hill’s films.

“Lately it’s come around so that the director is more of a star than he was [in the past], but I’ve never wanted that,” Hill said. “I feel that I can accomplish more if I have a low [public] profile. My profile in the business is just fine.”

“George didn’t like publicity, so he’s really not mentioned the way he should be,” said production designer Henry Bumstead, who worked with Hill on eight pictures and won an Oscar for his production design on “The Sting.”

“But if you look at George’s body of work, it’s unbelievable the variety of films he did, from ‘Slap Shot’ to ‘The World According to Garp.’ He was a fantastic director.”

Hill was born on Dec. 20, 1921, in Minneapolis. His mother’s uncle founded the Minneapolis Tribune, which remained in the family after the uncle died. Hill’s father, who was secretary of the American Automobile Assn. in Minneapolis, died when Hill was 9.

While growing up, Hill developed early interests in classical music and aviation. Fascinated by the era’s barnstorming pilots, a period he would tap for “The Great Waldo Pepper,” Hill hung out at the local airport and obtained a pilot’s license when he was 17.

Hill also developed an early interest in acting, appearing in student productions at Blake Country Day School, a prep school in Hopkins, Minn.

After graduating, he majored in music at Yale. A baritone, he became a member of the university Glee Club and the Whiffenpoofs, but he eventually realized that he didn’t have much talent as a singer. He also joined the Dramatic Society, becoming president and appearing in campus musicals.

Ten days after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1942, Hill joined the Navy. After flight school, he transferred to the Marines and piloted transport planes in the South Pacific. Following the war, he worked briefly as a cub reporter on a family newspaper in Texas, then used the GI Bill to attend Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in literature.

While in Dublin, Hill acted in productions staged by poet-dramatist Austin Clarke at the Abbey Theatre, and continued acting after returning to America in 1949. He had roles in plays put on by Cyril Cusack’s repertory company in New York City, and toured with Margaret Webster’s Shakespearean company, where he met actress Louisa Horton, whom he married in 1951. They later divorced.

Hill landed a steady job on the radio soap opera “John’s Other Wife,” but the Korean War curtailed his acting career. Called back into active duty, he spent 18 months at the Marine Corps jet-pilot training center at Cherry Point, N.C., where he had time to reevaluate his feelings about acting.

What had been enjoyable at Yale was now “too painful. I didn’t like to expose myself or summon up emotions I didn’t have,” Hill once said. It got to the point, he said, “where I would break into a sweat and get sick to my stomach before going on stage.”

The service also gave Hill time to write. He already had written two unpublished autobiographical novels, and, by the time he was discharged in 1953, had sold three scripts to Kraft Television Theater.

Hill, who continued to write, quickly rose from assistant director to director on various dramatic shows, including “Playhouse 90.”

Over the next five years, he directed more than 50 live dramas, including “The Helen Morgan Story,” the original “Judgment at Nuremburg” and “A Night to Remember” (about the sinking of the Titanic).

“When I went out to Hollywood,” Hill said, “I was probably more expert at editing than many who had been in Hollywood for years. My whole thought process of seeing a film before I ever got on the set developed from working for television. Live television was a tremendous training ground for a director.”

At the same time he was making his mark in television, Hill became a respected Broadway director. His first production, Ketti Fring’s adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s novel “Look Homeward, Angel” in 1957, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

After directing Tennessee Williams’ “Period of Adjustment” on Broadway, Hill began his film career by directing the 1962 film version of Williams’ play about young newlyweds. He followed that up with the 1963 film version of “Toys in the Attic,” an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play.

By the time he started work on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1968, Hill also had directed Peter Sellers in “The World of Henry Orient” and Julie Andrews in the epic “Hawaii” and in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

“Butch Cassidy” propelled Hill into the top ranks of Hollywood directors. But no one involved with the film anticipated the light-hearted western would be the runaway hit it became when it was released in 1969.

Many of the country’s most influential film critics found much to pan in the nostalgic tale of two outdated outlaws running away from a relentless super-posse at the end of the western era.

The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called it “unfocused and unrealized,” a “glorified vacuum.” Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic scoffed, “Hill’s direction, like the writing, is imitative of everything that’s ‘in.’ ” And the New York Times’ Vincent Canby said the outlaws’ “decline and fall was the sort of alternately absurd and dreamy saga that might have been fantasized by Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Catherine -- before they grew up.”

But audiences fell in love with the delightful and stylishly made film, which earned Oscars for Conrad Hall’s cinematography, Burt Bacharach’s original score and Bacharach and Hal David’s song (“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”), as well as Goldman’s original screenplay.

The film was also notable for making a superstar out of Redford.

The studio, 20th Century Fox, originally did not want Redford for the role of Sundance opposite Newman’s Butch, preferring instead to cast a similarly big star such as Marlon Brando or Warren Beatty.

But, as Redford said in an interview that appeared on a 25th anniversary laser disc edition of the film, “George is the one that went to the mat” for him.

“This unquestionably was the film that put me in a new place,” Redford said. “I could no longer live my life the way I had been living, normally.”

Redford credited Hill for being “the one that really gave [the film] a kind of dimension and breadth by opening it up. It wasn’t quite so much jokes back and forth. He created space for behavior and character development that I think is what really gave the film that extra lift.”

As the director, Hill had to walk a fine line between the film’s comedy and drama. Goldman recalled getting a call from Hill after he attended a sneak preview of “Butch Cassidy” in San Francisco.

“He said he was in despair because they laughed at it,” Goldman said. “He said he thought it was too funny. He went through [the film], taking out laughs because his feeling was -- and he was quite right -- if it was too funny you wouldn’t be ready for the sad stuff that came at the end. So he did a phenomenal job of directing the script.”

In their interviews for the special anniversary edition of the film, Newman and Redford gave high praise to Hill.

“He is truly a director in the best sense,” Newman said. “When you’re cookin’, he leaves you alone. When you get in trouble, which is where most directors falter, he’s the guy that comes in and points you in the right direction and that, believe me, is very unusual.”

Said Redford: “First of all, he was just perverse enough to make it an interesting experience. I appreciated that. He was wily and wicked and full of surprises and enjoyed being surprised back, so that made it lively.

“Beyond that, George has such discipline for the work. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He was totally prepared. He has no fat in his films, and I learned a lot from that. He really understands the importance of story.”

Hill, the Yale music major, also understood the importance of music. That was particularly evident on “Butch Cassidy.”

“Burt Bacharach scored the film and we made a deliberate decision to go with a semi-modern sound despite that we were playing in period,” Hill said in his narration for a behind-the-scenes documentary of “Butch Cassidy” that he donated to Yale.

“The picture was designed for a contemporary feel,” Hill said. “The characters are modern rather than traditional in approach and temperament, and [Goldman’s] dialogue, while it isn’t actually anachronistic, has a very contemporary rhythm and sound to it and we didn’t want a traditional western score.”

The film’s most famous musical sequence -- Newman clowning on a bicycle for Katharine Ross -- resulted in Bacharach and David writing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” to accompany it.

“George wanted a song like the Gershwin tune ‘Bidin’ My Time,’ ” Goldman said. “And if you play ‘Bidin’ My Time’ and play ‘Raindrops,’ they’re the same kind of loping, ‘we’re going along and having fun’ song.”

When a 20th Century Fox executive protested that the musical bicycle sequence had nothing to do with the plot, Hill agreed, but said, “The emotion is right.”

“He was the best friend that anyone could have: friend, mentor, enemy,” Newman said in a statement Friday reported by Associated Press. “He gave everyone a hell of a ride. Himself included.”

Hill is survived by two sons, George Roy Hill III of Roslyn, N.Y., and John Andrew Steele Hill of Ardsley, N.Y; two daughters, Frances Breckinridge Phipps of Dumont, N.J., and Owens Hill of Los Angeles; and 12 grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at a later date.

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Filmography

Films directed by George Roy Hill:

“Period of Adjustment” (1962)

“Toys in the Attic” (1963)

“The World of Henry Orient” (1964)

“Hawaii” (1966)

“Thoroughly Modern Millie” (1967)

“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969)

“Slaughterhouse-Five” (1972)

“The Sting” (1973)