Following up TRM’s report of the impacts of Robert Redford’s legacy movie – A River Runs Through It – on fly fishing.
In North America this one budget movie in 1992 was responsible for revolutionising public interest in trout fishing. It transformed the public perception of fly fishing. Fly fishing clubs doubled their memberships. The film initiated a mass adoption of fly fishing as a sign of lifestyle status and inspired new generations of nature’s environmental protectors.
Now, in 2025, the time is ripe for a new addicted digital generation to dispose of their computer games and try the real thing.
NZ is so fortunate in having so many wonderful scenic trout fishing rivers to attract a new breed of fishos. We have all seen the Kiwi video skills in so many brilliant short movie clips of trout fishing in paradise. NZ just needs one keen fisho to take it that one step further… on the Tongariro River. Imagine the tourist impacts on NZ…
The passing of Robert Redford has reawakened the fly fishing industry (?) to the potential of using a “movie” – like A River Runs Through It – to promote the sport (“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” as written by Norman Maclean and published in 1976,) in this region. Of all locations in NZ, the Tongariro River ticks all the boxes but sadly, the opportunity continues to be neglected in Turangi. A film clip should be sent to Peter Jackson and James Cameron. Consider the following…
A River Runs Through It –
Remembering “The Movie”
In October of 1992, Robert Redford’s silver screen adaptation of Norman Maclean’s novella introduced a whole new generation to Montana.
November 01, 2017 By Jason Borger
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.“
Those words, written by Norman Maclean and published in 1976, introduced a generation of anglers to the lives, loves, and losses of a Montana family. In October of 1992, Robert Redford’s silver screen adaptation introduced a whole new generation to Norman’s Montana, and to the desire to understand what happened and why. For me, a 21-year-old kid fresh off an undergraduate degree in film study, the production represented both a well-timed professional opportunity and deeply personal journey that took me back to my roots as a fly fisher.
I caught my first trout by my own hand not far from Storm Castle Peak in Montana’s Gallatin River drainage. A lucky cast, followed by a shout from my father, and I was soon clutching a 13-inch ‘bow. That was 1972. Nearly 20 years later, I found myself back in essentially the same spot as a casting double in Robert Redford’s film adaptation of A River Runs Through It.
Unlike my boyhood uniform of snap-button shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, I was dressed in period wardrobe. I did, however, have a fly rod in-hand, although it was painted as faux-bamboo and came with an aerodynamically challenged Bunyan Bug lashed to a rope of a tippet. The script called for some shadowy trickery of trout, even though no fish were awaiting an offering. The dearth of rainbows didn’t really matter. The scene was more about a brother’s momentary ascendance into grace via art.
In the finished film—which appeared at the Sundance Film Festival 25 years ago—only a few seconds pass, but it’s enough to lift the character of Paul into his own realm. For me, pivoting there on a rock, in that river, under a big sky, it felt as if my angling journey had come full circle. The time, place, and story had left an indelible and deeply personal impression on me. I would never see fly fishing or the Gallatin in the same way again. Fly fishing as an industry (or hobby) would not be the same again, either, nor as many have argued, would Montana itself. Much has changed in our sport and our industry since the premier showing of that movie. It is my own hope that “The Movie” ultimately raised a larger, more enduring awareness of our angling resources, and created a deeper connection for those who share the passion.
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”
BY TODD WILKINSON
As often is the case, the passage of time brings a warm diaphanous gloam to the way we remember the past. Some 30 years ago, in the months before the film A River Runs Through It began appearing on big screens, director Robert Redford told part-time Livingston, Montana, resident and writer Toby Thompson to “get ready. This film is going to change everything.”
In hindsight, it is impossible to overstate just how prescient Bob Redford’s prediction was. It’s a view shared today by the son of Norman Maclean himself, the latter being author of the novella set in Montana and widely considered one of the best fishing stories ever written in American history. A River Runs Through It rightfully ranks right up there with Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tale, The Old Man and the Sea.
The Hemingway mention is more than anecdotal. Not only have generations of the writer’s fans made pilgrimages to the places where he fished, lived and visited—including Cooke City, Montana, and Ketchum, Idaho—but the mystique of Hemingway’s association with Key West, Florida, is blamed, in part, for both the popularization and development pressure placed upon the once quaint saltwater fishing mecca.
As for A River Runs Through It, John Maclean has waded often into the fleeting afterglow of his father’s words, the place they were drawn from, the moments they shared together fly fishing the Big Blackfoot River east of Missoula. In 2021, John’s own book, Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, was published to acclaim for it delves into “the story behind the story.” He reflects on his father’s intent and the dreamlike spell the book—and film—put on people who became smitten with an idealized sense of what Montana was—and is. He shared a little-known fact that while his father was still alive and having rejected a first script written by a giant of Montana literature, the late William Kittredge, it appeared the movie might never be made.
But in 1992, two years after Norman Maclean died, it did.
Now, 30 years later, what impact did the movie A River Runs Through It have on the state where it was made? What if it hadn’t been made?
Redford genuinely loves Montana. Unlike others who make movies, using natural beauty as a supporting actor, conservation to him is a conviction rather than a fashion statement.
John Maclean still steps into streams. Dividing his time between suburban Washington, D.C., where he served prestigiously as a diplomatic correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, and his family’s getaway at Seeley Lake, Montana, he occasionally drives over to the Blackfoot. Just as his father taught him, he floats his line in a four-count rhythm onto seams of water where trout lie. But, as he explains it, he isn’t so much trying to land a big fish. “I try to catch the essence of what once was,” he says.
What once was—as three generations of the Maclean family knew the river—is gone, forever carried away into the current of change. “People did not boat the Blackfoot, not in my Dad’s time and not when I was a kid,” John says. “Now you’ll encounter between 50 and 100 boats coming down.”
In the three decades that have passed since A River Runs Through It transformed the public perception of fly fishing, so, too, have the backdrops and communities where the film was set.
Bozeman, downstream in the Gallatin Valley near where much of River was filmed, has experienced an inundation that, from the perspective of an extended real estate boomtime, blew in like a hurricane and never left. Livingston and Paradise Valley, too. Impacts are evident in how the human footprint of development has expanded, how former cattle and farmlands have become recreation retreats and how the venerated rivers themselves are now swarmed with anglers, sometimes with a frenzy mirroring the flurry of a caddis hatch.
A River Runs Through It, the book, was first published in May 1976 and while it remains a cult classic for American place-based literature, fly fishing in its aftermath still emanated only boutique appeal. The film, however, set off a mass adoption of fly fishing as a sign of lifestyle status. Outings on trout streams in the Northern Rockies came to represent their own class of trophy, like pieces of a portfolio that include homes, land and memberships in prestigious country clubs.
Akin to Thompson, I, too, interviewed Redford on a couple of occasions. In August 1993, I flew down to Utah from Bozeman and spent a day tagging along with him at Sundance, home to the institute he founded to champion independent films and where Redford’s own commitment to environmental protection was galvanized. Redford told me it was his hope and sincerest intent with the film to communicate the reverence for wild water that the Maclean clan embraced as an ethos—a sacred marriage of spirituality and immersion in the sublime unmarred elements. On the page, it was stated clearly in the novella’s opening line: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”
Redford wanted it to inspire new generations of protectors, but conceded the inherent danger always is the unpredictability and unintended consequences of human nature.
Robert Redford has never been a superficial, fair-weather advocate for nature. Formidable, he is outspoken as an environmentalist, fierce in lending his voice to protect the natural world, be it as a spokesman for organizations fighting to protect public lands or narrating documentaries on topics ranging from wolves to restoring San Francisco Bay. He genuinely loves Montana. Unlike others who make movies, using natural beauty as a supporting actor, conservation to him is a conviction rather than a fashion statement.
Articulate on issues, he’s never held back out of fear his activism might affect his appeal at the box office or his bankability as an actor/director. Conversant both in the science and philosophy of biodiversity, he is an inveterate reader. In fact, it was noted that Montana writer Thomas McGuane handed him a copy of A River Runs Through It after Redford complained that good contemporary stories about the West were hard to find.
Somewhat daunting, the moment I strolled into his office at Sundance, he had a stack of clippings from stories I’d written in newspapers and magazines on his desk. He already had sized up whether our visit would last an hour or the day. Our conversation fortunately lasted all day and included a chat the following morning. When he told Thompson the film would have impact, he wanted it to inspire new generations of protectors, but conceded the inherent danger always is the unpredictability and unintended consequences of human nature…
Bozeman, the fastest growing micropolitan city in America, had a population of less than 25,000 in 1992 when River debuted, and today is double that. At current growth rates, Bozeman and Gallatin County will double in less than 20 years to reach 220,000, the current population of Salt Lake City proper (not the entire metro); By the 2060s, if the inundation continues with people fleeing mega-metro areas and climate change-related impacts (soaring heat and water shortages in the desert, rising tidal surges along the coasts and outbreaks of catastrophic wildfires), the Bozeman area could double again to reach 440,000, about the current size of Minneapolis proper…
Three factors that did not exist before separate the early 1990s and today: social media that has hastened the loss of places whose locations used to be obscure and little known; climate change as a grave concern for humanity; and the arrival of technology that allows people to live practically anywhere and work remotely. The latter has expressed itself mightily during the pandemic…
While land-protection victories have a hard time keeping pace with the expanding footprint of development, there have been some amazing achievements. Along the Blackfoot River, the Blackfoot Challenge has protected 80 percent of the land girding the river corridor as “working” ag and timber lands, in which maintaining ecological health is the commonly shared objective. It’s an initiative that John Maclean praises. Yet, while the currents flowing through the Blackfoot are cleaner than they used to be, thanks to cleanup of abandoned hardrock mines, recreational river traffic has created a bustling corridor his father would find at odds with the solemn solitude he immortalized.
In the final scene of the movie, an elder Norman Maclean is portrayed standing alone in the Blackfoot, haunted by the loss of things he adored most in life, set against the daunting mystery of time immemorial. Behind the modern slogan that humans in the 21st century are “loving places to death,” Maclean’s surviving son notes that the counter is that people, when given a chance, will also rise to defend from harm the places they love.
How a fishing tale for the ages might contribute to an outcome one way or another boils down to the instincts of human nature. And right now, we don’t know how that story ends. But there is the sobering reminder of Redford’s words, that the film was going to change everything. In 30 years, those changes have been epic.
In 1995, director Robert Redford brought to the big screen the real-life story of a Montana family bonded by faith and a near-religious dedication to fly fishing. The film version of Norman McLean’s autobiography, “A River Runs Through It,” catapulted Brad Pitt into instant stardom. Ladies still recall scenes of him in tight waders!
Whether it was the onscreen charisma of Pitt, the masterful direction of Redford, or the story itself, the movie won a large following at the box office.
The impact was both immediate and sustained. Manufacturers and retailers were gleeful over the exponential rise in sales. Fly fishing clubs doubled their memberships.
Now, it wasn’t that our sport was near death. On the contrary, the American Sportsman television show, which ran from 1965 to 1986, often featured fly fishing. It introduced many legends of our sport to the masses. Names such as Lee Wulff, Lefty Kreh, Flip Pallot, Stu Apte and Gary Borger. During this period, participation increased steadily.
But by 1995, it had hit a plateau. THE MOVIE — as we call it — brought an infusion of new blood into our sport.
THE MOVIE was like a drug. Within a few years, the true believers were wanting more. The question ever since has been, “Will there ever be another great flyfishing movie?”
