How Long can ‘A River Runs Through It’ Keep Running?

When Robert Redford was wrangling with author Norman Maclean over the screenplay for the 1991 movie adaptation of the most famous fly-fishing book ever written, Redford described it as a “story of two brothers, one rising and one falling.” Maclean told him the screenplay needed more fishing.

Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, who won an Oscar for his work, said “the goal of this film is not to bring more tourists to the rivers of Montana, and not telling people you should fish.” John Dietsch, who was a fly-fishing consultant on the movie set, observed the book was between 60 and 70 percent about the experience of fishing.

In 1976, Norman Maclean published his 104-page novella chronicling events of his family during the summer of 1937. He also stuffed an image of piscatorial Eden into a time capsule that modern trends have shattered beyond repair. The Blackfoot River fishing holes where the Maclean brothers tangled with trout and family radiated splendid isolation on the page. Today, it’s a different story: That same river now sloshes with what Maclean called a “Spanish Armada” of floating anglers taking more selfies than fish from the waters.

Many locals wonder how much more the river can take. One might as well wonder how much more the story has to give. Initially rejected by numerous publishers, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories nearly won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1977. Although the competition’s fiction jury nominated the book, its advisory board made no award that year.

This year is the 50^th anniversary of the novella’s publication, and a swarm of events have hatched in its honor. On March 31, fans heard from Tom Skerritt, who played Norman’s father in the movie, at an event in Santa Barbara, California. For the stay-at-home crowd, Taylor Sheridan has debuted The Madison TV series with Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer in a “heartfelt study of grief and human connection [and fly-fishing] in the Madison River valley of central Montana.”

Opera Montana has a version of A River Runs Through It in production, with workshop performances in May before official Montana premieres in Missoula and Bozeman this fall. In October, the sixth biannual “In the Footsteps of Norman Maclean Literary Festival” takes place in Missoula. 

Annick Smith took undergraduate classes from Norman Maclean at the University of Chicago, before becoming a writer and filmmaker. She and William Kittridge worked with Maclean on an initial version of the screenplay, and she co-produced Redford’s movie. She was not surprised by the novella’s staying power.

“It’s not a regional book – it’s an international book,” Smith said. “The river is such a huge presence, and it gets almost mythical status from the book. The book itself will probably come and go, but there’s enough fly fishermen who know about it and revere it, they’ll keep passing it down.”

But are they idolizing a family that explains the mysteries of love and tragedy through the language of fishing, or justifying their favorite pastime by wrapping it in Shakespearian parlance?

Tall tales of fish tails

Opera director and librettist Matt Foss told Mountain Journal he was working as a fire ecologist and wildlife biologist in Red Lodge when he encountered Norman Maclean’s work. But it was Maclean’s posthumous Young Men and Fire, not River Runs Through It, that first caught his attention.

Twenty years later, Foss met Norman’s son, John Maclean, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who splits time between Washington, D.C. and the family’s Montana cabin on Seeley Lake, after a presentation of Foss’s theatrical version of All Quiet on the Western Front in Chicago. Foss was thinking the novella would make a good play when Maclean suggested it might be an opera.

“I’d never worked on an opera,” Foss said. And he confessed that most of his fishing was done with a compact Eagle Claw spinning rod and lures. But he loved the way Maclean could use the pursuit of trout as a metaphor for pursuit of family love.

“Maclean devotes pages to the schematics of a roll cast,” Foss said, referring to a difficult fly-fishing technique. “And it’s all to set up a feeling of inadequacy and not wanting to disappoint your brother. Good art works like an electron in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: the moment you put your finger on it, you’re probably wrong. And so in the book, someone tells a story and rather than explain it, they tell another story. Or go fishing.”

The film version bent the story in various ways. It introduced the world to the shining smile of Brad Pitt, cast as Paul Maclean in his virile mid-20s, although the story took place in Paul’s 30s. It celebrated the Maclean family’s hometown of Missoula, Montana, but was filmed mostly in Bozeman and Livingston because Missoula had become too modern-looking. The film crew shot most of the fishing scenes on the Gallatin and Yellowstone rivers rather than relocate to the Blackfoot across the Continental Divide.

As a result, the Greater Yellowstone region has reaped the benefits and impacts of fly-fishing fandom more than the story’s original locale. The movie props auction provided much of the décor in the original Mackenzie River Pizza restaurant in Bozeman, including a rowboat the Maclean brothers purloin for a whitewater adventure early in the film. It’s inspired how-to angling videos and innumerable news stories with titles like “How ‘A River Runs Through It’ Changed Montana.” John Maclean, told Mountain Journal the film served as an “accelerant” to the popularity of Montana river vacations. He has also suffered burglaries at the family cabin on Seeley Lake, which he suspects are from people seeking souvenirs of the book. 

Environmental forces have accelerated with equal impact. University of Montana fisheries biologist Yoichiro Kanno told Mountain Journal the growing popularity of fly-fishing has also raised awareness of rising water temperatures, invasive species and over-fishing on rivers.

“My students are in their early 20s, but they’re all aware of Brad Pitt and A River Runs Through It,” Kanno said. “It has left a foundational legacy that set the stage for how good fishing is in Montana. But it’s also set exceedingly high expectations for fishing conditions in Montana. That’s where a person like me comes in.”

Montanans aged 18 to 36 expressed the highest levels of concern about human-caused climate change of any age demographic in a recent Montana Free Press survey, with 61 percent saying they were very or somewhat concerned. In contrast, almost 20 percent of the 50-64 age group reported they didn’t believe in human-caused climate change. A separate study by the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research showed that the state’s cold-water fishery generated $919 million during the 2024-25 fishing season, supporting 15,900 jobs and $1.5 billion in economic impact.

Kanno is setting up a new research lab based in Missoula to look at the impacts of climate change on fish spawning, growth and habitat suitability. Those forces tend to affect native fish such as cutthroat and bull trout more than non-natives like rainbow, brook and brown trout. Ironically, the creels Norman and Paul fill to the limit throughout A River Runs Through It hold only the artificially stocked species — they never mention catching a cutthroat or bull.

Constructing a vision

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was Maclean’s first published book, at the age of 74. He started writing about his brother Paul’s 1938 death shortly after the passing of his own wife, decades removed from the brother’s murder.

At the time, he called it a product of the “oral, Western storytelling tradition.” But Maclean founded his academic career on the written word. In the movie, Norman’s father John oversees his son’s essay writing, with the repeated command: “Good, now cut it in half.” 

University of Chicago colleague John Cawelti recalled Norman’s reputation as a mix of benevolence and fearsomeness. All the fellow English professors addressed him as the relaxed “Norman” rather than the rigid “Maclean.” But in Cawelti’s first encounter with Norman after giving what he thought was a successful lecture, Maclean “launched into a careful, searing and absolutely correct analysis of the flaws in my presentation … I was quite destroyed by it and went home to bed for three days.”

Maclean’s work has its own critics. Annick Smith observed how the character Old Rawhide, who attaches herself to Neal and gets a memorable bareback sunburn, “is really sexist and demeaning to women.” While Smith acknowledged Old Rawhide was probably included just for comic relief, that kind of superficial and disposable depiction comes off poorly, especially compared to the more nuanced scenes of Norman’s mother and wife. 

For a story depicting a lost time, River displays some odd anachronisms. Maclean often points out geologic evidence of Glacial Lake Missoula’s great flood, including scars in the upper reaches of Blackfoot canyon walls “left by passing icebergs.” But the idea that a prehistoric flood visibly shaped the landscape of western Montana was just getting circulated among obscure geological academics in Maclean’s early adulthood, and didn’t reach the general public until about the time he was writing the novella, in the 1970s.

And while he frequently mentions the giant Ponderosa pines that shade his favorite fishing holes, Maclean never remarks on the impact logging had on the forests around Missoula. In fact, Bonner Elementary School at the mouth of the Blackfoot River had a playground-sized “slab yard” of wood stacked 10 feet high that it burned for heat in winter. Those slabs were the unwanted remains of log cores needed for mining braces and railroad ties. Most would make a 2-by-12 or larger plank in today’s sawmills. The waste was so egregious, it prompted Senator Lee Metcalf to commission Arnold Bolle, dean of the University of Montana School of Forestry, to investigate. The subsequent Bolle Report in 1970 triggered a wholesale restructuring of the U.S. Forest Service and its timber management.

Blackfoot River trout feature prominently in the story, although the Blackfoot River itself was in terrible shape in Maclean’s later years due to rampant logging and mining pollution, topped by a catastrophic dam failure in 1975 that dumped more than 100,000 tons of toxic heavy-metal tailings into its headwaters. John Maclean wrote in his own book, Home Waters, that the public devotion to the Blackfoot inspired by A River Runs Through It helped drive a massive restoration of its watershed, including the federal Superfund removal of a toxic dam at its confluence with the Clark Fork River, the blocking of a major cyanide-heap leach gold mining project, and the cleanup of the Mike Horse Mine tailings that poisoned its headwaters.

That devotion is due for another test, as an Australian mining company recently filed plans to explore the Blackfoot headwaters again for gold. International economic jitters have driven the price of gold past $4,550 an ounce, making even played-out historic sites worth a geologist’s new look. Similar market forces have inspired plans to put an artificial intelligence data center in one of the old plywood mill buildings near the Blackfoot’s confluence with the Clark Fork River.

Opera director Foss put his finger on another theme Maclean may have unintentionally crystalized. While the story concentrates on Norman’s struggle to help his brother Paul, much of the action involves a separate series of disasters involving his brother-in-law Neal from California.

“He was saying the same thing about Neal as we’re saying about Californians and Texans who come to Montana because they love Taylor Sheridan shows,” Foss said. The fights between Rocky Mountain neighbors, he points out, can be just as intractable as any out-of-state developer trying to dollarize a family ranch on the Yellowstone TV series.

Maclean himself ends his story with the enigmatic coda: “The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”

A River Runs Through It drills its lesson that understanding fly-fishing, family or the world we live in requires constant practice. For those who struggle with any or all of those subjects, his story offers priceless words.