If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!: The Life and TImes of Sam Peckinpah by David Weddle

Author:David Weddle [Weddle, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-03-29T04:30:00+00:00

Peckinpah followed Noon Wine up with an episode “That Lady Is My Wife”—for another TV anthology series, “Bob Hope's Chrysler Theater.” The script was pedestrian, but Sam managed to pack the show with bizarre imagery, tumescent with undercurrents of eroticism, dread, and anxiety. The final product was weird, audacious, and completely mesmerizing—a remarkable achievement considering it had been made in the heart of Hollywood's most rigid assembly line, Universal Studios. Peckinpah had been able to pull it off because the show's producers, Jack Laird and Jeannot Szwarc, were great admirers and willing to cut him some slack.

Shortly after Sam finished the episode, the break he had been waiting for materialized. Ted Richmond, a producer at Paramount, offered him a chance to write a script based on William Douglas Lansford's biography of Pancho Villa. Villa couldn't be the only character, Richmond explained—they'd need a white face in the story, say an American who gets caught up in the revolution. Yul Brynner had already been signed to star as Villa. If Brynner liked Sam's script, Richmond promised, he'd get the green light to direct the film as well.

Sam was given a small office at Paramount, a copy of a treatment that William Douglas Lansford had written for Richmond, a stack of yellow legal pads, a drawer full of pencils, and three months to come up with a screenplay. James Coburn, who was about to star in one of the camp classics of the sixties, The President's Analyst, heard Peckinpah was on the lot and decided to look him up.

“Here was Sam sitting in this little fucking office, a little pot belly, sitting there,” says Coburn. “He said, ‘Hey man, how are you? Sit down and have a drink.’ We had a little drink, talked for a little while. My heart just fucking went out to him. I mean, here was this guy who had been this general on Dundee, who had now been demoted to like a fucking private in the cavalry who sweeps the horse turds out of the stable . . . working on that script. I felt so badly. I didn't know how to help him out.”

If he found his present circumstances humiliating, Sam didn't dwell on it, for this was his chance to get back into the big time. As he ordered more and more books and old newspaper articles from Paramount's research department, the walls of his cramped office fell away and the vast panorama of the Mexican revolution spread out before him.

This was the revolution John Reed wrote about in Insurgent Mexico, the revolution Ambrose Bierce charged into, never to return. A time of tremendous turmoil, corrupt warlords, fanatical idealists, hypocritical politicians, and long-suffering peasants finally rising up out of their stoicism to pursue the thin ray of a dream, a desperate vision of a better world. It was China in 1945, America in 1967. It was the whole sad turbulent story of mankind packed into six raging years.

In his script Peckinpah drew Villa not as

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