ien I first began writing screenplays, I had the good fortune of

hanging out with Sam Peckinpah during the time he was writing
The Wild Bunch. His niece, Deneen Peckinpah, and I had both
worked with Jean Renoir on the world premiere of his play Carola
when we were students at UC Berkeley. When she came to L.A. seeking an acting career, she stayed with Sam at the beach.
Since I was just starting out writing screenplays, I was like a
sponge, absorbing as much as I could about the art and craft. It was
during those summer months that I was blessed to be around the
man who literally changed the style and impact of the Western film.

Major Dundee Sam Peckinpah,

Oscar Saul

"Amos Charles Dundee is a tall, broad-shouldered,

rawboned man in his late thirties. Opinionated, strong-willed, quick-tempered, he is
a realist who sees the world exactly as it
is and can't get enough of it. An artist,
perhaps a sculptor of battle, who knows that
for him death is as close as the owl perched
upon the thigh of night. It is a very personal world to Amos Charles Dundee and win,
lose, or draw, he will play it according to
his needs and wants. Dundee is a soldier. He
gives orders well and takes them badly. . . .
A wise man who can be a fool . . . who will go
his own way come hell or high water and so far
has yet to look back or regret . . . who so
far has yet to fail."

Building a
Character

SCREENPLAY

I write a lot about this period and my relationship with Peckinpah

in Going to the Movies.
Sam was amazingbrilliant in his visual awareness, talkative
when he felt comfortable, and, of course, moody and self-destructive
when he was drinking too much or thought someone had gone behind his back or broken their word to him.
Most of Sam's films deal with characters who are dedicated or
obsessedtake your pickand caught in the maelstrom of changing times. He explored this theme, unchanged men in a changing
time, in most of his films: Ride the High Country (N. B. Stone),
Major Dundee (Oscar Saul), The Wild Bunch (Walon Green), The
Ballad of Cable Hogue (John Crawford and Edmund Penny), Straw
Dogs (David Zelag Goodman), The Getaway (Walter Hill), Junior
Bonner (Jeb Rosebrook), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Rudy
Wurlitzer), and others.
When I first met him, I'd heard stories about his drunken antics,
the difficulties he had on the set with his crew, his sense of "perfectionism," the conflicts he had with the studios and producers, so I
didn't really know what to expect. I found him to be tough and honest, with a keen sensibility and understanding. He wasn't drinking
the "hard stuff," he said, only two beers a day, and during our conversations I learned he had not made a film since Major Dundee,
four years earlier.
Cowritten with Oscar Saul, Dundee had been a traumatic experience for him. The studio had reneged on the contract and taken it
away from him, reut it, and butchered it, even though he had "final
cut" built into his contract. The title music, by Mitch Miller's singalong gang, was absolutely ridiculous. In his words, it had been a
"personal disaster," and it was while working on Dundee that he got
the reputation of being "difficult"meaning "unemployable" in
Hollywood vernacular. Charlton Heston, Deneen told me, had returned his salary, and Peckinpah demanded that his name be taken
off the credits, but the studio refused. He wanted to reshoot the
opening sequence the way he had written it, but the studio said no.
In effect, he was fired from his own film. He couldn't get any work
after that and was only now being given a chance to rewrite and direct The Wild Bunch by producer Phil Feldman.

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