David Samuel Peckinpah was an American film director and screenwriter.
66 Facts About Sam Peckinpah
2.
Sam Peckinpah's films employed a visually innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence as well as a revisionist approach to the Western genre.
3.
Sam Peckinpah's characters are often loners or losers who desire to be honorable but are forced to compromise in order to survive in a world of nihilism and brutality.
4.
Sam Peckinpah was given the nickname "Bloody Sam" owing to the violence in his films.
5.
Sam Peckinpah's nephew is David Peckinpah, who was a television producer and director, as well as a screenwriter.
6.
Sam Peckinpah was a cousin of former New York Yankees shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh.
7.
David Samuel Peckinpah was born February 21,1925, to David Edward and Fern Louise Peckinpah in Fresno, California, where he attended both grammar school and high school.
8.
Sam Peckinpah spent much time skipping classes with his brother to engage in cowboy activities on their grandfather Denver Church's ranch, including trapping, branding, and shooting.
9.
Sam Peckinpah played on the junior varsity football team while at Fresno High School, but frequent fighting and discipline problems caused his parents to enroll him in the San Rafael Military Academy for his senior year.
10.
Sam Peckinpah claimed he was shot during an attack by Communist forces.
11.
Sam Peckinpah spent two seasons as the director in residence at Huntington Park Civic Theatre near Los Angeles before obtaining his master's degree.
12.
Sam Peckinpah was asked to stay another year, but Peckinpah began working as a stagehand at KLAC-TV in the belief that television experience would eventually lead to work in films.
13.
In 1954, Sam Peckinpah was hired as a dialogue coach for the film Riot in Cell Block 11.
14.
Sam Peckinpah's job entailed acting as an assistant for the movie's director, Don Siegel.
15.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which Sam Peckinpah appeared as Charlie the meter reader, starred Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter.
16.
Sam Peckinpah claimed to have done an extensive rewrite on the film's screenplay, a statement which remains controversial.
17.
An experienced hunter, Sam Peckinpah was fascinated with firearms and was known to shoot the mirrors in his house while abusing alcohol, an image which occurs several times in his films.
18.
Sam Peckinpah spent a great deal of his life in Mexico after his marriage to Palacios, eventually buying property in the country.
19.
Sam Peckinpah was fascinated by the Mexican lifestyle and Mexican culture, and he often portrayed it with an unusual sentimentality and romanticism in his films.
20.
From 1979 until his death, Sam Peckinpah lived at the Murray Hotel in Livingston, Montana.
21.
Sam Peckinpah was seriously ill during his final years, as a lifetime of hard living caught up with him.
22.
Sam Peckinpah died of heart failure at age 59 on December 28,1984, in Inglewood, California.
23.
Sam Peckinpah wrote one episode "The Town" for the CBS series, Trackdown.
24.
Sam Peckinpah wrote a screenplay from the novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, a draft that evolved into the 1961 Marlon Brando film One-Eyed Jacks.
25.
Sam Peckinpah directed the CBS sitcom Mr Adams and Eve, starring Howard Duff and Ida Lupino.
26.
In 1958, Sam Peckinpah wrote a script for Gunsmoke that was rejected due to content.
27.
Sam Peckinpah reworked the screenplay, titled The Sharpshooter, and sold it to Zane Grey Theater.
28.
Sam Peckinpah wrote and directed a pilot called Trouble at Tres Cruzes, which was aired in March 1959 before the actual series was made in 1960.
29.
Sam Peckinpah acted as producer of the series, having a hand in the writing of each episode and directing five of them.
30.
Sam Peckinpah suggested Peckinpah as director and the project's producer Charles B Fitzsimons accepted the idea.
31.
Reportedly, Fitzsimons refused to allow Sam Peckinpah to give direction to O'Hara.
32.
Unable to rewrite the screenplay or edit the picture, Sam Peckinpah vowed to never again direct a film unless he had script control.
33.
Sam Peckinpah was hired as director after Heston viewed producer Jerry Bresler's private screening of Ride the High Country.
34.
At one point, Sam Peckinpah's mean streak and abusiveness towards the actors so enraged Heston that the normally even-tempered star threatened to run the director through with his cavalry saber if he did not show more courtesy to the cast.
35.
The movie, detailing themes and sequences Sam Peckinpah mastered later in his career, was taken away from him and substantially reedited.
36.
Sam Peckinpah maintained, nonetheless, throughout his life that his original version of Major Dundee was among his best films, but his reputation was severely damaged.
37.
Sam Peckinpah was next signed to direct The Cincinnati Kid, a gambling drama about a young prodigy who takes on an old master during a big New Orleans poker match.
38.
Sam Peckinpah decided to shoot in black and white and was hoping to transform the screenplay into a social realist saga about a kid surviving the tough streets of the Great Depression.
39.
Sam Peckinpah caught a lucky break in 1966 when producer Daniel Melnick needed a writer and director to adapt Katherine Anne Porter's short novel Noon Wine for television.
40.
Melnick was a big fan of The Westerner and Ride the High Country, and had heard Sam Peckinpah had been unfairly fired from The Cincinnati Kid.
41.
Sam Peckinpah completed the script, which Porter enthusiastically endorsed, and the project became an hour-long presentation for ABC Stage 67.
42.
Sam Peckinpah set out to make a film which portrayed not only the vicious violence of the period, but the crude men attempting to survive the era.
43.
Sam Peckinpah received his only Academy Award nomination for this film.
44.
Sam Peckinpah opens his business along a stagecoach line, only to see his dreams end with the appearance of the first automobile on the horizon.
45.
In retrospect, it was a damaging career move as Deliverance and Jeremiah Johnson, critical and enduring box office hits, were in development at the time and Sam Peckinpah was considered the first choice to direct both films.
46.
Sam Peckinpah traveled to England to direct Straw Dogs, one of his darkest and most psychologically disturbing films.
47.
Sam Peckinpah rewrote the existing screenplay, inspired by the books African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey, which argued that man was essentially a carnivore who instinctively battled over control of territory.
48.
Sam Peckinpah accepted the project, at the time concerned with being typed as a director of violent action.
49.
Sam Peckinpah had no pretensions about making The Getaway, as his only goal was to create a highly polished thriller to boost his market value.
50.
Sam Peckinpah had met Gould in England while filming Straw Dogs, and she had since been his companion and a part-time crew member.
51.
Sam Peckinpah rewrote the screenplay, establishing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as friends, and attempted to weave an epic tragedy from the historical legend.
52.
In 1988 Sam Peckinpah's director's cut was released on video and led to a reevaluation, with many critics hailing it as a mistreated classic and one of the era's best films.
53.
An alcohol-soaked fever dream involving revenge, greed and murder in the Mexican countryside, the film featured Bennie as a thinly disguised self-portrait of Sam Peckinpah, and co-starred a burlap bag containing the severed head of a gigolo being sought by a Mexican patrone for having impregnated his young granddaughter.
54.
Producers refused to allow Sam Peckinpah to rewrite the screenplay for the first time since his debut film The Deadly Companions.
55.
Still renowned in 1975, Sam Peckinpah was offered the opportunity to direct the eventual blockbusters King Kong and Superman.
56.
Sam Peckinpah turned down both offers and chose instead the bleak and vivid World War II drama Cross of Iron.
57.
Almost immediately, Sam Peckinpah realized he was working on a low-budget production, as he had to spend $90,000 of his own money to hire experienced crew members.
58.
The production abruptly ran out of funds, and Sam Peckinpah was forced to completely improvise the concluding sequence, filming the scene in one day.
59.
Sam Peckinpah's associates were perplexed, as they felt his choice to direct such substandard material was a result of his renewed cocaine use and continued alcoholism.
60.
In spite of his addictions, Sam Peckinpah felt compelled to turn the genre exercise into something more significant.
61.
Norton, Sam Peckinpah tried to encourage the actors to re-write, improvise and ad-lib their dialogue.
62.
Friend and actor James Coburn was brought in to serve as second unit director, and he filmed many of the scenes while Sam Peckinpah remained in his on-location trailer.
63.
Surprisingly, Convoy was the highest-grossing picture of Sam Peckinpah's career, notching $46.5 million at the box office, but was panned by many critics, leaving his reputation seriously damaged.
64.
Sam Peckinpah immediately accepted, and his earnest collaboration, while uncredited, was noted within the industry.
65.
Sam Peckinpah accepted the job but reportedly hated the convoluted screenplay based upon Robert Ludlum's novel, which he disliked.
66.
Nevertheless, Sam Peckinpah brought the film in on time and on budget, delivering his director's cut to the producers.