Passion & Poetry - The Early Sam ( Peckinpah documentary, TV - Work & DEADLY COMPANIONS (removed)

[Music] the westerner the they were human beings his father really was very proud of the westerner he thought that it was a very honest look at what it was like to be on a ranch around the turn of the century and that's what sam was trying to do i began to realize that i was working with the director that was important in the development of westerns is john ford of the 14 pictures sam did at least three classics i said too many times when i'm a good [ __ ] i go where i'm kicked maybe i'm not a good car and i don't get paid [Music] with ford kurosawa corsa ford fellini and bergman i uh you know they uh they've been great influencers in my life but particularly uh i've never gotten over rashomon [Music] you know there was only three dissolves in the entire picture everything is done in cuts and i must have seen it that in last year money about two i think great breakthroughs in filmmaking [Music] [Music] we were mountain people we were country people father's family they had a sawmill up on peck and paul mountain which is now on the maps and it is pecking paul mountain and it's above fresno grandfather was a judge he was an attorney and a judge in fresno and became a congressman and mother lived back in washington dc but her love was always the mountains they ran cattle and i remember the last roundup i was about five and they would cut the ears of the uh of the calves to mark them and i remember crying because i could see the blood spurting and my grandfather said are you crying and i said no no he said get out of here if you are you were expected to behave a certain way and there was a lot of honor and and things you shouldn't do sam loved the mountains up there and that's where he added with old tom the hound dog with my brother older brother denver he really loved his older brother they'd wake up in the middle of the night and go hunt coons which i thought was terribly cruel there were two girls who had been adopted by the pecking paws to take care of their children really and both were mono indians and sam used to use that and early in his career it's saying that he was part indian which was just totally a lie it had nothing to do with reality reality was that sam was from uh from the frisian islands the ancestors from the frisian islands he was a germanic descent his mother and father had a lot of problems i think i don't think that his mother and father was the world's greatest love story i think that there was it was a marriage of convenience somewhat engineered by her father and she and sam had a very stormy relationship i think because she was sam was her favorite and i think that it's that sam bridled under a lot of what his mother expected of him father wanted more discipline that sam was willing to allow happened and i think my father sent him off to military school because he thought he would get more of a strict uh training and and uh the military way which was a lot of huey and sam was going to do what he was going to do i think he was the one with more detention than anyone who had ever attended the academy [Music] i don't know that marines was really good for them there's discipline but there's also it takes away the ability to reason for yourself to make your own decisions so sam went from the house from home to san rafael to the marine corps and you don't mature with that type of training you mature when you experience something [Music] i just got into a directing class so i changed my major from history to drama i think it happened because he met maurice selland and she was in the drama department in um at fresno state and he became interested there [Music] uh i never was a film student per se i was a moviegoer i was a drama student and i learned and worked at that and i was a director primarily of stage i was stuck in uh new mexico to kc at the station making short experimental films to be able to dialogue directly with john siegel to writing my own scripts for gun smoke and got a chance to direct with broken hair [Music] [Applause] i typed the original script for the rifleman on my little portable typewriter and um the boy's name was marian in it vivian it wasn't mary is vivian and of course that was changed to mark and it was going to be for gunsmoke and it if they didn't want it or something wasn't right about it and then it became a series a very good series as a matter of fact he was the director on it and as a matter of fact after it was over he called he was sitting i remember the stairs on the set on the set and he was sitting there and he called me over and he says i like your work and what you do you know and it says i'm he hadn't even directed a feast or anything and i said i want i want to be a i i want to use you in every film i do i hope to get some feature movies you know and and and he did [Music] i begin to realize that i was working with the director that was important in the development of westerns is john ford [Music] so [Music] so [Music] i think he took himself too seriously because when he became um well known success is a is a difficult thing to handle and with the hide the ride the high country was really his his great success first great success and then of course came the rifle or the um wild bunch from what i hear from talking to the different family members and talking to denny when he was alive and um there was a you know you can't really blame the family because the the the his parents and grandparents they came out of a time of the frontier you know and bob packapot told a story of where his grandfather um said to him uh you know do you know which way north is and he said no i don't and he backhanded him and knocked him to the floor you know but in those days you know in the days when you have to cross planes and in their diaries they actually had problems with indians and fights with other trail masters and you know it's just like a western epic the crossing of the you know the planes by their family um so that you know the ways of dealing with discipline or teaching were pretty basic bam don't do that you know sam very much was expected really to join the family law firm and he didn't do that because he had this sort of raging need to to get into drama he was uh he had gone into the war and then come back from it and gone to fresno state and when he did he took a degree in drama and then went to usc and did the same and then he was a dramatic director down at the at the huntington theater my thesis was based on filming stage playing this was based on broadcasting a stage player um and he found his way into film because his father had a relationship with um a producer named walter wanger and got him a chance to go off and become a an assistant to don siegel my father once said always surround yourself with people who know more so i have but all along the way sam was constantly trying to prove to his father he'd made the right choice that that by not going into law it was not a bad thing that he really was so he had something to say something that was important uh and as a consequence i think that it it colored the kinds of pictures that attracted him and the kinds of statements he wanted to make i mean there is a sense of justice and a sense of looking at at what is what is right as opposed to what is legal in in his films and i think that that's a big part of who sam was sam was constantly trying to to measure up to his [Music] father first episode of the westerner was called jeff which is a powerful little piece of film for that time it was extraordinary i tried to get tell some some stories in the westerner and uh then in the rifleman then i've got smoke that we snuck some plastic sensors and standards and practices and uh i knew that i wanted to film very badly [Music] no one wants to see the truth and the westerner the they were human beings they weren't characters out of nice little stories and you know yeah the western i did two of those and he directed the pilot film for that one too it's a wonderful series yeah denver actually said to me that he had uh that they had seen um the westerner and his father really was very proud of of the westerner he thought that it was a very honest look at what it was like to be on a ranch around the turn of the century and that's what sam was trying to do i think it it certainly um was very uh powerful in terms of brian keith's relationship to sam because brian keith then became responsible for for bringing sam aboard deadly companions which was sam's first feature [Music] huh [Music] do [Music] horses in this town you know as good as me that only two people are gonna ride out of here alive [Music] center of life is a woman i find myself drawn to that center quite often [Music] i got started in the business at a time when directors were directors were directors and ran the business once they got on the set before that warner brothers would tell ralph walsh what to do or would tell will will william wellman what to do but when they got on the set they were god wellman was that way uh waltz was that way forward was that way huge directors and they ran it and let me tell you something sports fans the committee made the camel and that's why we have so much crap today not because the people aren't around that have the talent to do it they do but the prices have gone they've just soared and uh what was it we did the mask of zorro different figures but something between 85 and 91 million dollars to make one motion picture well if i'm going to spend 91 million dollars folks i'm going to tell you how i want it spent but i'm not going to want it spent as a motion picture telling a director what to do if you're going to make a picture with peck and paul then hire peck and paul get the hell out of his way if you don't want someone who is going to run it the way he wants to good bad or indifferent then go hire somebody else a whole bunch of directors around who'll be tickled to death to listen to everything you've got to say and do exactly what you say sam ain't one of them and he wasn't one of them he was a collective but it was people he trusted the peck and paul stock company there were about 10 of us and my guess is that he used us not because we were so talented of course i was but he hired us because he knew we understood what he was trying to do which show up would help him we overlooked his foibles he overlooked ours and we shot the picture he ran it that's the way it should be and we're getting away from that sam was trying to hold to it and had he been a little more stable he would have been able to but his condition override overrode his talent and it got away from it too bad because he could have made as we pointed out probably another 10 12 14 pictures and probably three or four of those would have been classics so he shot himself in the foot unlike the rest of us of course [Music] i said too many times when i'm a good [ __ ] i go where i'm kicked yeah i'm not a good [ __ ] because i don't get paid [Music] middle of going through all this stuff but sam said come on you got a phone call and he turned to me he said come on we gotta go have lunch and i didn't think much of it i really wasn't all that hungry even but we went across the formosa cafe and he says we're going across he said there's somebody here i want you to meet we walked in and there's peter o'toole sitting there and he and sam were really good friends something i never would have thought because they never did a film together but they were they really admired each other and had talked about working together a lot but it never worked out and we had this really terrific lunch in which they just told stories on each other sam at one point these girls who were in there were sort of sneaking around in the background because they the peter o'toole was a very handsome man and was was very much a movie star in the real old sense of the word and he saw them and he and he he waved them over and and gave them they wanted autographs and and sam watched it and said you could almost see the envy in sam's face sam would have they wouldn't they weren't asking sam for his autograph but but sam really would have given it to them if they wanted to he wanted sam very much wanted to be in the forefront of of what he was doing i mean there's a real signature to his films there's also a certain amount of of this is me this i mean you know a sam peckinpah film to sam really meant something and he he worked really hard for that um he uh but we had this really wonderful time and at the end of it all uh we sort of went our separate ways but when peter o'toole made a film later on called stuntman and he plays a director he's playing sam peckinpah and even in in several interviews i think he even said that but it's but watching that film i can remember seeing that film and going my god this is i mean literally take after take everything he does in that film is patterned after the kinds of things sam would do sam was actually ruthless the things he would do to actors and to the people around him to get what he wanted it was all in it really sacrificed at the altar of making a great film he didn't care what else happened and he would he would you know he would his whole personal life was a mess because everything that mattered was on film and and when it's all over with and the reason i wrote the book i wrote was that in a hundred years the thing that will matter will be the films the films said something special it means a man only made 14 films in his lifetime 14 feature films which is not a great deal of movies but as as robert culp said it at the service for him at the director's guild after he died it wasn't that he made 14 films it was that he may he actually did make 14 films that he could have made 14 films given the way he went at it because he made it as hard as any human being could possibly make it but at the end of the line when you look at those films even the ones which i think are not wholly successful there are things about them that are extraordinary and i think you know they're they're probably half a dozen films that 100 years from now we'll still be looking at and we'll still be saying this is really why it is such an incredible medium it captures that moment which which sort of transcends the illusion and becomes reality of the 14 pictures sam did at least three classics at least three cross of iron is close straw dogs is close junior bonner is certainly a classic although an unsuccessful classic if you will but a classic nevertheless but let's say of the 14 pictures we're you're looking at close to six of them being classic works of art so the man had something sports fans i can't tell you what it was but he used it well but not wisely because i really sam lost the opportunity if he did 14 he lost the opportunity to do another 12 or 14 and what would he have realized in that period of time i don't know question is comes down to basic drama that is catharsis empathy and aesthetic distance people who react emotionally to a film the basic thing about drama is conflict we don't have any douay machina to pull us up and save us we're facing oedipus and he's got to put out his own eyes and maybe that's what we're looking to if we have to open our own eyes or put them out [Music] i find the interest that is still generated because of sam's films fascinating and he could treat people so badly and they would come back for more i never understood that i never did [Music] she was the good side of the pecking paw family god bless her [Music] here's a here's the golden boot i got for most of the because of the films i was in with packing paws you ever hear about the golden boot [Music] yeah that's a golden boot [Music] i like it this is like the you know the cowboys oscar our

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Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 10 2022