9

Caught in the Spotlight

I've seen you standing there stunned in the spotlight,

I've seen the sweat streak the pain on your face,

’Cause you're caught like a clown in a circle of strangers,

Who do you screw to get out of this place?

It's one for the money, and too far to go,

Three fingers of whiskey, just for the soul.

That lady you're pleasin, is hungry and cold.

Don't look in her eyes, you'll see what you've sold.

Too many bodies and too many bars,

Too many feelings of falling behind,

’Cause you're easy to fool when you're lost in the stars.

Shoot out that spotlight before you go blind . . .

written by Kris Kristofferson
on the set of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

When Garner Simmons asked Sam Peckinpah why he had married Joie Gould, he replied: “We had gotten into an argument, and I slapped her with my open hand. I really felt bad about it. So in a moment of remorse I agreed to marry her—in Mexico, where I knew that I could get a one-day divorce.”

But Joie's memories of how it all came about differ sharply. “Before Sam started shooting The Getaway he had to go to Europe because Dustin Hoffman was making a film in Rome and Sam had to loop some of his lines for Straw Dogs. I went to meet him in London, just for the weekend. Then we flew back to Los Angeles together and he proposed to me on the plane and put this ring on my finger. I was so shocked. To be someone's fiancée, after the sixties no one ever got engaged. It was so romantic. I remember the sun streaming down in through the airplane windows as we were taking off. He went through this whole thing, it was almost corny. He gave me this little box—you know, like they do in old movies—and had me open it. He had bought me an engagement ring from Cartier. He put it on my finger and said he hoped I'd be his wife.”

The second honeymoon continued throughout the shooting of The Getaway. Sam wanted to get married in May or June, after he finished the picture. But one day during shooting he said suddenly, “Let's get married on Saturday. I'm gonna organize it all.”

“He arranged everything,” says Gould. “It was the most fantastic, beautiful Mexican wedding at the Camino Real, with mariachis and everything. Sam had our whole hotel room filled with yellow roses and he got French champagne, from God knows where in the middle of Mexico. He made all of these preparations on his own in three days. It was the side of Sam Peckinpah that not many people know about. That was the poet that I suppose all us wives fell in love with. That dearness about him was so real, but it was hard for him to expose it.”

To the men on his crew he put on a different face. “I didn't even know they were gonna get married,” says Chalo Gonzalez. “The next day Sam comes over to me and says, ‘Where the hell were you?’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘When I needed you you weren't there!’ I said, ‘What the hell happened?’ He said, ‘I got married to Joie and you weren't there to talk me out of it!’ “

The marriage meant banishment for Katy Haber. “The night before the wedding Katy was in this little honky-tonk in Fabens, Texas, where we were shooting,” says Gordon Dawson. “She was feeding quarters into the jukebox, playing old, sad, sad cowboy love songs. Boy, it was really sad for Katy.”

When Getaway wrapped, Katy left for Spain to work on a Sam Fuller western, Reata, and Sam and Joie returned to their apartment in Studio City, now as man and wife. He tried to integrate her into his inner circle, but most of his friends were baffled by the marriage and greeted the young bride with frigid smiles.

“Joie was a very, very nice person,” says Fern Lea, “and she absolutely did not go with Sam. She seemed stylish. Sam had never really gone with stylish women before. She wanted terribly to have Sam be a certain way, and not the angry person he was. She wanted him without his anger, which wasn't gonna happen. What she was looking for and what she got were worlds apart.”

“I thought I could change him, of course,” says Joie, “that was part of the attraction. I was the one, it would be different with me . . .” The thing she most wanted to change was his drinking. His daily intake of alcohol on The Getaway shocked her: “That he could stand up straight every day was extraordinary. He had an extraordinary constitution. I was terrified the whole time we were married that he would suddenly drop dead. He stayed up around the clock, he'd sleep for a few hours, but he'd wake up at five and start right in drinking again.”

When she tried to talk to him about his drinking he would say that he wasn't an alcoholic, that he could quit any time he wanted. And then he would, cold turkey; wouldn't touch a drop for three weeks. During these periods he was calm and retiring. He'd spend hours reading, would go out to dinner and the movies; the violent mood swings, the explosions of rage receded almost completely. “He became a normal person,” says Gould. But sooner or later—usually sooner—he'd fall off the wagon again.

“I can't direct when I'm sober,” he became fond of saying, conveniently forgetting that he'd directed The Wild Bunch without a drink in his hand.

On the set the crew would fawn all over him, cater to his every whim. Chalo or Bobby or Katy kept the drinks coming, but when he got home at night, Joie refused to cooperate. And so they had fights, terrible fights. Once the deadly mixture of booze and repressed rage was ignited, there was no putting out the flames until somebody got badly scorched, usually Joie.

“We were staying at the Fieldings’ home once. Sam had gone to bed and I was sitting in one of the rooms, reading. I just didn't go to sleep. I can't remember the circumstances of the evening, what upset Sam so much, usually it was nothing. He came in the room and out of the clear blue—I mean, we weren't even having an argument—just started walloping me. He really knocked me around. It was really weird. I ran, I was so scared, and they took me to the bedroom upstairs and they put Sam back down in his bedroom.”

“What set it off? Who knows?” says Camille Fielding. “The booze made him mean and the reasons for the blowups were nonexistent, it came out of nowhere. Anyway, he suddenly reached out and hit her, right in the face. I threw him out of the house.”

The next day Joie was going to leave to stay at a friend's house. “I was really scared. Sam wanted to see me and I told the Fieldings that I didn't want to see him, and everyone made me go speak to him.”

“You can't just leave him,” they told Joie. “You have to go in and tell him you're leaving.”

He was sitting alone in the den, like a lost and frightened little boy. He was sorry, he told her, his eyes welling up and voice quivering—he would never do it again, never. "It was a heartrending performance,” says Gould. “I felt so badly for him. He was so sad and vulnerable. He was so hurt by what he had done, you felt you couldn't hurt him any more. I, and everybody else did too, rationalized his behavior. It was the alcohol. When he drank he was out of control.”

After four months, Joie had had enough. She filed for divorce. “This girl was on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” says Bob Schiller. “I don't know if this was brought on by Sam, or if her life had led to that. Her eyes were constantly shifting, her hands were shaking. She looked like a person who was very tightly strung, as tightly strung as Sam and maybe even more so.”

Sam later told Garner Simmons: “When things fell apart it took me a year to get the divorce and it cost me my shirt, my pants, and my embroidered jockstrap. But some you win and some you lose. She took all the money I got on Getaway and took a trip around the world at my expense.”

That was not quite the truth—Joie's settlement amounted to $25,000, and she got not a cent of Sam's profits from The Getaway. "I don't think Joie was terribly interested in getting a big settlement,” says Kip Dellinger, who had recently taken over from Bob Schiller as Peckinpah's business manager. “I think she wanted to put the whole thing behind her. The case could have gone on forever; it wasn't that clear that she had a legitimate interest in The Getaway profits.”

As a bonus Sam gave Joie his Porsche. He'd stopped driving it anyway after getting a DUI charge. For the next six years drivers—Chalo Gonzalez, Stacy Newton, Jim Davis, and a succession of others—would chauffeur him to and from film sets, meetings with studio executives, and social events, as well as do his shopping and run miscellaneous errands.

The apartment in Studio City was vacated. When they were married, Sam had bought a plot of land north of Broad Beach. He had planned to build a home for Joie and himself there. After the divorce, he held on to the property for a while, then sold it, along with his ranch outside of Ely. Instead he rented a tiny patch of land in Paradise Cove, an inlet with a fishing pier and restaurant where most of the beach-party movies and a thousand other Hollywood films had been shot. Sam bought a twelve-by-fifty-six-foot mobile home not much larger than the ones he used on locations, stuck it up on a bluff overlooking the cove, and moved in. It would be his base of operations, the closest thing he would have to a home for the last twelve years of his life. “I'm a goddamned nomad, I live out of suitcases. My home is wherever I make a picture,” he told William Murray of Playboy.

The loss of Joie hurt more than he wanted anyone to know. However misguided the marriage, he had loved her and he had a hard time letting her go. Shortly after the divorce, Frank Kowalski received a phone call at four in the morning. It was Sam. “Listen, partner, I need you. I want you to drive by Joie's apartment and see if she has any company.”

Frank sighed wearily. “No, Sam, I don't do that. I would never do anything like that.”

“You no-good fuckin’ bunch quitter!” Sam shouted, then slammed down the receiver.

“I did a lot of things for Sam,” Kowalski says. “You get sucked into that whole thing of being part of the inner circle, it was tremendously attractive—that opportunity to be in the center of all the action, privy to all the high-level creative decisions. You were willing to subject yourself to many things just for a taste of that. Sam knew that and exploited it, and if you didn't watch it he'd draw you by degrees into becoming nothing more than a servant for him. But I drew the line at doing anything really demeaning, like doing Sam's laundry or spying on his women. I just wouldn't do that.”

Bobby Visciglia had fewer inhibitions. “I was peeking in windows and tracking her down and seeing where she was going. I spent many a night parked in a car outside of her apartment—and I'm married, trying to raise three kids. Then she went to work over at 20th Century–Fox and I had to call people to find out who she was going out with, where she ate for lunch.”

Finally Sam accepted that the relationship was over; the surveillance missions were dropped. But he kept inviting Joie to screenings of his movies; they had a few lunches together, and she tried to maintain a friendship with him. But it was always strained.

“He was obviously quite upset, seeing me again,” says Joie. The encounters stirred up a mixture of feelings in her as well: anger, love, pity, frustration. “He had every opportunity to change, yet he didn't. He had gone to a psychologist, Dr. Wahl, for therapy, but when it got too close to the things that were really troubling him he stopped. He had plenty of intelligent people around him who loved him and would have helped him if he had just let them, but he wouldn't.”

After his third marriage burst into flames, Sam went into a tailspin from which he couldn't, or wouldn't, pull out. In the past he would have plunged into his next picture, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, with savage fury, but now he found it harder and harder to get it up anymore. Fame had proved to be sweet-tasting junk food devoid of any real nutritional value. Art had failed to purge him of his demons; their grip on him was now a slowly tightening strangle hold. Was this all there was left for him? Another movie, and then another and another and another?

In the midst of a long, drunken interview with Jon Tuska in 1975, Sam would make a very curious statement: “Since my home burned down, I don't have any place to live anymore.” The only home that he ever lost to fire was the Quonset hut almost twenty years earlier. He'd lost a whole world there, along with Simbo's puppies, and he'd never get it back. “I'm the greatest stupid romantic in the world,” he said in another interview. “Really stupid. I'm an outsider, and I think being an outsider is a lonely, losing job. I would love to be married and live in a split-level house. I love all that shit, but I don't do it. I get in too many problems. I drink too much and I get in too many fights. Next year I'll be fifty years old and I've got to quit. Three knuckles have been broken; it's gone, right there, right there, and right there. You can see it . . .”

He abandoned even token efforts to control his drinking. From the moment he opened his eyes each morning—racked by the shakes and vomiting, sometimes blood—until the small hours of the night when he finally blacked out, he was knocking back shots of vodka, whiskey, Campari, tequila, brandy, and deadly mixtures of some or all of the above. He was spending more and more time in bed—sometimes whole days, if he didn't have a set or meetings to go to. It became a kind of rumpled throne from which he held court; secretaries, crew, and other members of his entourage gathered around its perimeter, hanging on each half-whispered word. He took most of his phone calls and held production meetings from under his sheets, a bottle always within easy reach on the nightstand.

In an article published in New York magazine in 1974, Sam's long, drunken monologues circled back again and again to the memory of his father: “He had great hands. I have good hands, but he had great hands, to hold somebody and tell them it's okay. He was all right.” It was a subtle cry for help. He was, of course, romanticizing the memory of his father, but the longing for a strong authoritative force to take control of his life was heartfelt.

“I don't think Sam would have destroyed himself the way he did,” says Fern Lea, “if my father had lived. Dad wouldn't have let him.” But David Peckinpah was long in the ground and no other Steve Judds appeared on the horizon. Most of his entourage cheerfully reinforced his drinking and many got drunk right along with him; for them, locations became one long party and the increasingly outrageous and erratic behavior of “Yosemite Sam” a cause for merriment rather than alarm. “He'd wake up in the morning with the DTs and people laughed about it,” says Walter Kelley, who worked as a dialogue director and actor on most of the later features. “They made jokes about it . . . It was sick.” As long as his pilot fish could keep the living legend upright and shuffling through his paces, the paychecks would keep rolling in.

By the time Sam's marriage to Joie ended, Katy Haber had finished the western in Spain and went back to England. She too had been wrenched by an unlucky affair. She'd fallen in love with a member of the crew, a married man who returned to his wife and family after the picture wrapped, torn between his loyalty to them and his new passion for Katy. Katy returned to her apartment, where the phone was ringing. She picked it up.

“I hear you're back from your picture.” It was Sam.

“Yeah.”

“Well, do you want to come to Mexico? We've got another picture to make.”

“What happened to Joie?”

“She's gone.”

A few days later she was on a flight. Before she left, she told her lover, “When you make your decision, let me know, because I promise I'll come back to you.” All through the making of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, she received letters from him in which he wrote, “I'm dying of a breaking heart. I don't know what to do. I'm torn between my child and you.” One day the letters stopped coming. The picture wrapped, the crew returned to L.A., and Katy called the London studio where he worked, only to be told that her lover had died of a heart attack two weeks earlier. He was thirty.

“I was devastated,” says Haber. When Sam found out about it he was very solicitous. Soon they were sleeping together again and the tortuous pattern of their relationship resumed—she obsessed with him, willing to do anything to please him, he handing out vicious punishment to her for having the bad taste to love him.

Gordon Carroll was one of the hip young New Hollywood producers to rise up through the ranks of the fragmented movie industry in the 1960s. Tall, good-looking, genteel, a graduate of Princeton, he had produced a couple of mediocre Jack Lemmon comedies—How to Murder Your Wife and The April Fools—and one of the milestone antiestablishment flicks of the era, Cool Hand Luke. In the early seventies Carroll was looking for another project when he suddenly came up with the idea of making another movie about Billy the Kid. (Forty-five of them had already been made.)

Carroll's inspiration for putting a new “topspin” on the played-out legend was to draw conscious parallels between the saga of Billy the Kid and the modern living legends of rock and roll. Maybe Billy and his gang could even be played by rock stars. “The story that I wanted to do, the story that most clearly defined a young person who is a prisoner of his own legend, was Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett,” Carroll told Paul Seydor. “That was the story that could tell what it must be like to live all of your life in one incandescent span. Then, what is it like when that short period of time is over? Your incandescence is over. You're alive and you're twenty-four and you've got all of the rest of your life to be somebody that you used to be.”

To write the script, Carroll hired Rudolph Wurlitzer, a young novelist who'd just completed a screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop that had been hailed in a cover story by Esquire as one of the most brilliant and idiosyncratic scripts ever to come out of Hollywood. The movie, directed by Monte Hellman, became an instant cult classic and one of Sam Peckinpah's favorites.

Wurlitzer was also fascinated with the Billy the Kid legend, and had already done a lot of research on his own. He produced a screenplay that piqued the interest of MGM, but the studio wanted a big-name director attached to the project before they'd commit to it. Carroll sent the screenplay to Peckinpah, who read it in his office at Goldwyn Studios, where he was preparing to shoot The Getaway. By the time he reached the last page he knew he had to make the movie. It was another crack at The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, the novel by Charles Neider that he had adapted for his second screenplay fifteen years earlier.

Wurlitzer's script was beautifully written. Like Neider, he had stripped away all the layers of legend to render a harsh, realistic portrait of the last days of Billy the Kid. Wurlitzer's Billy was no noble Robin Hood, no misunderstood neurotic driven to a tragic end by a cold and corrupt society. He was simply the product of a crude and brutal time and place: New Mexico in the late 1870s. As a wild and fearless youth he had recklessly won a reputation in the Lincoln County War—a fierce battle between rival commercial interests for control of commerce in the region, in which both sides hired armies of professional gunfighters. But Wurlitzer began his story at the tail end of Billy's outlaw career, opening with the Kid's escape from the Lincoln County Jail and following him during the last three months of his life as he tries to elude Pat Garrett and is eventually shot down.

Wurlitzer portrayed Pat Garrett as a former friend and fellow bandit who tracks Billy down and kills him; as an aging gunman clutching at the coattails of the political machine that has taken control of the territory, a small-minded man troubled by few scruples and little guilt when he finally guns down the Kid. It was a stark, unglamorized portrait, probably very close to the real Garrett.

Wurlitzer's western dialogue was every bit as rich as Peckinpah's: it was filled with the idiosyncratic rhythms, colloquialisms, and unvarnished poetry of the American Southwest. The script was episodic in structure—a loosely strung series of vignettes that occurred as the Kid first flees toward Mexico with Garrett in pursuit, then changes his mind and returns to Lincoln County to meet his fate.

The script offered Peckinpah an opportunity to explore yet again the themes that obsessed him: two former partners who are forced by age and changing times onto opposite sides of the law; the ambiguous nature of that law, which is manipulated by huge and faceless economic interests that are slicing up the rolling grasslands for a fast buck, and the tragic consequences this inflicts on individual lives. Sam didn't have to think twice; he gave Carroll an immediate yes.

Within eighteen hours, MGM's head of production, James Aubrey, came back with a pay-or-play (a contract that guaranteed to pay Peckinpah his full salary even if the production was eventually canceled) offer of $228,000 to direct the film—$3,000 more than he got for The Getaway—plus a percentage of the profits based on a convoluted formula concocted by the studio. Wurlitzer would get $98,130 for the screenplay and Carroll $95,721 for producing.

When he finished post-production of The Getaway eight months later, Sam moved into one of the big luxurious dressing rooms on the MGM lot and sat down to read Wurlitzer's screenplay again. When he did, his enthusiasm soured. The script didn't work. For all its impressive qualities, by the final page it left him feeling nothing—nothing for the Kid, nothing for Garrett.

“The script was elegiac and beautiful, but it was a tone poem,” says Roger Spottiswoode, who would work as one of the editors on the picture. “There was very beautiful writing, Ruby's a wonderful writer, there was a beautiful quality to the text. But it was a deceptive script. Whenever the script cut to Billy, he was never doing anything except hanging out with his buddies, and everyone's drinking. I suspect the deal gathered steam too fast. Rudy was hot, the project was hot, and all of a sudden Sam reads it one night a couple of months before he's supposed to start shooting and he realizes: this doesn't work.”

As he did whenever he was caught in the throes of a creative crisis, Sam picked up the phone and called Jim Silke. Silke was sent a copy of the screenplay, then met with Peckinpah at MGM. Sam threw up his hands. “What the hell am I gonna do with this thing? Maybe this is the way it really happened in Lincoln County in 1881, maybe this is really the way these men were, but who gives a damn?”

“What are we gonna do, Sam?” Silke responded Socratically. “Are we gonna do the real Billy the Kid, or are we gonna do the legend?” Peckinpah sat there for twenty minutes without answering. Silke simply waited. Finally, Sam said, “Let's do the legend.”

His vision of what the film could be snapped suddenly into focus. He read Wurlitzer's script again, and a major structural weakness that was initially camouflaged by the dazzling dialogue and stark poetic prose leapt out at him. Wurlitzer opened with Billy's escape from the Lincoln jail, then cross-cut between him and Garrett as one reluctantly fled and the other even more reluctantly pursued. The two characters never appeared in a scene together until the climax, when Garrett shot the Kid in Pete Maxwell's darkened farmhouse at Fort Sumner.

The writer had made this choice quite consciously, as he later explained to Jan Aghed in Sight and Sound: "I wanted to eliminate all the usual historical cliches . . . I was very interested in not having them meet until the end; that seemed to be a more dangerous thing to do, more interesting, creating a subtler tension.”

It was an unconventional approach, even daring. But the problem was that it gave one nothing about Garrett's relationship with the Kid—its history, what they had meant to each other, and how they felt about each other now. Nearly every living American knew the basic plot points of the Billy the Kid legend, but the interpretation of the characters, their actions, and motivations had changed constantly over the ninety years since the Kid's death. From one newspaper account to the next, from biography to biography and movie to movie—as the society changed, it remolded the myth to suit its current emotional needs. (And the historical facts were quite different from the myths. All reliable evidence suggests that Garrett and the Kid were acquaintances before the older man put on the sheriff's badge, but never close friends, as virtually every version of the legend, including Peckinpah's, insists. For it is this crucial fiction that has given the tale potency, decade after decade.) So one couldn't simply assume the audience would know the background story of Garrett and the Kid and therefore leave it out; you had to reinterpret it for them once again—that's what kept the myth alive.

Not letting Garrett and the Kid meet until the climactic scene was a clever but empty device, Sam concluded. They had, he decided, to portray Garrett and Billy together at the opening of the story, before Garrett becomes sheriff, so they could show what their relationship was, and how it changes when he puts on the badge.

The other major problem was the characterization of the Kid. Wurlitzer told Jan Aghed: “You can say that Billy at some point made a fascinating existential choice. Everyone told him to leave New Mexico. The governor of the territory, Lew Wallace, said: ‘Look, we're settling this territory and trying to attract money from the East. The country is changing and there just isn't room for outlaws anymore, and it's gone past the point where you can disappear because you're too famous.’ So he was given that choice. They said, ‘Go to Mexico and we'll forget it. Or California or wherever. But just get out.’ And what interested me was his decision not to get out. In other words, he chose to be Billy the Kid. If he had gone to Mexico he would have become just another gringo. But this choice made him become a hero. Because in choosing to be who he was, he also chose his death. He knew he was going to get killed. So there's that kind of fatalism, which really intrigued me . . .”

But such philosophical concepts were abstractions forced onto the characters by the writer; they didn't rise out of the characters themselves. Billy's actions, Peckinpah insisted, had to be motivated by his character.

In a series of story conferences with Carroll and Wurlitzer in September and October 1972 Sam outlined a radical restructuring of the script. Just as he had done in his adaptation of Hendry Jones fifteen years earlier, Sam tenaciously pushed this slice-of-life western into the realm of epic tragedy. Many of Wurlitzer's supporting characters and much of his dialogue would remain unaltered; Peckinpah retained the screenplay's wealth of realistic detail to make his own mythic vision convincing.

Two new sequences were added on to the beginning of the screenplay. The first, written by Peckinpah, took place at Fort Sumner just five days before Pat Garrett officially became sheriff of Lincoln County. Garrett rides into Fort Sumner to tell the Kid that he has to clear out of the territory. The two share a bottle of whiskey in a dusty saloon for old times’ sake. The sequence established with precision the characters’ past history, their affection for each other, and the social forces now pressing them onto a collision course.

After this sequence, Peckinpah had Wurlitzer add another taking place some five weeks later. A cabin that the Kid is using as a base for cattle rustling with two of his gang is surrounded by Garrett and his posse. Billy's companions are killed in the shootout that follows and he is captured and taken back to the jail at Lincoln to await hanging.

Next came the sequence that had originally opened the screenplay: Billy's incarceration and eventual escape. Garrett had been absent from these scenes, but Sam inserted him into the action to further develop the relationship between him and Billy, and he rewrote the dialogue of Garrett's deputy, Bob Ollinger, to transform him into yet another of the psychopathic preachers who wander through Sam Peckinpah's fictional universe toting a Bible and a shotgun.

In this sequence and throughout the rest of the script Sam sprinkled in bits of dialogue from Hendry Jones and some new material of his own. The screenplay improved dramatically, but still something was missing; it didn't come together with the impact he was looking for. Why, he asked himself, even bother to film this well-worn legend for the forty-sixth time? What possible relevance did the story have in 1972, nearly a century after the Kid's corpse had grown cold?

He needed to look no farther than his morning paper for the answer. That summer, at the height of the presidential campaign, five men had been arrested for breaking into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Richard Nixon would win the election by a landslide that fall, but within months his administration would unravel.

The scandal didn't surprise Peckinpah; he had despised Nixon with a passion ever since he had won a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1947. It was the Republican president's boys-will-be-boys attitude toward the My Lai massacre that really galled Sam. “Nixon's pardoning Calley was so distasteful to me that it makes me really want to puke,” he told Anthony Macklin. To Peckinpah, Nixon personified the dark side of America: the smoke-filled back rooms where big business and sleazy politicians conspired to murder, rob, rape, and pillage the land under the banners of law and order, patriotism, and “progress.”

By the time the Watergate scandal reached its traumatic conclusion, it would disillusion both Republicans and Democrats and both sides of the generation gap. It was the final jolt in a decade of shocks that had left the country on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The outrage and exhilaration of the 1960s was sliding into the generalized alienation, apathy, and exhaustion of the seventies. The more Sam worked on Pat Garrett, the more the story became for him an allegory not only of Watergate but of the entire greed-ravaged expanse of the American experience.

The killing of William Bonney did not make Pat Garrett a popular man in Lincoln County. He was voted out of office soon afterward and lived on as a little-loved ghost from an era that died with the Kid. Twenty-seven years after he put a bullet into Billy, Garrett became embroiled in a bitter property dispute and was shot in the back while urinating on his own land.

Peckinpah told Jan Aghed: “The inevitability of Billy and Garrett's final conflict fascinates me. Also the inevitability of Billy's death. The . . . irony is the so-called Santa Fe Ring, which was controlled by a group of people represented by Albert Fall and involved in a lot of land-grabbing and shady financial dealings, and Billy and the people around him resented that. Albert Fall later defended the murderers of Pat Garrett and got them off. You see, the same people who had hired Garrett to kill Billy years later had him assassinated, because as a police officer he was getting too close to their operation . . . Albert Fall later became United States Secretary for the Interior, which may be some comment on today's government.”

Peckinpah was well on his way to spinning yet another version of the myth, half-based on fact. Albert Fall did indeed defend the alleged murderer of Pat Garrett and was aligned with local ranching interests that Garrett had antagonized for the reasons that Peckinpah cited. And Fall did go on to become Secretary of the Interior, and the prime villain in the Harding Administration's Teapot Dome scandal. Both Garrett and the Kid were victims of the factionalized range wars that plagued New Mexico throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century. But they were killed by different coalitions of business and political interests, not by one all-controlling entity, as Peckinpah insisted. Here he was taking artistic—or paranoid—license, allowing the mythical Santa Fe Ring to stand for all the powerful unseen economic and political forces that manipulate the fate of individual American lives.

Discussions along these lines in the story conferences gave Gordon Carroll an inspiration: why not add a prologue to the film? Open the picture in 1908, when Garrett—an old, embittered man, warped by twenty-seven years of guilt after killing the Kid—is himself gunned down by agents of the Santa Fe Ring? Then dissolve into the main story in 1881; then, after the climactic scene of Garrett killing the Kid, dissolve back to 1908 again, when Garrett himself lies dying. Peckinpah loved it.

Sam wrote the prologue into the script immediately and explicitly described how it was to be intercut with the first scene in the main body of the film, which takes place in 1881. In that scene Billy and his gang are engaging in a little target practice at Fort Sumner: blowing the heads off live chickens buried up to their necks in the sand. Sam planned to intercut this with Garrett getting ripped open by assassins’ bullets in 1908 so that Billy would appear to be taking part in his murder—thus the deaths of the two men would be linked in a strange, fatalistic way.

After the epilogue, in which Garrett dies, a title card would be superimposed over the frozen image of his fallen body. It would summarize the circumstances of his murder, the involvement of Albert Fall and his role in the Teapot Dome scandal, and would be followed by the title: “So what else is new?” and the Sam Peckinpah brand.

Like gluing on one piece of a huge mosaic at a time, Sam added an extra dimension here, a nuance of character or theme there, until he had in Garrett a complex and tragic character, a man in conflict with himself, every bit as mythic yet profoundly human as Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch.

Unfortunately, the other half of the story's equation—Billy the Kid—never developed a comparable level of sophistication. In response to Peckinpah's urging that Kid's character needed more development, Wurlitzer had added some formulaic “motivation.” He inserted a Mexican sheep farmer, Paco, into the story. Paco attempts to flee the war zone of Lincoln County for his native land, but to do so he must cross over some of John Chisum's open range. A trio of Chisum's cowboys capture him and torture him to death. Billy, also fleeing for Mexico, comes upon the scene just as Paco is dying. He kills the cowboys; then, after listening to Paco's long, rambling last words, decides he has to go back to Fort Sumner, rally his gang, and seek frontier justice against Chisum and the rest of the ring's henchmen.

When forced to abandon his idiosyncratic style, Wurlitzer's writing became as contrived and stilted as an old TV hack's. The Paco scenes were as phony as Monopoly money because they were motivated not by the psychology of the characters but by the author's need to plug a gap in the story. In contrast to the excellent dialogue throughout most of the script, Paco's dying soliloquy was hideously bad.

The most disturbing thing is that Peckinpah accepted this material without requesting more rewrites. Perhaps there simply wasn't time. MGM had scheduled the first day of shooting for November 6, which gave him only about six weeks for pre-production, and the studio insisted on a tight budget and shooting schedule. Carroll, Wurlitzer, and the studio brass were already irritated with the amount of rewriting Sam had demanded. So maybe he took the path of least resistance and shrugged it off with the famous last words of many a movie director: don't worry, we'll fix it during shooting.

But the other factor that cannot be denied is that Sam's alcoholism was finally beginning to affect his creative judgment. His incredibly acute vision was beginning to blur.

In the finished film, the image of Billy the Kid would veer indecisively from that of a charming psychopath in one scene to a romantic anarchist in the next. Peckinpah had brilliantly dramatized the dichotomies of the human animal in the past—through Pike Bishop, David Sumner, Roy Earle Thompson—but in this portrait of Billy the Kid the mixture failed to cohere.

While Wurlitzer was revising the screenplay, Sam proceeded with casting. For the part of Billy, folk singer Kris Kristofferson was signed. A Rhodes Scholar who had won Atlantic Monthly Awards for short stories he'd written in college, Kristofferson had recently skyrocketed to stardom with a pair of hit songs, “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” and had segued into acting with supporting roles in Cisco Pike and Blume in Love. For the part of Pat Garrett Sam cast Dundee veteran James Coburn.

To fill the gallery of small parts in Wurlitzer's string of brilliant vignettes, Sam assembled a roll call of nearly all the great western character actors alive at the time—an entire generation of men who collectively had appeared in thousands of westerns. Many, like Peckinpah, had grown up on cattle ranches and farms, or in the small rural towns of the American Southwest. They would parade through the movie, trailing with them the associative memories of all the roles they had played in the past, in everything from classic “adult” westerns to cheap B-programmers: Katy Jurado, L. Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Chill Wills, R. G. Armstrong, Richard Jaeckel, Dub Taylor, Luke Askew, Matt Clark, Richard Bright, Jack Dodson, Jack Elam, Barry Sullivan, Paul Harper, Emilio Fernandez, Jorge Russek, Gene Evans, Jason Robards, and Paul Fix (in his first part for Peckinpah since Sam created his role on “The Rifleman” some fifteen years before).

As the picture geared up for pre-production, the first rumblings of trouble between Peckinpah and the management of MGM began. The president of the studio at the time was James Aubrey. A graduate of Princeton, Aubrey had moved up through the ranks at CBS in the late 1950s to become president of the network in 1959. There, he earned a reputation as an insufferable autocrat who made erratic creative decisions. Writers and directors began calling him “the smiling cobra,” and even Phil Feldman would say, “Jim Aubrey is about as cold as you can get without being declared a corpse.”

Aubrey was put in charge of MGM by hotel and airline financier Kirk Kerkorian. Kerkorian had gained control of the company in 1969. He promptly announced plans to build a glitzy MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas and stuff the gambling palace with studio memorabilia. Aubrey's main achievement during the four years that followed was the dismantling of what had once been Hollywood's mightiest movie factory. One by one, the company's assets were sold off. The annual stockholder reports had less to say about the studio's production of films and more and more to say about the new hotel, into which $120 million had now been poured.

James Coburn had just completed a film, The Carey Treatment, at MGM, and had watched how Aubrey nearly destroyed the director, Blake Edwards. In the middle of shooting the production head suddenly decided to cut fifteen days out of the schedule, forcing Edwards to drop several major sequences and scramble to fill the gaps by rewriting as he shot the rest. “What an evil motherfucker this Aubrey was,” says Coburn. “Blake refused to edit the film. He left. He was broken up by the end. Aubrey would hire big-time directors and top writers and stars, and then step in and fucking destroy the film. He was totally irrational.”

When Peckinpah came to him with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Coburn tried to warn him: “Jesus, are you sure you want to make this film here? Aubrey will fuck you up, man, he's gonna go for you. He screws everybody.”

A grin crossed Peckinpah's face. “Don't worry about a thing. I bought one share of MGM stock, and if anything happens I'm gonna call a stockholders’ meeting and I'm gonna fuck him!”

“Aubrey was a challenge to Sam,” says Coburn. “And Aubrey saw Sam as a challenge too. Sam was a bad boy. He did a lot of things that grated the Hollywood production community, and yet they all wanted to take on the challenge of being the one who could ‘handle’ Sam. ‘I can make him heel, I'll be the one!’ Instead of being the producer who could support his work.”

Sam may have perversely relished the challenge of taking on Aubrey, but he also wanted desperately to make the film. It was a project too close to his heart to pass up. Besides, there were some good people working under Aubrey. Dan Melnick was vice president in charge of production, and Lew Rachmil the studio's production supervisor. Melnick, of course, had saved Sam's career with Noon Wine. Sam had worked with both men on Straw Dogs and Rachmil again on Junior Banner. He respected their creative judgment and believed their assurances that they could protect him from Aubrey. And with The Getaway completed, Sam would be riding the wave of his first runaway hit. At the height of his career, both artistically and commercially, surely he had the clout at last to prevent another Major Dundee.

His contract guaranteed him two public previews of his cut before the studio could step in and make changes in the film. Today it is a standard clause in the Directors Guild basic agreement, but in the early seventies it was rare for a director to get even that concession from a studio. Surely this was an indication of MGM's good will.

Wrong. He began to see the terrible mistake he'd made when they laid out the shooting schedule and budget. MGM wanted the picture shot in fifty days for just $3 million. Sam hoped to make a film that approached the power and epic sweep of The Wild Bunch, but the studio expected him to do it with thirty fewer shooting days and at under half the cost. After intense lobbying he finally got the schedule extended to fifty-three days, but the studio's penny-pinching continued. MGM refused at first to hire many of Peckinpah's regular crew members because, executives argued, their salaries were too high. Sam claimed that without his regular team he could never bring the picture in on time. Finally, after much debate, the brass gave in.

But on another crucial issue the studio refused to compromise. The picture would be shot in Durango, Mexico, and Sam knew from past experience that the fine silicone sand of the Durango desert could wreak havoc on camera equipment and cause lengthy and costly delays. For this reason, he requested that a camera mechanic be brought down to Durango to service the three Panavision cameras throughout the shoot. Too expensive, MGM management concluded. Absolutely not. Sam boarded a flight to Durango in the first week of November with clenched teeth.

The studio had rented him a huge four-bedroom house in Durango, with a walled-in garden and a swimming pool. A ghost from Peckinpah's past reappeared upon his arrival: Begonia—her Castilian features as smoothly drawn as the last time he laid eyes on her, her dancer's body still firm and richly curved. Sam decided that he wanted her to play the part of Garrett's wife. Once again he was crossing the wires of his real and fictional life to strike sparks, for the dialogue between Pat and Ida Garrett bore a striking resemblance to the fights he and Bego had had when she found herself left alone at Broad Beach for hours and days while he was off writing or directing.

“You might say that you are glad to see me,” Ida says resentfully as Pat Garrett sits down at her dinner table. “It's been over a week since you've been gone.”

He looks up at her but cannot hold her gaze. “I'm sorry.” He pushes his chair back and suddenly walks away from the table toward the front door. “I've got to go down to the saloon, there's a drunk down there causing a lot of trouble, goes by the name of Alamosa Bill . . .”

She follows him to the door. “Will you be blessing this house with your presence for dinner?”

“Oh, looks like it's going to be a long night.” He grabs his hat off the rack.

Her voice breaks. “It's been a long year.”

“Not now,” he says quietly, eyes averted.

“My people don't talk to me. They say you are getting to be too much of a gringo since you've been sheriff, that you make deals with Chisum, that you don't touch me . . . that you are dead inside. I wish you had never put on that badge.”

“Not now!” he shouts.

“Sí, ahora!” she shouts in return, “or I won't be here when you get back!”

He wheels on her, grabs and rips the heavy velvet curtains that frame the dining room door right off their rod. For a moment it seems he might lunge and strike her; then he pulls back, wrestling his voice to a subdued monotone: “We'll deal with this when it's over.”

Sam and Bego fell into bed together immediately. In the first flushed hours of their reunion, they called Jim and Lyn Silke in California and babbled about “old times” like a couple of love-struck teenagers. The Silkes were thrilled. Of all Sam's women, Bego had always been their favorite; with Bego Sam was at his best.

But in a few days it went up in flames again; another terrible fight erupted. “Sam threw Begonia out,” says Chalo Gonzalez. “He told me, ‘Get her the hell out of here! I don't care how, put her on a plane to Mexico City, I don't want to see her!’ “

Begonia got one thing out of their brief reconciliation: the child she had never been able to have during their marriage. Nine months later she would give birth to a little wisp of a girl—Lupita. To his entourage Sam would growl, “I wonder who the real father is.” But he would make regular payments for the child's support over the remaining decade of his life, and during brief reunions with Bego was attentive and affectionate to his youngest daughter. Lupita would never be burned by his fury like his other kids, mainly because he never saw her for more than a few consecutive days at a time.

As for Ida Garrett, Aurora Clavell—who had become Sam's icon of the woman left behind or betrayed—would play the part.

Shooting was to begin on the sixth of November, but Sam immediately came into conflict with the production manager, Frank Beetson, who had worked on True Grit and other westerns for director Henry Hathaway. Sam had, as usual, thrown the company into chaos by changing production plans and vetoing costume and location selections he'd previously approved. He was drinking heavily, and Beetson made the mistake of questioning his judgment.

“Frank was a tough old guy,” says Gordon Dawson. “He and Sam got into it pretty good. Beetson was one of the few honest people who said, ‘Sam, you're drinking this picture into the toilet! You're ruining yourself. You're a better director than this!’ “

Peckinpah fired Beetson and replaced him with a new production manager, Jim Henderling. Shooting was pushed back a week while Sam walked the streets of the Fort Sumner and Lincoln locations with art director Ted Haworth and cinematographer Johnny Coquillon, making modifications and discussing how various sequences would be shot. He also finished casting the Mexican parts, reviewed the wardrobe, and tested various special effects.

James Coburn arrived a few days before shooting began. Kristofferson was there too, as well as the other principal cast members. For three days they all assembled at the long wooden table in Sam's dining room to read over the script, the rehearsals inevitably sliding into marathon drinking sessions.

At this point another performer joined the company. His role would be minor, but his presence on the set and the screen enormous. Gordon Carroll had sent a copy of the script to Bob Dylan, who was a friend of Kristofferson's and had expressed some interest in playing a small part in the film. Dylan read the script, screened The Wild Bunch in New York, and signed on to the picture.

“I talked to Bob after he had just finished screening Wild Bunch," says Kris Kristofferson. “He was totally knocked out by it, and was so excited about the idea of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid that he had already written a song about Billy the Kid, which I loved.”

Carroll was ecstatic. The producer's reverence for the skinny, curly-headed folk singer put Peckinpah on edge, but when he heard Dylan's ballad about Billy the Kid he fell in love with it and had it put on tape so he could play and replay it over the course of the production. The folk singer was cast in a minor part as Alias, a member of Billy's gang, but Peckinpah had Wurlitzer expand the role from a nondescript outlaw to an enigmatic newspaper reporter who discards his printer's apron to follow the Kid. The implication was that Alias would weave the outlaw's legend in the years that followed his death.

When shooting began on November 13, the conflict between Sam and MGM quickly escalated. The first of an unending series of crises struck when a mounting flange on a 40mm Panavision lens was bent and went undetected. As a result, in the shots made with this lens (almost all of them masters because it had a short focal length) the entire right half of the screen was out of focus. The film had to be shipped back to MGM in Culver City for development, then back to Durango, so Peckinpah and his crew did not discover the problem until a week later. By that time they had filmed a dozen scenes with the defective lens.

“We started watching the first night's dailies and the shit's out of focus,” says Gordon Dawson. “Sam says, ‘Can't I expect fucking focus?’ And the second shot was out of focus, and the third shot was out of focus. Sam got so mad he took out a folding chair and he stood up, he almost fell off of it because it was gonna fold, and he took his cock out and he pissed on the screen with this big S. And he walked out of the fucking room.”

“Bob Dylan and I were sitting in the screening room when he did that,” Kris Kristofferson recalls. “I remember Bob turning and looking at me with the most perfect reaction, you know: what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”

“From then on,” says Dawson, “every night we watched dailies with this S-shaped piss stain on the screen.”

If the studio had given Peckinpah the camera mechanic he'd asked for they never would have had the problem. Now he demanded one be sent to Durango immediately. But MGM still refused. The camera crew still hadn't discovered the source of the problem, and so the company continued to shoot for another two weeks, checking and rechecking its equipment until the bent lens flange was finally discovered. By that time dozens more out-of-focus shots had been made, the footage completely unusable. Finally, a month into shooting, Aubrey relented and sent a camera mechanic to Durango.

Peckinpah wanted to reshoot the fuzzy footage, but Aubrey forbade it even though the cost would be covered by the studio's insurance.

“All of the masters were out of focus,” says James Coburn. “We couldn't use any of the masters. And Aubrey kept saying, ‘Nah, nah, nah, the people will never know.’ He didn't really give a shit, he didn't care. He had no respect at all for the public. ‘They'll take whatever we give ‘em!’ His trip during that time was to sabotage films. Evidently he hated people with talent.”

Peckinpah was aghast at Aubrey's insanity, then enraged by it, and the war was on. Sam reshot most of the ruined footage anyway, stealing the needed shots here and there while shooting other scenes, or sending Gordon Dawson and dialogue director Walter Kelley out to shoot them with the second unit. Dawson and Kelley were constantly conferring with the editors to figure out exactly what was required to fill the gaps in various sequences.

“Aubrey didn't know we were reshooting the stuff till he saw it in the rushes back in L.A.,” says James Coburn. “Then this big edict would come down, ‘You can't shoot anymore retakes! No reshooting at all. None! Cut the fucking scene out, forget about it.’ Well, we reshot everything that was necessary. But we had to reshoot it within the context of shooting the new scenes. We were reshooting scenes at lunchtime, we were reshooting at the end of the day, we were reshooting whenever we could. But that's exciting moviemaking. Fuck it, why not? You've got to go for it as long as you're into it.”

It was exciting but chaotic, and the disorganization and constant infighting pulled Peckinpah's focus off the quality of the work. It became a monumental effort just to get the scenes on film at all; there was little time or energy left over for worrying about if they were any good. And the scenes reshot by Dawson and Kelley lacked the vitality and precision of Peckinpah's. Many lay flat as a fallen cake on the screen.

Not only did he forbid any retakes but Aubrey began sending telegrams complaining about the number of camera setups Sam used in the scenes, the amount of coverage, and the time it was taking to shoot them. He gave explicit instructions on how certain sequences were to be shot, but again Peckinpah ignored him.

Caught in the middle between Peckinpah and Aubrey was Gordon Carroll. “In the beginning,” says Gordon Dawson, “Carroll was on Sam's side. He had this ridiculous assumption that he would be able to handle Sam, and that Sam was going to be a pussycat and this was gonna be wonderful, and he was going to catch lightning in a bottle with this picture. But he just never could control Sam, and he became a turncoat once shooting started.”

“I would not say that the picture was anything but a battleground,” Carroll himself told Paul Seydor. At Sam's instruction, Gordy Dawson tapped his telephone and routinely taped all of his conversations with production personnel. “Are you taping this conversation?” suspicious parties would query.

“No,” Dawson would coolly coo, time after time. “Trust me. I would have, but I just ran out of tape.”

That he was engaging in just the sort of behavior that he had condemned Richard Nixon for completely escaped Peckinpah. “On that film Sam created an atmosphere that was so poisonous,” says one former crew member.

Even Dawson, Peckinpah's most loyal and fervent foot soldier, was becoming disenchanted. As the second unit director, Dawson shot some of the most beautiful footage in the picture, like the exquisite sunset silhouette of Billy riding past a high desert lake. But he also shot the most repulsive: the scene in which Billy and his gang took target practice on the heads of live chickens. Dawson wired the chickens with squibs and methodically popped their skulls off for his camera. “That was one of the worst things I ever did for him,” says Dawson. “Anything for the picture though, right? . . . That's what I used to think. Sam drilled that into me: anything for the picture. The end justifies any means. I really believed that for a long, long time. But Sam had changed. He'd become very paranoid. Everyone was out to ruin his picture. He'd accuse Wurlitzer of trying to ruin his picture; shit, half the time he'd accuse me of trying to ruin his picture. Everyone's out to ruin his picture, you know? He got very paranoid “

Hours were consumed in petty debates between Peckinpah and Carroll over minor logistical problems. Sam became obsessed with getting back at the studio every way he could. Actors were flown in to Durango for scenes that could have been shot in a couple of days, but Peckinpah kept them waiting around on the set or in their hotel rooms for weeks—on salary—while he shot other scenes instead. As on Dundee, he was getting back at the studio by squandering its money.

Costs skyrocketed. Sam was getting a $500 a week per diem, but that didn't stop him from billing MGM for the cost of furnishing his house, for the salaries of his gardener, maids, and pool man; for the mariachi bands he hired to entertain at weekend parties, the flowers he bought for Katy Haber, and the over $2,000 worth of “refreshments” that poured forth from his bar. It was the same vindictive game he'd played on Major Dundee, and it was a losing game. He more than anyone should have known that, but once the pump had been primed he couldn't reverse the flow.

By mid-December, after thirty days of shooting, they were nine days behind schedule. Weather bore some of the blame—rain and wind had shut filming down for hours at a time—and an epidemic of influenza took its toll; almost every member of the company would be stricken and miss work days over the course of the shoot. The topsoil of Durango was permeated with animal manure that dried up, blew around with the fine silicone dust, and lodged in people's lungs, causing chronic pulmonary infections.

“Everybody got very sick,” says Coburn. “Sam and I got so sick that we shot a scene that neither one of us remembered shooting. We didn't think we'd shot it. It was the scene with Richard Jaeckel in the saloon, after the scene where I'd been with all the whores upstairs and was really drunk. I was asking Jaeckel to help me go get the Kid. It was a particularly tenuous scene for Garrett, because he was wiped out and fucked up and fearful. It was really cold and damp, there was wind and a thousand years of horseshit floating around in the air, and that stuff really gets potent as hell.”

On December 8 Sam was vomiting too frequently to work and the company had to shut down for three days. He went back to work on the twelfth, but remained weak, both physically and mentally, for the rest of the picture.

Of course, his drinking didn't help. He began every day with a big tumbler of vodka to stop the shakes and get himself upright, dressed, and out the door. Most days he arrived a half-hour to forty-five minutes late on the set; the crew rarely completed the first shot before ten A.M., and often not before eleven. “Every morning on the set, Sam would start off with a great big tall glass of grenadine and water,” says James Coburn. “As the day wore on it would get redder and redder and redder, until it was almost pure grenadine. And then it would start getting lighter and lighter and lighter again because he had started mixing it with vodka, or gin. He was a totally indiscriminate drinker. What it did for him, I guess, was close out all of the shit going on around him, all problems and chaos, so he could just focus on the scene.”

In the late morning he reached a state of alcoholic equilibrium, appeared sober, and worked with clarity until the mid-afternoon, when he began slurring his words and swaying on his feet.

“After about four hours, Sam was gone,” Says Coburn. “He was a genius for about four hours, then it was all downhill . . . He didn't want to shoot sometimes. He'd be sitting there in the trailer waiting for them to light a scene and they'd call him to the set and he wouldn't come out of the fucking trailer. We'd all be sitting around waiting for him, and I'd have to go into the fucking trailer and say, ‘Sam, what's happening? Why don't we go shoot this fucking scene? What's the matter?’ He'd say, almost in a whisper, ‘I don't know, I don't know what I'm doing—’ I'd say, ‘That's bullshit!’ And finally he'd go out there and—boom!—plug right into it. It was like a writer not wanting to sit down and face the typewriter.”

When L. Q. Jones arrived in Durango he was shocked by Peckinpah's appearance: “This apparition came around the side of the building. It was Sam. My first impulse was to say, ‘My God, Sam, I didn't realize you'd died.’ He had the sickest, weakest look I'd ever seen in my life. It was so bad that I would not have been the slightest bit surprised if after I'd gone back to the hotel that day the company told me Sam had dropped dead. That's how bad he looked. He wasn't coherent. He'd tune out in the middle of a conversation and be someplace else. Probably it was a combination of the drinking and the flu.”

“It was the classic alcoholic syndrome,” says one former crew member. “He was surrounded by enablers. Katy and Bobby Visciglia would bring him drinks. Everybody would say, ‘Sam's having a bad day.’ The cronies made it impossible to get to Sam. You'd go through all these acrimonious and painful things to try and tell an alcoholic the truth and then there'd be these fucking enablers who'd slap him on the back and give him a drink.”

When word got around in Hollywood that Peckinpah was drinking on the set and falling behind schedule, Sam took out a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter that showed him flat on his back on a hospital gurney, receiving a bottle of Johnny Walker intravenously. A caption read: “Dear sirs: With reference to the rumors that seem to be spreading around Hollywood that on numerous occasions Sam Peckinpah has been carried off the set, taken with drink. This is to inform you that those rumors are totally unfounded. However, there have been mornings . . .” It was meant as a hilarious sendup, an up-yours to Aubrey and the rest of the MGM brass. Instead, the image was absolutely chilling. Peckinpah, a gray, withered scarecrow, was surrounded by the frostbitten grins of his entourage, all egging him on, Katy Haber gripping the bottle that fed the scotch down the coil of surgical tubing.

The half-dozen men in Hollywood who had the power to green-light a movie were not amused. To them the image said only one thing: Peckinpah's out of control. If he could keep turning out money machines like The Getaway they would tolerate such behavior, but let him stumble a few times and it would be a much different story.

There was something else wrong with the dailies besides the focus, something far more disturbing. For the first time one could see the mark of all that alcohol. Pat Garrett, and all the films that came after it, would be plagued by gaps in continuity, sudden lurches in tone, and scenes that were sloppily staged, overwritten, overacted, and sometimes embarrassingly bad. There would still be scenes and sequences of great brilliance as well, but the motor had begun to sputter; the grip on the throttle had slackened. One can almost graph out the sequences shot during Sam's four good hours of each day and those filmed when that tall glass of grenadine and water had turned deep red.

A self-consciousness had crept into his work. The dialogue had become bloated and awkward at times, overstuffed with “meaning.” When the Kid is captured by Garrett, Kristofferson holds his arms out in the position of Christ on the cross. In The Wild Bunch Angel evokes the same icon, but in that film it is so well integrated into the action of the scene that the symbolism registers subliminally. In Pat Garrett it leaps out like a neon sign. There are shots of kids swinging playfully on the gallows that wait to hang the Kid in Lincoln, with an American flag all-too-carefully framed in the background. Such touches had the impact of a lightningbolt in The Wild Bunch; now they seemed stale, the contrivances of an artist running on fumes. He'd read too many of the reviews that raved about “the Peckinpah touch,” and the “recurring themes” in his work, and now took the path of least resistance, feeding the critics an easy-to-read schematic of the movie's “message.”

But then there were those days when Peckinpah pulled himself together and really came on, and the old magic began to happen and everybody was galvanized again.

There were the jailhouse scenes in which R. G. Armstrong played Bob Ollinger, Garrett's Bible-obsessed deputy with his peculiar interpretation of Christian mercy. “Repent, you son of a bitch!” he bellowed as he held a double-barreled shotgun to the Kid's head. It would be Armstrong's last incarnation of this character in Peckinpah's work, and his finest. And there was the sequence in which Garrett enlisted Slim Pickens, a small-town sheriff, for a raid on a faction of the Kid's gang. Pickens took a bullet in the belly and staggered to the edge of the Pecos River to gaze upon the silver-green water for the last time. It was one of the most poetic sequences Peckinpah ever committed to film. And there were a half-dozen other brilliant character vignettes that together, like dots in a pointillist painting, formed a vast panorama of life on the frontier as the first strands of barbed wire began to subdivide the open plains.

Because the production was running sixteen days behind schedule, Aubrey ordered Peckinpah to cut most of these vignettes from the script to make up for lost time. Sam defied him and shot all the scenes despite vehement protests by Gordon Carroll, who was present on the set. When the vignettes showed up in dailies back at MGM, Aubrey went through the roof.

Peckinpah's out of control and Carroll can't handle him, the production chief concluded. Something had to be done to rein this director in or they'd have a runaway production on their hands. And so, as on Dundee, a parade of executives in Tony Loma boots, Neiman-Marcus Stetsons and Gucci leather goods began materializing in Durango, where paranoia and horseshit swirled thickly in the air.

“I went down to Mexico two or three times, trying to get Sam to dry out,” says Dan Melnick. “I got a call from Jason Robards, who played a small part as Governor Wallace in the picture. He called me after he got back and said, ‘Sam's in real trouble, you've got to go down there.’ So I go down. And he greets me with open arms, the tenderness of a brother, and three drinks later he's slurring his words and saying, ‘Go fuck yourself! Don't tell me not to drink, I'll do whatever I want. Go on home! I don't need you!’ I went through that a few times and came away with a terrible sense that I couldn't make a difference.”

“I went to dinner with Sam and Rachmil and [MGM's vice president of operations, Lindsley] Parsons and Melnick,” says Gordon Dawson. “They were trying to tell us how we could shoot the film cheaper and faster. And we were saying, ‘Bullshit, we're out here making a first-class movie.’ “

MGM couldn't fire Peckinpah; the studio was in too deep. He knew that and it knew that. If the studio tried to remove him the entire cast and crew—which were loyal to Sam, not MGM—would have walked, leaving it with a three-million-dollar loss and an unfinished picture. Besides, Peckinpah was the movie's major box-office draw, the name on posters and ads that would, with luck, sell enough tickets to recoup MGM's investment. Now it was Peckinpah who had Aubrey by the short hairs. All the studio chief could do was keep the pressure on and hope Peckinpah stayed upright long enough to wrap the picture.

Shooting continued right through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. John Wayne's BATJAC company sent its cast and crew home for the holidays, but MGM refused to do the same, so they gathered at various houses on the different days and made the best of it. Bobby Visciglia had saved six of the wild turkeys used in the scene where Kristofferson and Dylan chase them, and fattened them up for Thanksgiving. The cast converged on actor John Beck's house and cooked them, but the birds were as tough as a set of radial tires.

Sam's kids came down for Christmas. He sent a mariachi band out to greet them as they got off the plane at the Durango airport, and the driver had a box of candy for each of them. On Christmas Day they all received beautiful Mexican ponchos from their father, but Sharon couldn't help noting that they were all exactly the same—a generic gift. He'd probably sent Katy Haber out to buy them.

Mathew, almost eleven then, had the worst time of it. His father rode him mercilessly. “Mathew had dyslexia,, and some of the same learning problems that Sam had as a kid,” says Walter Kelley. “When Sam would get together with him he would then, I think, be like his father was to him. Which was mean and physical. He was really mean to Mathew, and in fact would like to break his spirit. That seemed to be playing out something that had happened to Sam as a kid.”

Peckinpah threw massive parties at his house on both Christmas and New Years, complete with mariachi bands and pits in the backyard filled with glowing-hot rocks and roasting pigs, turkeys, and rabbits wrapped in banana leaves. So much tequila and mescal was consumed that the two events blend liquidly together in the memories of the survivors.

Sam was having alcoholic blackouts almost every evening now, and it was during these that his behavior became wildly erratic and, too often, violent. Knife throwing had lost some of its shock value over the last couple of years. Most of his co-workers and even the press had grown used to his hobby, so he took up a new one, inspired by Emilio Fernandez and the patrons of Durango's dance halls and whorehouses: pistol shooting. He carried a loaded gun around with him much of the time and, without warning, would whip it out and fire off a round into the air, into walls, and into ceilings.

“He was just happy, it's a common thing to do in Mexico,” says Chalo Gonzalez.

But the American and English crew members often failed to appreciate the fun. Several were summoned to Peckinpah's house on weekends. They found him upstairs in bed with a half-empty bottle of vodka between his legs and a revolver in his hand, taking shots at a mirror on the opposite wall. “I'd never been that close to a gun before,” says one former crew member. “I was only a few feet away when he fired it. The shot from a gun is huge as the bullet goes by you. Then I look, and I see that Sam's shooting his own image in the mirror.”

Peckinpah began filming the picture's climactic sequence on January 26. In it Pat Garrett stalks through the dark streets of Fort Sumner, a maze of crumbling adobe, drawing closer and closer to his final rendezvous with the Kid at Pete Maxwell's house.

Shooting up the mirror in his bedroom had been more than drunken theatrics; even in an alcoholic haze Sam constantly manipulated the film to reflect his life and his life to reflect the film. As shooting progressed he had grown more and more interested in Garrett and less and less in the Kid. Kristofferson's scenes often seem rushed and perfunctory, as if Peckinpah simply wanted to get them over with so he could get back to Garrett. The Kid remained little more than a blurry symbol of his own youth, now lost. But Garrett was a character of truly tragic dimensions, a man caught at the crossroads of a moral dilemma. For Garrett to become more than a facile symbol of America's moral corruption in the era of Watergate, for him to become a living, breathing human being, he would need a transfusion from Sam's own veins. And the only way to do that was to open one and let it bleed. Garrett sells out to Chisum, Governor Wallace, and the Santa Fe Ring, and kills a part of himself, perhaps the best part, in the bargain. What had Sam Peckinpah sold out?—he asked himself as he lay in bed holding a loaded gun on the withered image in the mirror. Sharon, Kristen, Melissa . . . Mathew. Mathew, that blond, skinny, shy, uncertain, lost boy who he could hardly look at without vomiting rage. That awkward, vulnerable kid he'd had to murder in himself so long ago in the hills of Dunlap's Ranch in exchange for a curt nod of approval from the Peckinpah men. Joie, Begonia . . . Marie. Lying on the bed with her in that airy apartment on Rimpau Boulevard, pressing his palm against the swell of her belly to feel Sharon's first stirrings. Where was that apartment now, was it still there, could he find his way back to it again? Lost, so many years, so many things lost. And he'd sold it all for what? Magazine profiles of a fictional identity he'd created, film festival awards, a mountain of money, the cold hungry clutching bodies of star fuckers, a circle of back-slapping, puppet-grinning strangers offering him another drink, who knew the image but not him, loved his celebrity but not him . . . It hadn't turned out the way he thought it would . . . not even close.

In the sequence, Garrett stalks through the darkness, like an iron filing pulled irresistibly toward the magnet of Pete Maxwell's and the Kid, he pauses for a moment at the shack of a coffin maker who is working late—another of Wurlitzer's character vignettes. Sam had now expanded the dialogue and cast a new actor in the role . . . himself.

Coburn wades through the night. Ahead lies Pete Maxwell's dimly illuminated farmhouse; to his right is a small pool of gold light, where a thin figure hunches over an unfinished coffin. A small coffin, a child's. “Hello, Will,” Coburn utters softly.

The graying head tilts up with eyes fierce and piercing. “Hello, Sheriff,” Will replies tensely. Coburn offers him a drink from the ever-present flask. Peckinpah waves it off and continues to stare at his fictional creation with those bottomless eyes. “You finally figured it out, huh? I thought you'd be out pickin’ shit with the chickens, cuttin’ yourself a tin bill.”

Coburn takes a giant swallow of whiskey, his face puckering. He repockets the flask and stares at the waiting farmhouse.

“Go on,” Peckinpah purrs, “get it over with.”

Coburn can't move, but can't take his eyes off his fate.

Peckinpah moves his hands over the raw-wood frame of the tiny coffin. “You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna put everything I own right here, and I'm gonna bury it in this ground, and I'm gonna leave the territory.”

Like a sleepwalker Coburn starts toward the farmhouse; his face is that of a dead man as his spurs lightly ching upon the ground. Peckinpah calls after him, “When are you gonna learn you can't trust anybody, not even yourself, Garrett?” It is the filmmaker in dialogue with his fictional alter ego, documenting his own spiritual crisis on film.

When Garrett had gone to visit his wife in the beginning of the film, he stopped before her house: a huge, two-story white Victorian with a picket fence surrounding a neatly kept yard, it juts out of the earth, towering above the other colorless adobe structures of Lincoln, a hallucinatory icon of hearth and home embodying all the allure and horror of domesticity that American men run toward and away from. Garrett himself fled shortly after entering its claustrophobic confines, then later had sought to fill the terrible vacuum within himself by hopping into a bed full of prostitutes.

Now, approaching the shadowy farmhouse of Pete Maxwell, Garrett comes upon another picket fence, weathered and warped from many years of neglect. He pauses before the gate and considers it; then, as if in some recurring dream, he swings it open with the same deliberate motion he'd used when entering his wife's home. Creeping up onto the porch, hand on the butt of his gun, he peers through a window from which he hears the sound of soft moaning and a breathless voice crying, “Jesus! Jesus!” It's the Kid, making love to his girl with a passion that is only a memory to Garrett. Garrett backs away from the window and collapses into a porch swing and waits for the Kid to finish.

When he does, Billy pads out onto the porch, barefoot and shirtless, to dig a midnight snack out of the cooler. Garrett creeps around back, enters the dark house, and moves silently to Pete Maxwell's bedroom, just inside the door from where the Kid stands.

“When we were rehearsing it I saw the mirror there by the door,” says James Coburn. “I saw myself in it and I said to Sam, ‘After I shoot the Kid, I want to shoot myself in the mirror.’ Sam said, ‘No, no! No, no, no, no!’ I said, ‘Yes, goddamn it, I want to do that! Fuck you, man! That's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do that! Now set that fucker up!’ We were yelling at each other and he was adamant, he wasn't going to do that, didn't want that to happen! . . . And then, somehow, we rehearsed all that night, but we didn't shoot. We came back the next night. I said to Sam, ‘Are we gonna shoot the mirror?’ He said, ‘Fuck yes, you're gonna shoot the mirror! That's what you want to do, isn't it?’ That's the way he was. Of course I knew about him shooting himself in the mirror at his house. It was just another kind of thing . . . shooting the ghost.”

The Kid backs in through the open door of Maxwell's bedroom, his bare shoulders and spine exposed to Garrett sitting on the bed. The Kid turns, gun in hand. “Hey, Pete, who's that out there?” Then he sees Garrett sitting there. He doesn't raise his gun, but instead smiles beatifically at Garrett, opens his arms, and offers his naked chest to him. Garrett—jaw set, eyes burning—raises his gun and fires. Like a stroke of lightning, the flash from the barrel illuminates the room. The Kid is punched backward, flying through space, lyrically floating through air, torso curved in on itself, face twisted. Then it descends toward earth, and Garrett rises and sees his own image fill the mirror before him. He grimaces and fires, the glass shattering and sprinkling, his image fragmenting just as the Kid's body completes its fall, thumping softly to rest on the wood planks of the porch just outside of the doorway. His face still has that beatific smile. Garrett steps closer to the mirror, staring at the fissured, broken image of himself with a gaping black hole in the center.

Seeing that the Kid is safely dead, Garrett's deputy, Poe, pulls out his pocket knife, opens it, and starts across the porch. Before he can get to the body Garrett steps into the doorway and looks down at the Kid, at the chest perforated by one neat bullet-hole, the face smiling up at him. Garrett stares with wide, unbelieving eyes. “I shot him,” he mutters softly, then steps over the body onto the porch. “I killed the Kid.”

It was a sequence of astonishing power. When Jim Silke saw it, he thought: damn, he finally did it! Sam had finally caught on film what he had been after in Castaway: the moment when Mr. Lecky kills the monster, turns over the bloody corpse, and discovers it to be himself.

“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is, for me, the masterpiece,” says Lyn Silke. “It's more complete than The Wild Bunch. The man was in there all the way, it's all of him, it's his whole story. There's a feeling afterward of completion, the world has been born and created and died. It's a wonderful, fulfilling feeling.”

The film finished twenty-one days behind schedule. Peckinpah had shot 367,440 feet of film in 803 camera setups (more footage than he'd shot on Wild Bunch by over 30,000 feet, but with 400 fewer setups). He had defied MGM and gotten every scene he wanted in the can. Some scenes were weak, many things in the picture didn't work, but much of the footage was stunning. Despite its many flaws, he knew he had a picture of incredible power. He had won the battle—but, back in Culver City, the smiling cobra was coiled and ready to strike.

Roger Spottiswoode, Garth Craven, and a team of Mexican editors had been cutting sequences together in Durango as Peckinpah shot them. When Sam returned with them to MGM in February 1973 he had a rough cut of the picture that ran three and a half hours. It needed a lot of work, but he hoped he could find ways in the cutting room of minimizing the weaknesses and carving out a great movie.

Then Aubrey dropped the bombshell. He wanted to release the film at the end of May, on Memorial Day weekend. The studio had sunk all of its reserves into the MGM Grand Hotel and was desperate to develop some cash flow in time for its stockholders’ meeting in July, so Aubrey was rushing as many pictures into theaters as possible despite the fact that the haste might cripple their box-office potential. The Wild Bunch had been in post-production for a year, and most of Peckinpah's subsequent pictures for six months. Pat Garrett would have just two and a half months to become a finished product. Aubrey's deadline was insane, but Gordon Carroll agreed to it on the condition that they would be able to add more editors to the team and thus work around the clock. Peckinpah had no choice but to go along with this plan—it was either cooperate or turn the film over to Aubrey—but he knew it obliterated his chances of shaping Pat Garrett into a great film.

Six editors—Roger Spottiswoode, Bob Wolfe, Garth Craven, Richard Halsey, David Berlatsky, and Tony de Zarraga—plus a stable full of assistants worked on the movie. “We had so many people working on the film,” says Bob Wolfe's assistant, Mike Klein, “it was like the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing.”

Peckinpah had worked with a large team of editors on Straw Dogs. By walking from cutting room to cutting room he'd been able to bring a unified vision to the film. He used the same approach on Pat Garrett, but by now he only functioned well for about four hours a day. Sometimes he never even showed up for the screenings of the various rough cuts; sometimes he'd stagger in halfway through the movie, collapse in a chair, and pass out. Just when Sam needed to be in peak form, he was dropping the ball.

Yet somehow they managed to produce a fine cut of the picture by March 13, which they screened for the MGM brass. “Hell of a first cut,” James Aubrey said when the lights came up. To the editors’ surprise (Peckinpah was not present) the production chief seemed to like the film. But Aubrey harbored the illusion that this was only a rough cut, and that Peckinpah would greatly reduce its length. When he discovered shortly afterward that Sam considered it his final cut, he blew his top. The picture was too long, Aubrey insisted. Westerns, like comedies, should never run longer than ninety minutes. He hated all the strange character vignettes that gave the picture its epic scope—they slowed down the action, got in the way of the plot—and he thought the prologue and epilogue were too confusing and beyond the comprehension of the general public.

Peckinpah's editors urged him to appease Aubrey with some concessions, to give away a few sequences to save the most critical ones, but Sam refused. “He could charm the birds out of the trees if he wanted to,” says Katy Haber. “He could manipulate the biggest and most difficult stars in Hollywood until they were eating out of his hand, but he refused to do that with Aubrey. It was almost as if he was asking Aubrey to destroy the film.”

Aubrey had Peckinpah right where he wanted him. Sam's contract guaranteed him two public screenings of his cut of the film before MGM could take it away from him. But instead of setting the previews up in Kansas City or at least San Francisco, the studio informed Peckinpah that the previews would be held right there on the lot in MGM's screening rooms. Furthermore, Sam would be permitted to invite no more than sixteen personal guests to each of the screenings. “[Sam] wanted people with some influence in the industry to see the film—Henry Fonda, Marty Baum,” Katy Haber told Garner Simmons. “We sent the list to MGM and they removed all the names they felt were influential. So that left only Sam's family and a couple of people [that] I was able to sneak in under assumed names as boyfriends of Sam's daughters—three newspaper reviewers.”

A few days before the first preview, Sam managed to smuggle three other outsiders into one of his own editorial screenings: Jay Cocks of Time magazine, Martin Scorsese, and Pauline Kael.

“I thought it was a masterpiece,” says Scorsese. “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was the only other Peckinpah film that came close to The Wild Bunch. It came very close.”

Dan Melnick was still hoping to broker some sort of compromise between Peckinpah and Aubrey, and so anxiously awaited the results of the first preview. Members of the general public were being bused into the studio for the screening; Melnick hoped their response would hit Sam like a pail of cold water and cause him to loosen his position. But when the lights dimmed in the MGM theater at eight P.M. on May 3, Sam had yet to show up. He still hadn't materialized by the time the lights came up again, two hours and three minutes later.

“After the preview Sam got us on the phone and told us we could shorten one shot by about twelve seconds,” says Roger Spottiswoode. “That was it. Then Melnick called us and said, ‘What are Sam's changes?’ We told him that Sam hadn't come to the preview. Melnick said, ‘What's he going to do, is he going to make some changes?’ We said, ‘Well, he called us and told us to shorten this one shot, we can take fifteen feet out of it.’ It outraged Melnick that Sam didn't go to his own preview. Dan was one of the few people who could talk to Sam and understood the movie, but he knew it was suicidal as far as Aubrey was concerned.”

“Sometimes things happen to us because we want them to,” Peckinpah had told a journalist a year earlier. In the film, Garrett destroys himself through killing the Kid; now his creator seemed bent on living out a parallel scenario.

When Melnick reported the results of the first preview, Aubrey wasted no time. Memorial Day was looming on the horizon. He would get his ninety-minute western one way or another.

Just days after the first preview, editor Mike Klein noticed something funny when he reported to work in the morning. “I said to Sam, ‘Something strange is going on.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, our film is put up on the racks in a certain way. When we finish up at night I know how everything is sitting up there. After everybody leaves, something happens to that film. They're sitting up there differently than the way they were left. I notice our trim boxes are put back differently, because I always keep everything very neat.’ Well, we found out that MGM was grabbing reels of film and making black-and-white dirty dupes of them. They had their own crew recutting the show without us knowing about it.”

“Sam was going to get his two previews,” says Roger Spottiswoode, “but that wasn't the film they were going to release.”

Aubrey had given the orders to dupe and recut the film, but only one man could implement them: the head of production, Dan Melnick. “Melnick was the hatchet man for Aubrey,” Bob Wolfe told Paul Seydor. The man who had saved Peckinpah from professional oblivion with Noon Wine had now betrayed him—though, of course, Sam refused or could not see how he had forced his former partner's hand.

At the second screening, also held at MGM, Sam's guests were mostly family members and close friends. Fern Lea and Walter Peter were there, as well as Sam's nephew David Peckinpah, the Silkes, and Gordon Dawson. “Sam wanted the people who he cared about to see his film, the film he wanted to make,” says David Peckinpah. “After the screening everybody went up to Sam's office. Everyone was very quiet. Sam said, ‘They've taken it away from me. They're recutting the film right now.’ Everyone was crowding around him; it had a very wakelike atmosphere, it was strange. I could see it in his face, he was broken.”

“After the preview Roger and I went back up to the cutting room,” says Garth Craven, “and the studio people had already moved in. They were already there working. The body wasn't even cold.” After giving every waking hour of his life to the film for four months, after all the trauma and heartache and frustration, Spottiswoode snapped, cursing as he kicked and smashed one of the moviolas around the room.

It was a dark night for Peckinpah and his bunch, but fortunately for film history MGM had not managed to completely crush their spirit. “That night I suddenly realized that our preview print was still up in the projection booth of the screening room,” says Garth Craven. “So I corralled Smiley [editor Sergio Ortega, who looked remarkably similar to Alfonso Bedoya, the bandit chief in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre], and Smiley got a studio bike [used by messengers] with a rack on the front and brought it to the back door of the screening room. I loaded the film into the basket and Smiley pedaled it across the studio and threw it in the back of Chalo Gonzalez's car, and off it went. Of course, a few days later the studio's looking all over for it. I said, ‘I don't know where it went. Don't you have any security in those screening rooms?'”

“The preview print disappeared, but the soundtrack didn't,” says Roger Spottiswoode. “Somebody called Sam and said, ‘Sam, there's been an extremely stupid theft. Somebody has stolen the picture but forgotten to steal the sound that went with it. We're hoping the thief comes back and gets the sound tonight because once the studio finds out it's going to be very difficult to take. So if the thief has got any smarts at all he'll move fast.’ “

Chalo Gonzalez recalls: “I parked my car close to the editing rooms and left my trunk open and Smiley would come and drop the reels in there. Then when I took Sam home at night I drove them off the lot. It took us three days, but we got it all. We took it all out to Sam's trailer in Malibu, then later moved it to a film vault.”

James Aubrey wasn't finished with Sam Peckinpah. Butchering his film wasn't enough; he wanted to make that bandanna-headed prick bleed and bleed and bleed, so he struck at another major artery, one close to the director's heart: his team, his precious bunch.

Just days after the second preview, Aubrey called Bob Wolfe to an MGM screening room and had the projectionist run a ninety-six-minute version of Pat Garrett that had been prepared by the studio's editors. “It was a disaster,” Wolfe later told Paul Seydor: the epic scope of the picture and much of the character development had been yanked out, roots and all. What was left was a plot-less series of shootouts in which characters appeared without introduction then disappeared as abruptly and never returned. The actions of the Kid and Garrett often lacked motivation, even coherence.

“Go back and tell your colleagues,” Aubrey said to Wolfe, “that we're going to release this version unless they cooperate. If they help us, we're willing to meet you halfway. We'll only cut twenty minutes out instead of a half-hour.”

Wolfe went back and told the other editors. Garth Craven refused to cooperate, but Wolfe and Spottiswoode decided they would. “We should not have made the deal,” says Spottiswoode. “I hold myself responsible, responsible for my own actions anyway. I did not want the most brutalized version to go out to theaters. We had put a huge amount of ourselves into the film and it had been a very painful and unpleasant experience. We wanted as much of it to be saved as possible. I always felt that if Sam had been willing to negotiate with them he might have saved even more of the film. However, I must admit, as I go on now as a director, I sympathize with Sam. After you've been fucked over a few times you begin to think, ‘I won't make any deals.’ “

Wolfe and Spottiswoode junked the studio's cut completely and over the next twelve days worked with Aubrey and Melnick to bring Peckinpah's version down from 124 to 106 minutes. The prologue and epilogue were removed—Aubrey wouldn't even consider leaving them in. Several vivid vignettes were dropped and the dialogue and pace tightened throughout the rest of the scenes. The editors fought hard to save what they could.

Roger Spottiswoode told Paul Seydor: “Aubrey was ordering scenes cut out for no other reason except that he knew Sam didn't want them cut. There were literal bartering sessions in which we traded away some scenes to save others. We had these screenings with Aubrey in which he became absolutely incoherent and obscene and terrible. We lost most of Walter Kelley's scene in the brothel near the end, with Walter Kelley leaning on the bar. Aubrey hated Walter Kelley and knew he was Sam's friend and wanted it out. Well, in the final negotiations the raft scene was kept in; Kelley went out. It was a trade. That's the way it went. That way we were able to keep in certain scenes that Aubrey really despised. But we lost a lot of them. The things that got cut were the nuances, the beats between the action. Sam's scene [as the coffin maker] with Garrett was very good, a lovely, melancholy Kafkaesque scene. Aubrey took three-quarters of the last half of it out. The epilogue was removed and Garrett's ride out of Fort Sumner now dissolved into a freeze-frame of Garrett and Billy laughing together. That was Aubrey's idea and it was appalling, just appalling.”

And after Spottiswoode and Wolfe delivered the compromise version, the cuts continued. As Spottiswoode walked past the cutting room one day he heard the soundtrack for one of the scenes playing on a speaker box. He stormed in to find an editor he'd never laid eyes on before hunched over a reel of film on the workbench. “What the hell's going on?” Spottiswoode demanded. “That's my reel, I cut that!”

The other editors looked up sheepishly. “It's nothing to do with us, sorry. Orders from Mr. Aubrey—we're taking out two minutes here.” It was two minutes of film that Spottiswoode had fought for and won, or so he thought, the right to keep in by agreeing to take out another scene.

By the time Aubrey was finished, Pat Garrett, one of Peckinpah's most audacious and elaborate films, had been shrunk into an ordinary western. But Wolfe and Spottiswoode had preserved some of the most powerful sequences, including the climactic murder of Billy. Peckinpah's vision, though fragmented, was still there, and the film still resonated with strong emotions. Though the movie's chain of events now seemed haphazard and confused, it was at least possible to sense what had been lost, what the film had once been before Aubrey took a meat cleaver to it.

“The MGM cut really blew my mind, it was really fucking terrible,” says James Coburn. “It made me sick, after all the anguish making the fucking thing. I kept asking Sam, ‘Where's this one share of MGM stock that you told me that you were prepared to go to war with, huh?’ He didn't want to fucking talk about it.”

Of course, what hurt Peckinpah almost as much as the butchery was the fact that his own editors had helped Aubrey perform it. Sam still had an office on the MGM lot and was coming in every day while the recutting was being done, but he'd been frozen out of the process and was helpless to stop it. “We had recut Sam's film and he was angry,” says Roger Spottiswoode.

One evening shortly after the recutting had been completed Spottiswoode ran into Bob Wolfe while crossing the studio lot. The soft-spoken, gray-haired editor's face was ashen, his eyes watery. “What's wrong?” Spottiswoode asked.

“I've just been up to see Sam,” Wolfe muttered, his eyes dropping to the ground. Sam was angry, very angry, he hesitantly explained. When Bob had stopped in the office just a few minutes earlier, Peckinpah had gone for his jugular. “You know, I like to have one really third-rate person on a show, and you're it, and you always have been,” Sam had said in his lethal whisper. “That's why I have you on my films, because you're sort of a dummy. You're quite good at editing, but you're kind of a dummy and it's just a good reminder of where one could go if one wasn't careful. You're it. You're the dummy.” And from there Peckinpah went systematically through every film they had worked on together—The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Junior Banner, The Getaway—and gave vivid examples that illustrated Wolfe's mediocrity.

Wolfe was a gentle, softspoken man. He had always tried to see the good side of Sam Peckinpah, and screen out the bad. When other editors condemned Peckinpah for some abusive act, Wolfe always made excuses for him. Now Sam had turned around and savaged him. Bob looked like a small, wounded animal—devastated, completely destroyed.

Enraged, Spottiswoode took off for Peckinpah's office at a full run. He burst through the door with clenched fists. Peckinpah started out belligerent, but when Roger came around the desk after him, shouting, “You fucking asshole!” Sam held up his hands and started apologizing.

“What can I do?” Sam pleaded, suddenly desperate for forgiveness. “I'll give you anything!” Spottiswoode turned his back on him and walked out. Halfway across the MGM lot Katy Haber caught up to him. “You have to come back,” she pleaded. He let himself be led back to Peckinpah's office.

Sam was sitting behind his desk, crying. “I've known you too long, you can't leave me, you can't leave me! You can't . . . I'm sorry! I'll say I'm sorry to Bob.”

“No, you cannot fix it,” said Spottiswoode. “You can't take those words back, and you do this a lot. You do things that you can never take back, and that is one of them.”

Bob Wolfe had been a major creative force on five of Peckinpah's films. Four years later, Sam would admit to Paul Seydor that out of all the editors that ever worked for him, “Wolfe was the best.” But now Wolfe was gone and he wouldn't be coming back. Spottiswoode was gone too, out of the country and back to England. He would eventually return to pursue a directing career of his own, but he and Peckinpah never worked together again.

Despite the mad rush in post-production, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid did not make its Memorial Day release date, but instead opened in Los Angeles six weeks later, in July 1973, to mixed reviews. Many critics complained that the film was incoherent. Some blamed MGM's hatchet job, others fingered Peckinpah.

Paul D. Zimmerman wrote in Newsweek: "This new film is a casualty of a prolonged shootout between director Sam Peckinpah and MGM president James Aubrey. The battle ended with Aubrey taking away Peckinpah's ‘final cut’. . . And the question remains: did the studio ruin an interesting film, or did it merely try to salvage a hopelessly muddled one? Whatever the case, the movie is a misshapen mess.”

But others recognized that the picture had a warped greatness. Jay Cocks wrote in Time: "Even in the maimed state in which it has been released, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the richest, most exciting American film so far this year. There are moments and whole sequences here that stand among the very best Peckinpah has ever achieved . . .” Cocks would later number the film among the ten best of 1973.

Jim Hamilton, who would be one of the screenwriters on Cross of Iron, saw Pat Garrett in a movie theater in San Francisco: “That's the movie where, if you studied Sam's work, you knew that the game was over and that the fatigue and melancholy had set in. It's one of the most fatigue-ridden movies ever made, you can feel it running off of the screen. But what Sam does is make all these wonderful images for the last time, like the wonderful death scene with Slim Pickens. Sam must have known: ‘This is all I've got left.’ He was finished with that genre.”

Pat Garrett's negative cost came to $4,638,783—more than $1,600,000 over the original budget. During its first year of release it grossed $4,652,724; by 1976 that figure had crept up to $5,367,980. So the picture probably turned a small profit, but not enough of one to save MGM. In October 1973 James Aubrey announced the studio's complete withdrawal from theatrical distribution. MGM sold its entire library of films to United Artists and Aubrey resigned. “Mr. Aubrey is now unemployed,” Peckinpah told an audience at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1974. “So maybe I've done something good for the world.”

The preview print that the Peckinpah Bunch stole from MGM was shuffled over the years from film vaults to office refrigerators to Kristen's apartment in Silver Lake.

In April 1986, not quite a year and a half after Sam Peckinpah's death, a screening of that print was quietly arranged at USC. A few handbills were stapled to bulletin boards in the cinema and drama departments, and the word spread like wildfire. The night of the screening, the plush Norris Auditorium was packed. Scattered among the crowd were such Peckinpah veterans as James Coburn, Roger Spottiswoode, Alfonso Arau, and Richard Bright. The next day an article appeared in Variety entitled “Restored Version of Peckinpah's Garrett Surfaces.” MGM immediately made inquiries about the print, which it wanted to repossess. But the film had already disappeared into another hiding place.

Two and a half years after the USC screening Jerry Harvey—vice president of programming for Z Channel, an adventurous Los Angeles cable station that specialized in showing cult movies, obscure American classics, and foreign films—convinced Ted Turner, who now owned the MGM film library, to put up the money for a full restoration of the film. The picture and sound quality of the restoration were first-class, but for some inexplicable reason the newly struck prints did not include the crucial scene between Garrett and his wife. Nevertheless, a screening of the Z-Channel version drew another packed house at the Directors Guild of America theater on Sunset Boulevard, and the subsequent airings in revival houses across the country and on television sparked a serious reevaluation of the film.

Today, twenty years after it was made, the movie's scathing vision of the American frontier slowly strangling to death in the grip of big business, corrupt politicians, and their hired henchmen is more relevant than ever. As in The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah injected his own spiritual crisis and personal despair into a larger mythological framework that addressed the spiritual crisis and despair of a nation. It is for this reason that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for all its shortcomings, remains a work of awesome power and penetrating vision.

“I felt very gut-shot about the movie when MGM first released it,” says journalist and critic Grover Lewis. “I mean, it was impossible to defend the film. It had some pretty scenes in it, but you couldn't even tell what was going on. Then, years later, I saw the Z-Channel version and I was in tears by the end of it. That's the darkest film I've ever seen.”

Many other critics have come to agree. Pat Garrett now regularly appears on their lists of the ten best westerns ever made, and is widely regarded, along with Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, as one of Sam Peckinpah's masterpieces.