[ << Back ]
Naked Photos of Sam Peckinpah are available at MaleStars.com.
They currently feature over 65,000 Nude Pics, Biographies, Video Clips,
Articles, and Movie Reviews of famous stars.
Related
Links:
Chixinflix.com
MenInMovies.com
StarsOfHollywood.com
MaleStars.com
Actresses
who appeared with Sam Peckinpah on screen:
|
 Sam Peckinpah
Birthday: February 21, 1925
Birth
Place: Fresno, California, USA
Height: 5' 9"
Below
is a complete filmography (list of movies he's appeared in) for
Sam Peckinpah. If you have any corrections or additions, please email
us at corrections@actorsofhollywood.com.
We'd also be interested in any trivia or other information you have.
|
|
| Biography
Believing real-life turmoil bred peerless creativity, Sam Peckinpah left an indelible mark on post-1960s cinema with a relatively small body of work that was not for the faint of heart, either in the audience or his collaborators. Once noting "the outlaws of the old West have always fascinated me...I suppose I'm a bit of an outlaw myself," Peckinpah's unruly, incendiary vision turned such films as Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), and the non-Western Straw Dogs (1971) into forceful, complex ruminations on violence, morality, and manhood.Born in Fresno, CA, and raised on a ranch on nearby Peckinpah Mountain by his sober mother and judge father, descendants of pioneer settlers, Peckinpah learned to ride and shoot as a child and idolized his hardy Superior Court jurist grandfather. A boozing, violence-prone troublemaker by his teens, Peckinpah spent his senior year at military school, joining the Marines in 1943 after graduation. Despite a tour of duty in China, however, Peckinpah never saw combat action. Enrolling at Fresno State College in 1947, Peckinpah discovered his calling when his schoolmate and first wife-to-be turned him on to drama. Relocating to Los Angeles to get his master's degree at U.S.C., Peckinpah began directing theater and took a job at KLAC-TV as a stagehand. He was subsequently fired from his menial job on Liberace's TV show for not wearing a suit. Peckinpah's luck changed when he was hired as Don Siegel's assistant at Allied Artists. Well matched in cinematic temperament, Siegel became Peckinpah's mentor as he learned the craft on five Siegel films, including an uncredited rewrite and a bit part in Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Peckinpah also began writing scripts for TV Westerns in 1955, contributing episodes to several shows, including Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel. Getting a shot at directing with an episode of Broken Arrow in 1958, Peckinpah further honed his skills with episodes of The Rifleman and The Westerner. Peckinpah got his first feature to direct when The Westerner star Brian Keith suggested him for The Deadly Companions (1961). Though more a vehicle for star Maureen O'Hara than the director, The Deadly Companions nevertheless helped Peckinpah land his second film, Ride the High Country (1962). A spectacular, nostalgic, yet clear-eyed meditation on the passing of the West starring wizened screen cowboys Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott as two gunfighters confronting their mortality, Ride the High Country proved that Peckinpah could already enter his house justified as a filmmaker. The studio thought otherwise, dumping it on its first release; critical accolades and foreign film prizes, however, gave Ride the High Country another shot stateside. With a considerable budget and an unfinished script, Peckinpah embarked on his third Western, Major Dundee (1965), starring Charlton Heston and Richard Harris as two former comrades who clash during an Apache roundup. Shot in Mexico, the production of Major Dundee fell into chaos as Peckinpah fired crew members, fought with producers, and was threatened with grievous bodily harm by a (literally) saber-rattling Heston. When the studio decided to fire Peckinpah, however, Heston gave back his salary to let Peckinpah finish. After Peckinpah's cut came in at over two hours, though, he was ousted and the studio eviscerated the movie, removing scenes that reportedly gave Major Dundee even more thematic heft than Ride the High Country. The resulting mess left critics and audiences cold; Peckinpah's deteriorating reputation (and his obstreperousness) got him fired from The Cincinnati Kid (1965).Blackballed for several years, Peckinpah survived by writing scripts. By the time he got to direct again in the late '60s, the parameters of movie violence had changed. Reuniting with High Country cinematographer Lucien Ballard, stock company regulars Warren Oates and L.Q. Jones, and adding stars William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, and Robert Ryan to the mix, Peckinpah explosively probed the nature of mythic Western violence and moral relativity in The Wild Bunch (1969). From the brutal opening line to the final, self-immolating massacre, Holden's Pike Bishop and his outlaw Bunch were no more despicable than the figures of "civilization," with their sense of loyalty elevating them above their pursuers. Aiming to show the pain of gunfire, and provide his own allegorical critique of Vietnam, Peckinpah orchestrated the battle sequences as sensational montages of rapid cutting, slow-motion bloodshed, and relentless carnage that outdid the spaghetti Westerns and Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Greeted by reactions ranging from "brilliant" to "sick," The Wild Bunch was only a modest hit, even after Warner Bros. cut ten minutes of exposition, but its impact on Hollywood cinema reverberated for years to come. Honoring its legacy, Warner Bros. restored and re-released The Wild Bunch in 1995. Peckinpah followed The Wild Bunch with a distinctly different Western elegy, The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). Starring Jason Robards as another Westerner who can't handle the end of the West, Cable Hogue was gentle and funny; its botched release, however, did it no justice. After this respite, Peckinpah returned to plumbing the depths of man's bestiality in his most controversial film, Straw Dogs (1971). Starring Dustin Hoffman as a nerdy American math teacher and Susan George as his wanton British wife, Straw Dogs chillingly surmised that even the most pacifist soul harbors an abyss of lethal, instinctual violence. Provoking heated objections to its rape scene in particular and visceral cruelty and nihilism in general, Straw Dogs nevertheless drew an audience and confirmed the potency of Peckinpah's methods. As if to prove his assertions that he himself abhorred the kind of violence portrayed in Straw Dogs, Peckinpah eschewed guns and bloodletting in his next film, Junior Bonner (1972). Another mild, wistful take on Western masculine values and their modern demise, Junior Bonner starred Steve McQueen as a rodeo rider past his prime who has a comic and sad return to his hometown. Though Junior Bonner was a poorly distributed financial failure, Peckinpah got along well enough with his former Cincinnati Kid star to re-team with McQueen for the more conventional action vehicle The Getaway (1972). Notorious for co-stars McQueen and Ali MacGraw's adulterous offscreen affair and a skillfully mounted chase movie, The Getaway was a major hit.The Getaway's success, however, didn't prevent Peckinpah's next film, and last Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), from turning into, as he put it, his "worst experience since Major Dundee." Locking horns with the studio during the Mexico shoot, the on-set battles escalated until the unit manager's threat during an argument to have Peckinpah killed resulted in a Peckinpah crony hiring local gunmen to off the unit manager. The hit was canceled and the manager exited. As with Major Dundee, Pat Garrett was sloppily recut by the studio, and the incoherent release version failed. After the scenes were restored in 1988, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was revealed to be a fitting exit from the genre for Peckinpah, with the onscreen death of James Coburn's Garrett and flashback to his fateful relationship with Kris Kristofferson's Billy turning the film into a rueful, low-key, yet visually magnificent reflection on an irrevocable past. As far as Peckinpah's present, he threw himself into Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). A strange, bloody revenge story starring Warren Oates as a hapless American in Mexico determined to fulfill the title edict his way, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was dumped in the U.S. and lavishly praised abroad. Always a hardcore alcoholic, Peckinpah discovered cocaine while shooting his next film, espionage actioner The Killer Elite (1975). Though The Killer Elite was a reasonably successful endeavor, one Peckinpah biographer later surmised that the cocaine addiction crippled Peckinpah's creative powers. Still, Peckinpah's sole war movie, Cross of Iron (1977), delivered a powerful antiwar message in depicting two philosophically opposed German officers on the Russian front in World War II. His final two films, comic trucker adventure Convoy (1978) and Robert Ludlum adaptation The Osterman Weekend (1983), however, were strictly mediocre. Though Peckinpah suffered a heart attack in 1979, he never retired. Along with branching out into music video with two clips for Julian Lennon, Peckinpah was preparing a Stephen King adaptation when he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1984. Peckinpah's five marriages (three to the same woman) all ended in divorce.
|
|
|
Movie
Credits
Trivia
- At the time of his death, Peckinpah was in pre-production on an original script by Stephen King entitled "The Shotgunners." (Source: Cinefantastique magazine, 2/91)
- The last project he directed was a music video for John Lennon's son Julian Lennon.
- Ida Lupino hired him to work on her series "Mr. Adams and Eve" (1957) after she found him living in a shack behind her property. He paid her back by casting her in Junior Bonner (1972) some years later.
- He wrote his scripts by hand in his nearly illegable scribble. Only two women were ever employed as his secretaries because they were the only ones who could transcribe his terrible handwriting.
- Was voted the 32nd Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
- In 1976 he signed a contract to film "Cukoo's Progress", a novel by the Swedish author Sture Dahlström. The story of the novel is about Xerxes Sonson Pickelhaupt whose life ambition is to impregnate every women on the face of the earth. He died before the movie was made, but Dahlstrom still got paid.
- Served in the Marines Corps during World War II, but did not see combat.
- In his January 1972 Playboy interview, Peckinpah was asked to comment about critic Pauline Kael's assertion that in Straw Dogs (1971), he endorsed rape by having the protagonist's wife seemingly enjoy being violated by her ex-boyfriend. Pointing out that the scene in question was actually the first stage of a gangbang and that the wife clearly did not enjoy being taken by the second man, he went on to gently criticize Kael, who was a great admirer and supporter of his. Noting that he had shared a drink with Kael and liked her personally, Peckiinpah said that on the subject of his movie endorsing rape, "she's cracking walnuts with her ass."
- Was hired by Marlon Brando to adopt Charles Neider's novella about Billy the Kid, "The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones," that served as the basis for Brando's directorial debut, One-Eyed Jacks (1961). (The Western was the only film that the immortal actor ever directed.) While Stanley Kubrick was still slated to be the project's director, Peckinpah wrote what he believed was a good script; subsequently, he was devastated when he was let go after turning it in. Later, some of the thematic elements and scenes that survived and were showcased in "Jacks" also became part of Peckinpah's own take on the legendary outlaw, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).
- Producer Martin Ransohoff felt compelled to fire Peckinpah after the beginning of principal shooting on The Cincinnati Kid (1965) due to disagreements over the conception of the film. The incident led to a physical altercation between the two. In the early 1970s, remarking on their fight, Peckinpah claimed Ransofhoff got the worst of it: "I stripped him as naked as one of his badly told lies", claimed the director known as "Bloody Sam" for the violence in his films. Peckinpah was replaced with Norman Jewison, a relative newcomer to feature film directing at the time, whose long and successful career as a journeyman filmmaker and producer brought him three Oscar nominations as best director and the Irving Thalberg Award in 1999 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Peckinpah, a master before he was discombobulated by substance abuse, received only one Academy Award nomination in his career, for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Wild Bunch (1969).
- Director Don Siegel and producer Walter Wanger had been desperately trying to persuade the warden of San Quentin Prison to allow the use of the facility to film Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), but the warden had adamantly refused. After the final meeting in the prison, when the warden had said there was nothing Siegel or Wanger could do to persuade him to allow filming there, Siegel turned to speak to Peckinpah, who at the time was his assistant. When the warden heard Peckinpah's name, he asked, "Are you related to Denver Peckinpah?". Sam replied that Denver was his father. It turned out that Denver Peckinpah was a well-known jurist in northern California who had a reputation as a "hanging judge" and the warden had long been an admirer of his. He immediately granted the company permission to shoot the movie in San Quentin.
- Father of Sharon Peckinpah, Kristen Peckinpah and Matthew Peckinpah with first wife Marie Selland, and father of Lupita Peckinpah with second wife Begoña Palacios.
- His nephew was the television writer and producer David E. Peckinpah
Naked Photos of Sam Peckinpah are available at MaleStars.com. They
currently feature over 65,000 Nude Pics, Biographies, Video Clips,
Articles, and Movie Reviews of famous stars. |
|
|
