The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film - Hardcover

Seydor, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810130890 ISBN 13: 9780810130890

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Long before Sam Peckinpah finished shooting his 1973 Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, there was open warfare between him and the studio. In this scrupulously researched new book Paul Seydor reconstructs the riveting history of a brilliant director fighting to preserve an artistic vision while wrestling with his own self?destructive demons. Meticulously comparing the film five extant versions, Seydor documents why none is definitive, including the 2005 Special Edition, for which he served as consultant.

Viewing Peckinpah's last Western from a variety of fresh perspectives, Seydor establishes a nearly direct line from the book Garrett wrote after he killed Billy the Kid to Peckinpah's film ninety-one years later and shows how, even with directors as singular as this one, filmmaking is a collaborative medium. Art, business, history, genius, and ego all collide in this story of a great director navigating the treacherous waters of collaboration, compromise, and commerce to create a flawed but enduringly powerful masterpiece.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Seydor is an Oscar-nominated film editor and a professor in the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University in California, USA. He is the author of Peckinpah: The Western Films - A Reconsideration (1997).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film

By Paul Seydor

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3089-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
PART ONE: Authentic Lives, Authentic Deaths, 
Chapter One. Brando's Western, 
Chapter Two. Garrett's Narrative, 
Chapter Three. Neider's Novel, 
Chapter Four. Peckinpah's Adaptation, 
Chapter Five. Wurlitzer's Screenplay, 
Chapter Six. Peckinpah's Changes, 
PART TWO: The Versions of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 
Chapter Seven. The Previews, 
Chapter Eight. The Box Set, 
Chapter Nine. The 2005 Special Edition, 
PART THREE: Ten Ways of Looking at an Unfinished Masterpiece and Its Director, 
Appendix. Credits and Running Times, 
Notes, 
Bibliography and Filmography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Brando's Western

Sam Peckinpah's first go-round with the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid came by way of Charles Neider's fictionalized treatment in his 1956 novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones. After spending some months doing research in New Mexico, Neider set his book in Northern California in and around Monterey and changed the names of the leading protagonists from William Bonney to Hendry Jones and Pat Garrett to Dad Longworth.

Soon after the publication of Neider's book, a producer named Frank Rosenberg optioned it and hired Rod Serling to write an adaptation. Rosenberg didn't like Serling's screenplay and asked Peckinpah, who was a friend of his, to read the novel.1 Though Peckinpah had at the time no reputation apart from some very good adaptations of Gunsmoke radio plays for the then-new television series, Rosenberg was perceptive enough to recognize a promising talent when he saw one, and his gamble paid off. Peckinpah, who appears not to have read Serling's screenplay, loved the novel—"the best Western ever written," he later called it—but said he wanted to research the history himself before sitting down to write. After an intensive six months during the summer and fall of 1957, he turned in a first draft dated November 11, for which he was paid four thousand dollars (far from princely, but very reasonable at the time for an unknown beginner). Rosenberg was impressed and, at Peckinpah's suggestion, sent the script to Marlon Brando, who was likewise impressed, and his company bought it. "Sam was high as a kite," said Marie Selland, his wife at the time. "He really thought Brando could do a fantastic job with the character." Over the next few weeks Brando met with him daily for long script conferences, then nothing much happened for several months until March 1958, when he phoned Peckinpah to tell him an offer to direct was going out to Stanley Kubrick, whom Peckinpah thought a splendid choice. But Kubrick disliked the script and refused to sign on unless another writer was engaged for essentially a page-one rewrite. So Brando fired Peckinpah, which left him, according to Marie, "devastated."

Brando went with Kubrick's suggested replacement, Calder Willingham. But after several starts, not to mention months, it became clear that Willingham wasn't working out to Brando's, Kubrick's, or anyone else's satisfaction. Rosenberg wanted to reenlist Peckinpah, who was by then hard at work on The Rifleman, a television series he had helped create, episodes of which he was directing as well. So yet another writer, Guy Trosper, was brought aboard. By this time it was evident that Brando had taken a very personal interest in the project, which in turn led to so many arguments between him and Kubrick about everything from casting to overall development of the characters and the plot that he eventually had Kubrick fired. Brando took over as director and finished the screenplay with Trosper the lone survivor among four (some sources say five) writers who had had a hand in it.

Slightly different versions of these events circulate. Memories are imperfect and, Hollywood being Hollywood, everyone tries or is usually given an opportunity to save face when it comes to the parting of the ways. Willingham, for example, says he resigned, but Brando's partner in his production company recalls that Brando took Willingham out to a dinner and canned him there, at the same time gifting him with a teak-inlaid chessboard. At that point Rosenberg wanted to bring Peckinpah back, but Peckinpah said he was too busy or Brando nixed him (or both). Similarly, when it became obvious that Brando and Kubrick could agree on nothing, Brando asked Rosenberg to have him fired. At the time, however, Kubrick issued a public statement expressing his gratitude to Brando for being so "understanding" of his desire to allow him to resign in order to pursue an adaptation of Lolita.

Although several persons associated with the production insist that Brando had for a good while wanted to direct the film, the actor wrote in his autobiography that he tried to hire other directors (among them Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet); when they turned him down, he had to take over because the start of production had already been delayed a few months, at least one of the stars, Karl Malden, was already on salary and had been paid a substantial amount (in the vicinity of $400,000), and other costs were escalating. By the time the film was completed, an original budget variously reported as $1.8 to $3 million had swollen to $6 million, and the shooting schedule doubled from three to six months. Brando's autobiography provides the reason: "On the first day of shooting," he wrote, "I didn't know what to do," and by "the fifth week, and even the fifth month, I was still trying to learn." He and Trosper

constantly improvised and rewrote between shots and setups, often hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute. Some scenes I shot over and over again from different angles with different dialogue and action because I didn't know what I was doing. I was making things up by the moment, not sure where the story was going. I also did a lot of stalling for time, trying to work the story out in my mind while hoping to make the cast think I knew what I was doing.

In one scene he was supposed to be drunk, but believing he couldn't fake drunkenness, he actually got drunk, then too drunk to finish the scene. So he got drunk on another day, but it "still wasn't right, and I had to do it over again on a number of afternoons until it was right." The scene in question never made it into the film. Multiply indulgences like this, add to them Brando's inexperience as first-time director, and it didn't take long before schedules and thus budgets began to soar. After spending several months working with his editor Archie Marshek, Brando gave up, admitting thirty years later in his autobiography, "I was bored with the whole project and walked away from it."

Until Peckinpah's departure, the script retained Neider's title and its story was still recognizably an adaptation of the book. But not long after Peckinpah was let go, the title was changed to One-Eyed Jacks and by the time the film was released, in 1961, about the only things it had in common with the novel were some of the characters' names and the Monterey Peninsula setting. So little of Peckinpah's work remained that only Willingham and Trosper received screenwriting credit. Spared all the Sturm und Drang over the screenplay was Charles Neider himself, who seems to have taken it all with great and even amused equanimity, often visiting the set, where he enjoyed his many meetings with Brando, Brando's father, and Karl Malden. One day during dailies Brando's father asked him what he thought of his son's having the six-gun stuck in a wide cummerbund. "First time he'd draw that gun he'd blow his balls off," Neider answered. If the father ever passed this piece of wisdom on to the son, there is no evidence in the completed film to indicate it was heeded.

"The book is spare, sober, tragic," Neider wrote, but "Brando the actor, director, and producer was convinced he had a clear romantic vision, and he clung to it."

Essentially, the film sentimentalizes the novel.... [It] contains wonderful nature scenes, moments of superb acting, a great deal of tension, lots of suspense. It has deservedly become a kind of underground classic, a cult film. It has a romantic, perhaps adolescent, bitter-sweetness that distinguishes it from other Westerns. And it has the sea, the beaches, and Brando's genius.

A far less generous Peckinpah called it "a piece of shit" that ruined "the definitive work on Billy the Kid." He found Brando a study in frustration.

Very strange man, Marlon. Always doing a number about his screen image, about how audiences would not accept him as a thief, would only accept him as a fallen sinner—someone they could love. As it was released, I think I've one scene left in the film—the one where Marlon knocks the shit out of Timothy Carey. The rest is all Marlon's.

Neider's is the more accurate assessment. One-Eyed Jacks is one of the strangest Westerns ever made. The film is magnificently photographed, the Monterey setting, with the sand and surf and cypress trees, lending it a look like no other Western's. The entire cast is quite extraordinary, the supporting actors including Ben Johnson, Katy Jurado, and Slim Pickens, all of whom would appear in important roles in Peckinpah's films (the latter two in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid). But it's the power of the central relationship between the one-eyed Jacks of the title that really sets the film apart. Concentrated, brooding, and intense, Brando as Rio gives one of his signature Method performances, while Karl Malden's Dad Longworth is a lying, sadistic opportunist so compleat as to be almost generic. "One-eyed Jacks" refers to the Jacks of hearts and spades, face cards that display only the Jack's profile and are often wild. In the film Rio tells Longworth, "You may be a one-eyed Jack here, but I've seen the other side of your face." The same can of course be said of Rio with respect to Dad. Their story no longer has anything to do with Neider's lean, elegant, focused reimagining of a famous episode in the history of the Old West. In the book Longworth reluctantly and only in the line of duty kills his friend, an unrepentant gunslinger and outlaw who forces the sheriff's hand; in the film, they're outlaw partners, Longworth abandoning Rio in Mexico to the rurales and certain imprisonment while he hightails it out and starts a new life as a sheriff in Northern California. Brando and his collaborators turned it into a story of trust and betrayal, vengeance and retribution, their antagonism given a distinctly Freudian slant.

This last is implicit in Neider's novel—he could hardly have been unaware that naming Longworth "Dad" and Hendry "the Kid" slants their relationship in both psychological and mythological directions. Nowhere does he push it, however—they're merely two shadings among several. But Brando and his collaborators added the subplot wherein Rio seduces Longworth's foster daughter, intending to disgrace him by shaming her, which backfires when he falls in love with her. In another scene not in the novel, Longworth lashes Rio to a hitching post, bullwhips him to within an inch of his life while the townspeople look on, then smashes his gun hand with the butt of a shotgun. Against this addition Neider argued that a hard man like Longworth would never put himself in danger like that by potentially angering the Kid's friends, who might ambush the sheriff in revenge. Yet the scene became at once the most notorious and the most powerful in the film. Though by no means graphic, it is a scene of such extreme brutality that even today it is nearly as shocking as it was over fifty years ago, one reason being that its violence does not quite feel fully justified by, thus barely contained in, the immediate dramatic situation or the story at large. (In view of the Freudianism in the material, it was not uncommon for reviewers at the time and since to speculate whether what is being expressed here wasn't a hidden streak of masochism in Brando or some need to punish himself by way of his character for some unconfessed sin or secret transgression.)

Yet it's easy to understand why Peckinpah felt as he did about One-Eyed Jacks when you consider his storytelling priorities during these early years of his career. He had already written his first scripts for Gunsmoke and he would soon be writing the pilot and other early episodes of The Rifleman and developing The Westerner. By his own admission he was obsessed with depicting cowboys as truthfully as he could on the basis of what he knew from the hands who worked his grandfather's ranch and from his own considerable research. The title character of The Westerner, for example, he intended as "a truly realistic saddle bum of the West. I wanted to make him as honest and real as I could do it." For Peckinpah this didn't necessarily mean a slavish verisimilitude as regards life in the Old West—it's easy to spot all sorts of inaccuracies with respect to details of clothing, props (even firearms), sets, saddles, reins, and so on in his films—so much as a realistic treatment of character, behavior, psychology, attitudes of mind and modes of thought and action, and a clear-eyed, unvarnished look at how cowboys, lawmen, bad men, gamblers, drifters, preachers, farmers, townspeople, frontier wives, schoolmarms, and prostitutes actually lived in their world, what their beliefs and values were. The opening episode of The Westerner is about a sadomasochistic relationship between a young whore and her pimp; in another episode a young Easterner's dime-novel illusions of gunplay in the Old West eventually get him killed; an episode of The Rifleman is about a marshal who's a drunk, and it does not treat alcoholism humorously. Of course a recurring preoccupation is with serious depictions of violence.

What really seems to have angered Peckinpah most about One-Eyed Jacks is that Brando turned Neider's Hendry Jones into a hero "and that's not the point of the story. Billy the Kid was no hero. He was a gunfighter, a real killer." Yet as he must surely have sensed, Neider's attitudes toward Hendry Jones are far from clear-cut, infused with a dark romanticism much akin to his own complex and conflicted feelings about the Old West, Western heroes and outlaws, and the Western itself as they would be given expression in his television and especially his later film work. Neider had taken a slice of Western history and legend and plumbed it for psychological verity and mythic reverberation without allowing it to become in the least self-conscious or pretentious, yet at the same time told a gripping story that could be enjoyed for itself alone. The shocks of recognition the burgeoning filmmaker felt upon first reading it must have been revelatory: here was both a progenitor and a fellow traveler. A closer look at Neider's novel, its primarysources, and Peckinpah's early screenplay will thus help fill a missing chapter in both the director's artistic biography and the story of how his last Western film came to be made. But long before any of these a sheriff wrote a little book about an outlaw he had tracked down and killed in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

CHAPTER 2

Garrett's Narrative

I knew both these men intimately, and each made history in his own way. There was good mixed with the bad in Billy the Kid and bad mixed with the good in Pat Garrett. Both were distinctly human, both remarkable personalities. No matter what they did in the world or what the world thought of them, they were my friends. Both were real men. Both were worth knowing.

—Sallie Chisum

Just about everyone who sets out to write something about Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett begins in the same place: a little book, published in 1882, a year after the sheriff shot and killed the young outlaw, that laid the groundwork, established the characters, and set the terms for virtually every history, biography, pulp novel, serious novel, drama, teleplay, screenplay, and movie about them. It carries an almost comically long title:

The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid,
The Noted Desperado of the Southwest,
Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood
Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico,
Arizona, and Northern Mexico
by Pat F. Garrett
Sheriff of Lincoln Co., N.M.,
by whom he was finally hunted down and
captured by killing him
A Faithful and Interesting Narrative

There is much that is worthy of note here, beginning with the fact that Garrett did not write the book: he had it ghostwritten by a man named Marshall Ashmun Upson, commonly known as "Ash." Born in South Carolina in 1828, Upson lived a peripatetic life that led him to Connecticut, New York, Ohio, Colorado, and Utah, along the way practicing the trades of printer, journalist, newspaperman, and editor (at various times throughout his life he also tried his hand as silver miner, storekeeper, notary, stagecoach agent, and justice of the peace) before settling down as the postmaster in Roswell, New Mexico, where he and Garrett became friends (he eventually lived on Garrett's ranch).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810130890
• ISBN 13: 9780810130890
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 456