STACK #139 May 2016

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Major Dundee (1965) Directed by Sam Peckinpah Mounting Problems During the Mexican Location Shoot Part 3:

B y early January 1964, two thirds of the Major Dundee script had been completed and the film’s secondary characters all cast. Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones, John Davis Chandler and R.G. Armstrong, who had featured in Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country , had all been assigned roles. These fine character actors, together with Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor and Ben Johnson, who were also cast, would later become known throughout the industry as "The Peckinpah Stock Company". But as the cast and crew prepared to leave for Mexico in late January, Peckinpah received devastating news from producer Jerry Bresler. The head of production at Columbia had been unexpectedly replaced by Mike Frankovich, who felt that a western film, even one starring Charlton Heston, did not warrant a lavish budget and certainly not road-show status.

Consequently, and without any discussion, Frankvich had cut the budget by $1.5 million and shaved 15 days off of the shooting schedule. An infuriated Peckinpah berated Bresler and Columbia’s “damn accountants”, further stating that he took this decision to be “a personal betrayal of the highest order”. His response was, “to hell with them” – he would make the film he wanted to make, confident that when the studio money men saw the first raw footage from the daily rushes, they would let him continue. But Peckinpah had a more immediate problem to contend

Richard Harris and producer Jerry Bresler on location in Mexico before Peckinpah sent the producer packing

his co-writer, Oscar Saul, had been able to develop an incredible cast of interesting characters and place them into various scenarios and individual vignettes, they had as yet been unable to pull them together into

together on the shoot”. When Peckinpah arrived at the film’s first location in Mexico, he was still in the foulest of moods. Ever the obsessive perfectionist, he had demanded that the studio’s wardrobe department authentically age all of the cast’s individual uniforms, so as to depict their progressive deterioration as Dundee’s men chase the Apache marauders further into Mexico. But when the uniforms were unpacked, Peckinpah detested them and subsequently fired all of the on-location wardrobe personnel. Amongst the new staff flown in was a young wardrobe assistant, who immediately impressed Peckinpah with his innovative idea of lightly blowtorching the uniforms to give

Chuck Heston and Sam Peckinpah discuss the next scene to be shot

with – he was working from an incomplete screenplay. This had resulted from the time constraint placed on him to completely rewrite the unworkable script originally written by Harry Julian Fink. Although Peckinpah and

a cohesive story with a credible ending. Saul expressed his grave concerns to Peckinpah – the complete story structure was so weak, it would probably cause the plot to flounder. Peckinpah replied, “Don’t worry, it’ll come

MAY 2016

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