STACK May 2016 Issue 139

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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
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
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
visit EXTRAS
22 MAY 2016
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
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
Major Dundee (1965) Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Mounting Problems During
the Mexican Location Shoot
Part 3:
Richard Harris and producer Jerry Bresler on location in Mexico
before Peckinpah sent the producer packing
Chuck Heston and Sam Peckinpah
discuss the next scene to be shot