Sam Peckinpah fired as director
I'm reading David Weddle's book on Sam Peckinpah, and there's a lot of information about this film, b/c apparently Peckinpah was attached to be the director right up through pre-production and was fired basically because he did not want to do the movie with Ann-Margret. He worked on the rewrites and probably some of his stuff did end up in the final film. Marty Ransohoff hired him on the strength of "Ride the High Country", he was paid $67,750 (which he collected despite being fired).
anyway there is some information here that people who are into this movie would probably find fascinating, so I'm inclined to throw some of it out there for consideration. For example, this:
There was no screenplay, only a ninety-seven page treatment by Paddy Chayefsky, which Sam disliked. A series of writers -- Frank Gilroy, Ring Lardner Jr, and Charles Eastman -- were hired to flesh it out to a script, but each delivered half-baked drafts filled with convoluted plot twists and cardboard characters. ..... Peckinpah ended up cutting the best sequences out of the various drafts and pasting them together to come up with a workable screenplay.
Ok so that's interesting because I never heard before that Chayefsky was involved in the script at any point. All right, so Ransohoff and Peckinpah clashed right away because Rarnsohoff wanted a popcorn movie, and Peckinpah wanted to do it in black & white and wanted to focus on the dark aspects of the story. Then Spencer Tracy, who was supposed to star as "The Man", dropped out because they wouldn't pay him what he wanted. Picking up the story there in Weddle's text:
Sam agreed that Robinson was a good substitute, but was disappointed to lose Tracy. Then Ransohoff came up with his suggestions for the two female leads: Sharon Tate -- a young starlet he had under contract and under his bed sheets -- and Ann-Margret. The two voluptuous, swinging-sixties fantasy girls were perfect for the "popsicle" movie that Ransohoff wanted to make, but hideously wrong for the film Peckinpah envisioned.
Sam voiced his objections to both actresses with lacerating sarcasm. Ransohoff backed off on Tate, agreeing to cast Tuesday Weld -- a marginally better choice -- instead. But he refused to give up Ann-Margret.
I'm not going to go into all the rest of it with how Peckinpah got fired off the film -- you can read the book and find out yourself, or just look it up in the index and read those parts. But it has something to do with Peckinpah doing a hotel party scene with Rip Torn, where Ransohoff essentially accused Peckinpah of making something pornographic, as a pretext for firing him (and attempting to not pay him for his work on the picture).
Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo' share