"If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!"

Author: David Weddle
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
“A probing biography of the enfant terrible of 1960s and 1970s film-making . . . exhaustive and endlessly intriguing.” —Booklist Written by the film critic and historian David Weddle, this fascinating account does critical justice to an important body of cinema as it spins the tale of David Samuel Peckinpah’s dramatic, overcharged life and the turbulent times through which he moved. Sam Peckinpah was born into a clan of lumberjacks, cattle ranchers, and frontier lawyers. After a hitch with the Marines, he made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features. In 1955 he began writing scripts for Gunsmoke; in less than a year he was one of the hottest writers in television, with two classic series, The Rifleman and The Westerner, to his credit. From there he went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah was both a hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, a filmmaker who defined his era as much as he was shaped by it. Rising to prominence in the social and political upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies, Peckinpah and his generation of directors—Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman—broke with convention and turned the traditional genres of Western, science fiction, war, and detective movies inside out. No other era in Hollywood has matched it for sheer energy, audacity, and originality; no one cut a wider path through that time than Sam Peckinpah. “Groundbreaking.” —Michael Sragow, The Atlantic

"If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!"

Author: David Weddle
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 453

Get Book

Book Description
“A probing biography of the enfant terrible of 1960s and 1970s film-making . . . exhaustive and endlessly intriguing.” —Booklist Written by the film critic and historian David Weddle, this fascinating account does critical justice to an important body of cinema as it spins the tale of David Samuel Peckinpah’s dramatic, overcharged life and the turbulent times through which he moved. Sam Peckinpah was born into a clan of lumberjacks, cattle ranchers, and frontier lawyers. After a hitch with the Marines, he made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features. In 1955 he began writing scripts for Gunsmoke; in less than a year he was one of the hottest writers in television, with two classic series, The Rifleman and The Westerner, to his credit. From there he went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah was both a hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, a filmmaker who defined his era as much as he was shaped by it. Rising to prominence in the social and political upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies, Peckinpah and his generation of directors—Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman—broke with convention and turned the traditional genres of Western, science fiction, war, and detective movies inside out. No other era in Hollywood has matched it for sheer energy, audacity, and originality; no one cut a wider path through that time than Sam Peckinpah. “Groundbreaking.” —Michael Sragow, The Atlantic

Sam Peckinpah

Sam Peckinpah PDF Author: David Weddle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571178841
Category : Motion picture producers and directors
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
This is the first major biography of Sam Peckinpah and is an attempt to do critical justice to an important contribution to the language of cinema as it spins the tale of Peckinpah's dramatic, overcharged life and the turbulent times through which he moved. Peckinpah was both a hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, a film-maker who defined his era as much as he was shaped by it. Rising to prominence in the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Peckinpah and his generation of directors - Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn and Robert Altman - broke with convention and turned the traditional genres of Western, science fiction, war and detective movies inside out. No other era in Hollywood has matched it for sheer audacity and originality, and no one has cut a wider path through that time than Sam Peckinpah.

Sam Peckinpah

Sam Peckinpah PDF Author: Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781934110645
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Collected interviews with the combustible director of The Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, and other films

Films of Sam Peckinpah

Films of Sam Peckinpah PDF Author: Neil Fulwood
Publisher: Batsford Books
ISBN: 1849942544
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A detailed look at the work of one of America's great film directors. Sam Peckinpah helped to redefine the Western, clearing the board of genre cliches in order to present an intelligent examination of the motivation behind, and effects of, violence. The accusations against Peckinpah for making violent films, both Westerns and non-Westerns, for the sake of it as well as misogyny have become cliches themselves. Like their creator, the men who walk or ride through Peckinpah's films are deep, complex and often flawed. Technical accomplishment and the ability to draw out great preformances from his actors are only part of what sets Peckinpah's Films apart. It is their depth and intensity that make them unique. This book takes an in-depth look at the man, his early work for television, and all his films. It covers the critical reception of his films, Peckinpah's approach to film direction, his on-set behaviour, and studio interference during editing. An Appraisal of the iconography of his films plus an analysis of recurring themes and pre-occupations show that his best work was the most personal.

A Uniquely American Epic

A Uniquely American Epic PDF Author: Michael Bliss
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813178169
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
One of the most innovative films ever made, Sam Peckinpah's motion picture The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. From the outset, the film was considered controversial because of its powerful, graphic, and direct depiction of violence, but it was also praised for its lush photography, intricate camera work, and cutting-edge editing. Peckinpah's tale of an ill-fated, aging outlaw gang bound by a code of honor is often regarded as one of the most complex and impactful Westerns in American cinematic history. The issues dealt with in this groundbreaking film—violence, morality, friendship, and the legacy of American ambition and compromise—are just as relevant today as when the film first opened. To acknowledge the significance of The Wild Bunch, this collection brings together some of the leading Peckinpah scholars and critics to examine what many consider to be the director's greatest work. The book's nine essays cover an array of topics. Explored are the function of violence in the film and how its depiction is radically different from what is seen in other movies, the background of the film's production, the European response to the film's view of human nature, and the strong sense of the Texas/Mexico milieu surrounding the film's action.

Kill Anything That Moves

Kill Anything That Moves PDF Author: Nick Turse
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805086919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a controversial history of the Vietnam War argues that American acts of violence against millions of Vietnamese civilians were a pervasive and systematic part of the war and that soldiers were deliberately trained and ordered to conduct hate-based slaughter campaigns.

Bloody Sam

Bloody Sam PDF Author: Marshall Fine
Publisher: Miramax
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
A comprehensive biography of the legendary creator of The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs and The Getaway, taking an aptly no-holds-barred look at his life, his vision and his influence on modern cinema. Famed and reviled in equal measure for his no-frills approach to violent realism, Peckinpah refused to compromise his ideas for his producers, with the result that his films were decried for their apparent amoralism as much as lauded for their groundbreaking style and savage intensity. A complete look at the life and work of a modern seer.

Billy the Kid on Film, 1911–2012

Billy the Kid on Film, 1911–2012 PDF Author: Johnny D. Boggs
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476603359
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A comprehensive filmography, this book is composed of lengthy entries on about 75 films depicting legendary New Mexico outlaw Billy the Kid—from the lost Billy the Kid (1911) to the blockbuster Young Guns (1988) to the direct-to-video 1313: Billy the Kid(2012) and everything in between. Each entry gives a synopsis, cast and credits, critical reception, and a discussion of the events of the films compared to the historical record. Among the entries are made-for-TV and direct-to-video films, foreign movies, and continuing television series in which Billy the Kid made an appearance.

Long Way Down

Long Way Down PDF Author: Jason Reynolds
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481438271
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch PDF Author: W. K. Stratton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 163286214X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
For the fiftieth anniversary of the film, W.K. Stratton's definitive history of the making of The Wild Bunch, named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the American Film Institute. Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch is the story of a gang of outlaws who are one big steal from retirement. When their attempted train robbery goes awry, the gang flees to Mexico and falls in with a brutal general of the Mexican Revolution, who offers them the job of a lifetime. Conceived by a stuntman, directed by a blacklisted director, and shot in the sand and heat of the Mexican desert, the movie seemed doomed. Instead, it became an instant classic with a dark, violent take on the Western movie tradition. In The Wild Bunch, W.K. Stratton tells the fascinating history of the making of the movie and documents for the first time the extraordinary contribution of Mexican and Mexican-American actors and crew members to the movie's success. Shaped by infamous director Sam Peckinpah, and starring such visionary actors as William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, and Robert Ryan, the movie was also the product of an industry and a nation in transition. By 1968, when the movie was filmed, the studio system that had perpetuated the myth of the valiant cowboy in movies like The Searchers had collapsed, and America was riled by Vietnam, race riots, and assassinations. The Wild Bunch spoke to America in its moment, when war and senseless violence seemed to define both domestic and international life. The Wild Bunch is an authoritative history of the making of a movie and the era behind it.