An informal onlooker might need assumed Sam Peckinpah didn’t know who Bob Dylan was after they met throughout preproduction on Pat Garrett and Billy the Child. On the urging of screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, Dylan had agreed to put in writing music for and play a minor function within the Western from the auteur of The Wild Bunch, The Getaway and Straw Canine. However the movie’s editor, Roger Spottiswoode, tells a distinct story.
Peckinpah was in a hacienda exterior Durango, Mexico. It was a sizzling day, and he was in a bathtub, bare, holding forth earlier than hangers-on when Dylan arrived. Actress Katy Jurado was pouring drinks. “Sam’s going, ‘Convey Bobby Dylin a drink. Bobby Dylin wants a drink,’ ” remembers Spottiswoode. Peckinpah stored mispronouncing his identify and making him uncomfortable. “It appeared to me that Dylan didn’t prefer to be in firm he didn’t know, or didn’t like,” Spottiswoode continues. “However Sam wouldn’t let him go. … He mentioned one thing like, ‘I hear you play a reasonably imply guitar, proper? And also you write songs and issues?’ Dylan says, ‘Uh, yeah, uh …’ ‘Properly, Bobby, I’d love to listen to a tune. Play us a tune.’ ‘I don’t actually try this, Sam.’ ‘You don’t try this? You don’t have a guitar? … Katy, Katy, get him a guitar! There’s a mariachi band [playing] on the market, the person wants a fucking guitar.’ ”
Jurado discovered one and handed it to Dylan. Spottiswoode remembers: “Dylan doesn’t need it, he’s standing by the bathtub, Sam’s dick floating within the water. Sam’s smiling, ingesting and appears utterly at residence, and we’re all watching. … It looks like he simply doesn’t know any higher, however Sam knew quite a bit. There was somebody on his turf, an even bigger identify. It was the most effective theater on this planet.”
This story appeared within the Feb. 12 difficulty of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.
