“I got out alive, which was great”: when Sam Peckinpah pulled a gun on a producer
Although his talent was never in question and he made several phenomenal features, Sam Peckinpah developed a habit of being his own worst enemy as he repeatedly found himself cast out onto the fringes of Hollywood.
The filmmaker forever changed the way cinema depicted on-screen violence with the balletic bloodshed of The Wild Bunch, with many of his films exploring the corruption and brutality of the human experience. In what should have been the most fruitful period of his professional life, Peckinpah instead found himself regularly antagonising cast members and producers alike.
Falling deeper into his alcoholism and reliance on substance abuse to get him through the day, Peckinpah’s mood swings and propensity for exploding into fits of rage made him a dangerous proposition for any studio to hire on a major production, but he still ended up holding conversations about helming one of the biggest ever made at the time.
Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Bring Me the Head of Alfred Garcia were more than enough to display that Peckinpah hadn’t lost a step when he was firing on all cylinders throughout the 1970s, but he could never escape his dark side. It was clear in his work that he was fascinated with guns and would even regularly open fire on the furniture in his own home, but he took things too far when he pulled one out during a meeting.
As an expensive, effects-heavy, and technologically innovative comic book adaptation, Peckinpah hardly stood out as the obvious candidate to take the reins on Superman. And yet, during an exhaustive and extensive search that ultimately settled on Richard Donner having worked its way through many of Hollywood’s most notable auteurs, the maverick auteur ended up sitting down with Ilya Salkind to talk it over.
“Everybody – or I would say a lot of them – were very interested,” the producer explained to Barry M. Freiman. “Peter Yates, Sam Peckinpah, my god, we met a lot of guys, very interesting people. We went to Friedkin, we went to Coppola, we went to everyone. Yates really wanted to do it.”
There were plenty of names in the running, then, but only one of them ended up pulling a gun. It quickly entered industry folklore that during Salkind’s conversation with Peckinpah about potentially helming Superman, the director told the upstart producer to shut up, asked him what he knew about making movies, and waved a pistol around.
It’s so insane that it could only be true, which Salkind confirmed on the film’s audio commentary track by effectively acknowledging that his opposite number found the producer’s tender years to be a disadvantage. “I had a meeting with Sam Peckinpah. I got out alive which was great, but we obviously didn’t make the film together,” he said. “I was very, very young. I’m still very, very young, but I was even younger, so it did not happen.”
Peckinpah pulling a gun was hardly out of the ordinary given his reputation, but even if Salkind had wanted him to commit, he wasn’t exactly the right fit for a project like Superman.
