CHUD’s fine friend Casey Moore sent this awesome scoop in yesterday. It was such a hectic newsday that we didn’t get around to posting it. But now it can shine away from all things Marvel and DC.
Sam Peckinpah devotees have undoubtedly heard of The Texans, one of the scripts the troubled director was hammering away on before his untimely death in 1984. It’s never been seen or read before.
Until now. Producer Al Ruddy turned the whole thing over to The New Yorker (accompanied with a funky backstory involving John Milius and a Rhodesian Ridgeback) who then posted the first fifteen pages of it online. A commenter on the story notes that The Texans was never truly lost, and that 50 drafts of it survive in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library. Nevertheless, this is the first time a far flung public has gotten a peek at it.
It’s a fascinating and messy script. It kicks off at a premiere of a movie, then veers into an old feud and impending marriage between Commanches and a white family called the Trentons. There’s a rattlesnake fight (the rattlesnakes are the weapons) and a knife fight. Ears are severed. Manhood is belittled. It’s pure Peckinpah.
It then jumps ahead further, into “present day,” as the modern descendants of the Trentons enjoy their cattle empire bought with the blood of their Commanche neighbors.
I want to read the rest. Or at least a review of the rest. (Mr. Beaks, will you?)
It’s definitely a must read for a Peckinpah fan. And in these The Wild Bunch remaking times, it’s good to read something original from such a man.
[Thanks again Casey, who found it thanks to Ain’t It Cool News and Mr. Beaks.]