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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best movie-related book in recent years.,
By
efudd (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
An immersive, compelling, brilliant book.
Francois Truffaut once wrote, "I demand a film express either *the joy
of making cinema* or *the agony of making cinema*. I am not at all
interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those
films that do not pulse." Sam Peckinpah's production of Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid overflowed with "the joy of making cinema" and "the agony
of making cinema" simultaneously. Paul Seydor's incisive, evocative and
inventive blend of cultural analysis, movie criticism and
behind-the-scenes storytelling matches it pulse for pulse. Readers new
to Peckinpah will grow to understand why he is key to our understanding
of a certain independent, self-destructive American character, as well
as a revered moviemaker. Readers who are already fans will savor this
book's revelations. A must-read for anyone who wants to comprehend the
battle that American artists wage for self-expression, or the group
inspiration generated by a collaborative art at its best, or simply how a
film professional approaches the reading of a script. A one-of-a-kind
experience.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant and thorough -- a must read,
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
Simply put, this book is a must for anyone
seriously interested in Sam Peckinpah's work, the American studio system
of the 1970s, or the layered mythology surrounding the story of Billy
the Kid and the man who killed him, Sheriff Pat Garrett. In examining
this quintessential story from the American West, Paul Seydor carefully
analyzes Peckinpah's film, from its sources to its various
interpretations to its growing reputation since its release in 1973. No
other critical work I can think of, save Pauline Kael's remarkable The
Citizen Kane Book, so thoroughly explores the complexities of the
filmmaking process with such clarity and insight. Readable and
rewarding, it is classic study in every sense.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Art and Passion, History and Myth,
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
Paul Seydor's first book on Sam Peckinpah became
the defining study of his western films and an indispensable work for
anyone seriously interested in this director. Reading Seydor on
Peckinpah was like reading F.O. Matthiessen on Hawthorne and Melville or
Edmund Wilson on our Civil War literature: he illuminated the art
while setting it in the context of the artist's journey through the
forces at work in his time. He treated Peckinpah not only as a film
director but as the major American artist he was.
One of the most intriguing and valuable sections of that book was on Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, a creation marred by its production battles, yet still uniquely captivating. As Seydor says, it was both a haunted and a haunting work. At first, it was haunting to think of what it might have been; as the years passed, you started to see it was haunting for its own mesmerizing quality; you realized it was haunted by ghosts from the past, ghosts of its creator, ghosts that can rise out of our own choices and compromises. Paul Seydor, in his fine and fascinating new book, has taken this one legendary film for his subject, both narrowing and broadening his focus: he explores the deep passions of life and art, as well as the business decisions and clashing egos, that made the film what it is; and he returns to its ultimate source in the strangely enduring story of Garrett and Billy, again placing Peckilnpah's art within his own legend and the legends the American West has generated, showing how our history and our art create and reflect each other. Paul Seydor is a graceful, engaging writer, a good storyteller himself, informed by long years in hollywood and by a life's engagement with writers and thinkers beyond the film world. Anyone interested in Sam Peckinpah, filmmaking, westerns, the American West itself, the emergence of art from our common history, and the struggles of an artist with himself and his world, will find this book gripping and enlightening.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Landmark Piece of Film Scholarship!,
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes
fact, print the legend." Paul Seydor rejects this argument, posed at
the end of John Ford's autumnal masterpiece, "The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance," released the same year (1962) as a young Sam Peckinpah's first
masterpiece, "Ride the High Country."
It's not that Seydor sees no value in legends. Nor does he believe that facts alone suffice. He believes that only by tracing the complex webs we weave between the two can we come close to the truth. And so Seydor ventures into the hall of mirrors -- the legends, myths, self deceptions, lies, and yes, facts, that surround the making of Peckinpah's last masterpiece, "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid." But he does not stop there. He continues deeper into the labyrinth of tall tales woven around the lives of the two historical characters the film is based on. The result is not merely a landmark piece of film scholarship, or an important historical document - though it is both - but a fascinating inquiry into our need to create fictions in our art, our personal lives, and in our collective understanding of the American psyche. -- David Weddle, author of "If They Move... Kill 'Em! -- The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah"
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A critical masterwork devoted to a magnificently flawed masterpiece,
By
Alan Axelrod (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
For me, "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" is the
most challenging film by one of America's most challenging filmmakers.
As someone who has read everything Paul Seydor has written on Sam
Peckinpah and who treasures his Oscar-nominated 1996 documentary, "The
Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage," I am convinced that only he could have
met the challenges posed by the film and the director. To understand
Hemingway, we must understand not just "The Sun Also Rises," but "Death
in the Afternoon." To come fully to terms with the achievement of Sam
Peckinpah, we must appreciate not just "The Wild Bunch," but this
magnificently and maddeningly flawed masterpiece. Seydor has given us
all we need to achieve this level of insight. It is a landmark of film
criticism, film history, and creative biography, exhibiting both
critical rigor and literary elegance. In life, Peckinpah was all too
often the victim of both the studios and his own demons. Fortunately for
us, the achievement this director has left behind has found a great
interpreter and evangelist.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Epic dive into work of an American film genius, a legendary outlaw and the rough tough world of Hollywood filmmaking,
By
Steven Gaydos "High Sierra Man" (Santa Monica) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
This book is EPIC!!!!!!!!! It's a page-turner
for those willing to saddle up for an intricate plot that spans 140
years and involves many brilliant artists, some outlaws and some men of
law and government many of whom are much worse than said outlaws, much
drinking, lots of shooting, lots of fighting, with Studio chiefs going
to toe with renegade poets and all the while a splendid display of
literary/cinematic genius is never far out of Seydor's gun sights!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Latest Written Work in the Authentic Career of a Great Scholar-Critic-Theorist,
By
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
I've admired Paul Seydor's work since the late
1970s, when he taught The Wild Bunch at USC. In the preface to my
Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction
(1984) I said: "In the academic study of popular culture, some recent
film studies are especially close to my work. I point to Paul Seydor's
chapter on The Wild Bunch in Peckinpah: The Western Films (1980) as an
analysis of the aesthetic implications of textual evidence so much like
my own work that I wish I had written it, for with a change in my
subtitle it could have been run into this book." Later, after we lost
touch, I plotted to reconnect through a "me and Paul" article for
Studies in the Novel (Fall 1995), "The Auteur-Author Paradox: How
Critics of the Cinema and the Novel Talk about Flawed or even
`Mutilated' Texts." There I praised film critics and lamented the
obtuseness of most literary critics. Here, as a kind of overview of
Seydor's lifelong methods, is some of what I wrote:
"A book which deals repeatedly with flawed films is Peckinpah: The Western Films (1980), in which Paul Seydor studies the extant forms of the cinematic texts and relates those forms to the circumstances of production. Writing fresh cinematic history, he `reads' the forms of the text in the light of biographical, historical, and specifically textual evidence. The result is scholarship on important American aesthetic documents, and at the same time it is the best sort of criticism, that which grows out of comprehensive scholarship. Repeatedly, his scholarship allows Seydor to break free of previous criticism, such as analyses which deplored a screenwriter's or the director's failures at characterization when in fact the failure (a real failure, accurately identified by the critic) resulted from the studio's alterations of the `text.' Seydor says of the studio's cutting of The Wild Bunch: `many filmgoers and critics familiar only with the cut version were, and are, bothered by the missing scenes and have, as a consequence, criticized the film for its alleged weak characterizations and ill-motivated characters.' Peckinpah was blamed when he was innocent - when, in fact, he had been victimized." I continued: "In Seydor's study a recurrent motif is the mangling of films during one or another stage of production and another is the creation of coherent films which were subsequently mangled. Often in Seydor's woeful tales what is lost is motivation. He quotes Peckinpah on having to sit in the cutting room and watch someone else cut down Major Dundee: `"What I worked so hard to achieve - all of Dundee's motivation (what it was that made him the man he was) - was gone."' This was material Peckinpah had `both written and shot and cared very much about,' but which the studio `had thought unnecessary to the total effect of the film.' (This notion that the `total' effect can be achieved without a great deal of the total material is one that links the studio executives to textual theorists and literary critics.) For all his sympathy with Peckinpah, Seydor judiciously explains that some movies have been damaged less than others. The `mutilation' of The Wild Bunch in no way approached `what was done to Major Dundee (or what, later, would be done to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid),' Seydor says, yet `the net effect of the cuts is to diminish the epic scope slightly, reduce some of the ironies moderately, and lessen the complexity of characters and character motivations considerably.'" More from "The Auteur-Author Paradox": "In discussing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Seydor acknowledges that critics have suggested that the movie seems to have suffered little from whatever cuts were made. For leaving this impression he credits Gordon Carroll and Roger Spottiswoode: they fought with the studio on Peckinpah's behalf so as to `guide the picture through the bargaining sessions with some of its dramatic sense and unity preserved intact.' He describes what can survive as interpretable and powerful even after severe cuts: `since what was cut are those scenes in which character motivation, social pressure, and personal and professional obligation are seen to generate action, incident, and decision, the released version has, to be sure, a "ritualistic," "mythic," rather "existential" "purity" that is not without a certain hypnotic power, beauty, and fascination. All the same, that purity remains a pretty sporadic, because largely serendipitous, affair, and it is of no help whatever toward filling in the narrative lacunae.'" As I summarized, "Some of the undeniable power is adventitious, unintended by Peckinpah, and consequently uncontrolled. Informing Seydor's book is a belief that true artists strive to achieve old-fashioned aesthetic goals of coherence and even unity: `Many of the scenes [in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid] are interlocked with Peckinpah's usual intricacy so that, as with The Wild Bunch, removing something in one place usually means something else falling out or failing to cohere fifteen pages or several minutes later.'" With permission I put on record a description of the new book which Seydor made in an email in 2013: "The only other book I am aware of that is similar to this one in relating an episode or group of episodes in history to a film is Glenn Frankel's recent, very well received and superb book on The Searchers: the first and by far longest part of his book concerns the real child abductions on which the Alan LeMay novel and the John Ford film are based. This part of Frankel's book is also the one of the principal bases for the enthusiastic reviews it has received. My book is different inasmuch as a far greater share given over to Peckinpah's film and its filmic and literary antecedents and offering an insider's view of its making, the development of the screenplay, the difficulties of the production, and the incredibly contentious editing; but readers and reviewers do seem to like to have some solid historical background when actual incidents or figures of history are involved in works of art." Here is another comment from 2013: "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid now regularly appears on most lists of the ten to fifty (pick your number) best or most important Westerns. When the British tastemaker magazine Time Out published an annotated list of the fifty best Western films, Pat Garrett placed--are you ready for this?--number two. Yes, it's an idiosyncratic list in some ways, with The Wild Bunch placing fourteenth, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller first, but still . . . . It placed 126th on Empire Magazine's list of the `500 Greatest Movies of All Time' (movies, not Westerns as such). The popular book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die contains four Peckinpahs, including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The site Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 80 82% approval. Now I realize that most of these are not scholarly sources and some of them are even a little silly, as all lists are, but they nevertheless are important barometers of how and where books, films, plays, music, art, television shows and series, and so forth are situated in our culture, what the opinion leaders are paying attention to, and how something is regarded." These emails show Seydor at his commonsensical best, alert not just to the ramifications of his current project but to audience responses. In this new Northwestern UP book Seydor does not repeat what he has said earlier. I quote again from a 2013 email: "One of the things I am proudest of in the new book is that I've managed to examine this extraordinary film in entirely new ways and from entirely fresh perspectives with very little repetition of what I've written before. I managed to do something of the same thing when I revised Peckinpah: The Western Films into the Reconsideration, which is one reason why it was even more highly reviewed than the first edition, reviewers and readers alike appreciative that when I cover the same ground more than once, I do it from new perspectives, usually with new research, that result in original material. This is something I'm known for and I'd like to keep it that way." This is not boasting--it is a cool survey of the history of the place of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in Seydor's working life. (An aside: When we made contact after "The Auteur-Author Paradox" came out Seydor stopped off on a trip East, bringing with him to our house in SE Pennsylvania the rough cut of Tin Cup, a movie featuring my second cousin Bill Costner and his wife in a walk-on role at the end. We spotted an awkwardness and suggested an improvement. Paul acknowledged the awkwardness but gently explained that we did not have a clue about what a film editor could to do fix the problem. Paul Seydor is an honest man.) A practical textual theorist and aesthetician in all he writes on Peckinpah and all he incorporates into the editing of film, Seydor is absolutely aware of "the aesthetic implications of textual evidence," and that awareness consists of what he has gained through years of the most meticulous scholarship in written archival documents, oral histories, and archives in which different states of films are located as well as that derived from personal interchanges with, among others, actors, directors, crews, film critics, starting with Peckinpah himself. Seydor, an Oscar nominee, is a great scholar-critic-theorist as well as a film editor. His new book is very, very good.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
... on Sam Peckinpah Paul Seydor’s latest book is the best study of a single film I’ve ever read,
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
Paul Seydor’s Latest Book on Sam Peckinpah
Paul Seydor’s latest book is the best study of a single film I’ve ever read. Part One traces the several sources of Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973): what is known about the historical Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; Peckinpah’s adaptation of Charles Neider’s “The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones,” a 1956 novel which inspired Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks" (1961) (a film which includes virtually nothing of Peckinpah’s screenplay); Rudolph Wurlitzer’s original screenplay for “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (then entitled “Billy the Kid”); Wurlitzer’s several versions of the script eventually used by Peckinpah; and finally Peckinpah’s many changes to Wurlitzer’s screenplay, some drafted by Wurlitzer and some by Peckinpah himself. Seydor’s chapters on Neider’s novel, Wurlitzer’s original script, and the subsequent versions of the screenplay written by Wurlitzer or revised by Peckinpah are all groundbreaking, especially his incisive and sympathetic analyses of Wurlitzer’s scripts. Seydor’s mastery of these various materials sets his early chapters apart from anything previously written on Peckinpah’s great film. Part Two deals with a subject only Seydor could explore in such great and fascinating detail: the several versions of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” from the two preview versions assembled by Peckinpah, to the theatrical version released by MGM in 1973 after Peckinpah left the project, to the 2005 Special Edition prepared by Seydor. As the editor of the latest version, as well as Peckinpah’s foremost critic, Seydor knows all the relevant players, including Peckinpah and Peckinpah’s editors (Roger Spottiswoode, Garth Craven, Bob Wolfe), and his account of the film’s difficult production and even more traumatic postproduction is unlike anything we have read before, even in Seydor’s previous books. These eighty-five pages are richly detailed, rigorously objective (Peckinpah certainly emerges as no hero here), and almost ridiculously entertaining. This film’s flaws but ultimate greatness have never been presented so cogently. Part Three, entitled “Ten Ways of Looking at an Unfinished Masterpiece and Its Director,” offers ten brief essays by way of conclusion. Seydor covers a number of subjects, including criticism of his critical approach to Peckinpah, attacks on his Special Edition, and recent letters to Seydor in which Spottiswoode offers an insider’s view of what Peckinpah was trying to do in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” and Wurlitzer presents a take on what Peckinpah did to his script very different from the petulant outrage he expressed in 1973. Several of these “essays” allow Seydor to bring his overall reading of this important film to a completely satisfying conclusion. This is not only the best study of a single film I’ve ever read; it is also one of the best film studies I’ve encountered in any format.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Compelling Read,
By
tejaskip (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews
Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The
Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film (Paperback)
Paul Seydor's The Authentic Death and
Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story
of Peckinpah's Last Western Film is an instant classic. In these pages,
Sydor brilliantly manages the confluence of history, literature,
American mythology, and the production of a masterpiece by one of
America's greatest auteurs. This book is bound to both educate and
strike debate. In the end, though, its greatest virtue is as a
compelling read -- the insights offered by Rudy Wurlitzer about the
composition of the screenplay alone are worth the price of admission. I
can't think of a better book devoted to a particular film. And I can't
think of a film that merits this sort of inspired treatment more than
Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
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