In 1963, Sam Peckinpah was hired by Columbia Pictures to make Major Dundee, a sprawling cavalry picture set in the Southwest in the closing days of the American Civil War. Peckinpah and Columbia had high ambitions for the film, which would begin shooting in and around Durango, Mexico in February of 1964. By the time the movie was released at the end of that year, Peckinpah's career lay in tatters and many in the industry believed the erratic genius would never make another major motion picture. One of the people who feared this was Peckinpah himself. He put up a brave front, but when alone with his second wife, Begonia Palacios, Sam broke down, sobbing uncontrollably.
Five years later, Peckinpah came roaring off the barroom floor to make his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, which remains to this day the greatest western ever made.
The truth is, Peckinpah needed to "fail" with Major Dundee before he could make The Wild Bunch. Dundee made The Wild Bunch possible.
This is because in writing, directing, and virtually every art form, a creator learns more from their "failures" than they do from their "successes." You have to fail to succeed. Often you need to fail many times.
In interviews, Peckinpah often blamed Columbia for the Dundee disaster. The studio cut the film's $4.5 million budget to $3 million shortly before shooting commenced,. This meant 15 days would have to be shaved from the 75-day shooting schedule, which ruined many of Peckinpah's meticulous plans for the production. The producer, Jerry Bresler, and the studio brass failed to support Peckinpah's creative vision. In post production, the studio took the film away from Sam, barred him from the lot, and ruthlessly recut the movie. The film that was released to theaters in February of 1965 was a mangled monstrosity.
But Peckinpah shared an equal portion of the blame. The screenplay that he wrote with Oscar Saul had a terrific beginning, filled with brilliant compelling scenes. But it began to unravel at the halfway point and became a sloppy meandering mess that failed to pay off the powerful character arcs and themes it had been so painstakingly set up. Peckinpah was keenly aware of the screenplay's flaws, but feared losing the star, Charlton Heston, if they delayed shooting, and if he lost Heston, the picture might have been scrubbed altogether by Columbia.
So Peckinpah and his crew departed for Mexico with a deeply flawed script. Sam told Saul he would rewrite the screenplay on location and fix all of the problems. But this never happened because the production's logistical problems devoured all of Peckinpah's attention and energy.
And it was Peckinpah who created the logistical problems. Sam had never taken on a production of this magnitude. He had created the hit TV show The Rifleman (1957), and The Westerner (1959), which was the greatest half-hour western ever produced for television, and had written and directed a low budget feature film that became a sensation, Ride the High Country (1962).
While prepping Major Dundee, Sam laid out a production schedule that would take his company of actors and technicians on a forced march across central Mexico from one far flung primitive location to the next, in a quest to deliver a western with the epic scope of Lawrence of Arabia. But the frequent company moves across vast distances and working under hideous conditions exhausted the actors, the crew, and Peckinpah himself, which was another factor in the finished film's shortcomings.
Peckinpah got his shot at redemption three years later when the new head of Warner Brothers, Ken Hyman, green-lit The Wild Bunch. Sam quickly demonstrated that he had learned from his mistakes. He spent three months rewriting the screenplay until it was tightly crafted with brilliant character arcs that led to a stunning and satisfying climax.
Then he laid out a production schedule with locations that were tightly grouped around the Mexican towns of Parras and Torreon, with roads and infrastructure to support the crew. There would be no exhausting trek across Mexico this time. That decision lifted a tremendous burden off of Peckinpah, his cast, and his crew so they could concentrate on bringing Sam's brilliant script to the screen.
After critics praised The Wild Bunch as one of the masterpieces of the 1960s Peckinpah himself reflected on how the learning experience of Dundee made The Wild Bunch possible. Peckinpah pointed out that Dundee was not a failure, but an important stepping stone that enabled him to grow as a filmmaker.
Over the course of my 48-years as a professional writer, I have experienced the same dynamic many times.
After having great success with the first play that I wrote and directed, Memoirs of an Awkward Lover, I decided in 1981 to write a second wildly ambitious play about Buster Keaton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a number of other writers marooned in an office at MGM Studios in the 1940s. Keaton and Fitzgerald were both brought on the payroll at that studio within a week of each other in 1938 -- Keaton as a gag writer, Fitzgerald as a script polisher who could add prestige to some MGM projects.
Both found themselves in kind of limbo, sitting for hours in their office with no concrete writing assignments. This seemed to me to be the perfect setting for writing a kind of Waiting For Godot in a movie studio. The play would examine the creative processes of a once great slapstick clown and a literary legend who had fallen on hard times.
I labored very hard on the script and directed it at The Beverly Playhouse in 1982. It was a much more ambitious production than Memoirs. I spent a fortune on the sets and rehearsed with the actors for months before it opened. We had a fantastic premiere. The audience laughed and cried throughout and applauded wildly at the end.
Unfortunately, there were also a number of critics in the audience and they savaged the play, pronouncing it a pretentious catastrophe. Ticket sales plummeted and investors -- including my father and older brother -- lost everything.
I was devastated. After reading the reviews, I agreed with the critics and never looked at the play again.
Until last week, when I decided to read Under the Nutcracker for the first time since its disastrous run. What motivated me to look at it 44 years after it belly flopped? I recently spoke at the International Buster Keaton Society's annual convention in Muskegon, Michigan. I described the origins of my obsession with Keaton -- how my father had introduced me to his work when I was a boy. And how a few years later I read the biography Keaton, by Rudi Blesh. It described Buster's conflicted relationship with his father, which mirrored my relationship with my Dad.
I also discussed Under the Nutcracker. Afterward, a member of the audience -- Mark Bernstein, who runs a community theater in the Midwest -- asked if he could read the play. So I mailed him a copy. Days later he emailed that he had read it in one sitting and loved it. He offered a detailed and flattering analysis of the characters and themes and praised the scope of the comedic and tragic elements.
That caught my interest, so I broke open the play and read it last weekend. I was pleasantly surprised. Under the Nutcracker is deeply flawed -- the climax doesn't quite work -- but the dialogue is smooth and fluid and funny and psychologically rich, as are the themes about the demons writers struggle with as they try to survive in a mercenary marketplace. I could see how the play helped me refine a sophisticated stye of dialogue that later enabled me to be extremely successful in television.
So it wasn't a failure at all -- despite its shortcomings. It was a stepping stone -- as Major Dundee had been for Peckinpah -- that allowed me to ascend to greater achievements.
I now love the play with all my heart and regret that I allowed critical voices to alienate me from my offspring.
I had a similar experience with my first novel -- Prodigal Son -- which was rejected by publishers who found it to be overwritten and pretentious. They were right.
I had been inspired to write it after reading Ken Kesey's masterpiece, Sometimes a Great Notion. That book blew the top of my head off with its brilliant exploration of the complexities of an American family. Kesey jumped back and forth in time and switched point of view at lightning speed, sometimes in mid sentence!
I had been having great success as a magazine writer and decided it was time to take on the challenge of a novel. I wanted to write about my father's Dickensian childhood in the steel mill town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania. So in 1985 I sold everything I had and moved there for a year and over the course of two years wrote a 2500-page manuscript that I later pared back to 1200 pages.
I tried too hard to copy Kesey's technique instead of developing my own, and I lacked the maturity to bring sufficient complexity to the characters.
Objectively, this project could be deemed a "failure." Except it was anything but that.
My father didn't want me to go to McKeesport. He was afraid I would discover he never graduated high school and had been a juvenile delinquent who was forced by a judge to join the Marines to avoid jail time. Dad threatened to "disown" me if I went to McKeesport. I broke down crying and said I had to go. Dad muttered, "Well, I'm sorry I told you anything about my childhood."
But when it came time for me to depart, Dad drove me to the airport and lingered at the gate until I boarded the plane. A month after I arrived in McKeesport, Dad called to ask if I had found an apartment. I told him I had. He asked where it was located. I told him, "On Union Avenue." He shouted: "Oh my fucking god, you're on Union Avenue? I don't believe it!"
A month later he called to say he was coming to McKeesport. And so the two of us slept in my studio apartment in an old mill worker's house. He slept on the bed, I slept on the barcalounger. A shower curtain shielded my window from the street. Dad kept muttering in wonder all night, "I can't believe I'm back on Union Avenue."
In the days that followed we visited the apartment he grew up in and knocked on the door. An elderly couple lived there and they remembered Dad's parents. They invited us in. We toured the cramped rooms and stood in the bedroom where my father was born. Later, we visited his father's grave. Dad's father -- a McKeesport dentist who everybody called Doc Weddle -- had rested in an unmarked grave for more than forty years, until Dad convinced his brother to contribute to the expense of a grave stone. I watched Dad count the steps and turn at a tree to find the grave -- something he had been doing since his father died when Dad was 12 years old.
In the year that I lived there, I conducted hundreds of interviews with a wide cross section of veterans from McKeesport's halcyon days in the 1930s. By the end of 1985, I could speak to them with in-depth knowledge, as if I had actually lived in McKeesport during the 30s.
In 1985 the town was dying before my eyes. U.S. Steel caved into pressure from Wall Street and diversified by investing in oil companies and foreign steel mills. It refused to modernize the mill in McKeesport because Wall Street insisted it would be more profitable to simply suck money out of the mill as it gradually deteriorated. While I was there the great blast furnaces were torn down and sold as scrap metal. The once grand Memorial Movie Theater -- where my father had gone with Doc to see the great silent movie clown Harry Langdon perform -- was also torn down. As the brick walls tumbled to Earth, a group of old men who had gone there as kids stood on the sidewalk watching and remembering all of the shows they had seen there.
Today rubble is all that remains of McKeesport. The town that had produced all of the steel pipe used in America when we were an industrial powerhouse is no more. McKeesport vanished along with America's once robust industrial capacity. Because Wall Street wanted to make a quick buck.
Looking back, I realize writing that novel was one of the great adventures of my life. I am so glad I did it.
And, it transformed me into a mature prose writer. Every day for two years I wrote anywhere from 6,000 to 9,000 words a day. By the time I finished, I had the creative muscles to attempt a more mature work.
That work became: "If They Move, Kill 'Em!" The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. When I began the Peckinpah biography, I decided to make the prose much simpler and reader friendly because I wanted to reach a larger audience. And yet because of my McKeesport novel, I now had the skill to make the prose sing and to bring scenes vividly to life.
It's ironic that in writing about Peckinpah, I followed a similar creative journey.
So there is no such thing as a failure in writing. Because each project is a step in the journey and each step takes you closer to amazing discoveries.
