Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage

Sam Peckinpah is, by his own admission and that of almost everyone else in this richly entertaining book, a director who needs adversity to get the juices flowing. As shooting goes on, complications multiply and tensions increase. The wild man, fortified by booze and shots of vitamin B12, rides the whirlwind he creates firing the incompetents beneath him, baiting the ones over him, and bullying and testing and goading the rest . . . [This book gives] a nuts and bolts account of the . . . complex interplay of power and art or movie and myth-making as practiced by an idiosyncratic but skillfull manipulator. -New York Times Book Review