1 - The Wild Bunch: The Screenplay

Summary

Any script that's written changes at least thirty percent from the time you begin preproduction: ten percent while you fit your script to what you discover about your locations, ten percent while your ideas are growing as you rehearse your actors who must grow into their parts because the words mean nothing alone, and ten percent while the film is finally being edited. It may change more than this but rarely less.

Sam Peckinpah

If ever there was a film that absolutely demonstrates the validity of the auteur theory as it is commonly understood – that the director is the “author” of a film – it is surely The Wild Bunch. Of the hundreds of pieces written about this film, I can't think of a single one that doesn't rest upon – indeed, that even thinks of questioning – the assumption that it is, first, last, and always, Peckinpah's and only Peckinpah's creation. Yet he did not come up with the original story, nor did he write the first screenplay. And though he did a substantial rewrite that transformed the material, amazingly little is known for certain about how the project began or, for that matter, about the precise contours of the way he developed the story and made it his own. What did he keep, what did he drop, what did he change, invent, or reinvent for himself?

For a long time these questions were unanswerable in any detail because the requisite materials, namely, the various versions and drafts of the screenplay, were scattered around and unavailable.