Synopses & Reviews
Almost as famous for the legendary excesses of his personal life as for his films, Sam Peckinpah (1925-1984) cemented his reputation as one of the great American directors with movies such as
The Wild Bunch and
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Max Evans, one of Peckinpah's best friends, experienced the director's mercurial character and personal demons firsthand. In this enthralling memoir we follow Evans and Peckinpah through conversations in bars, family gatherings, binges on drugs and alcohol, struggles with film producers and executives, and Peckinpah's abusive behavior--sometimes directed at Evans himself.
Evans's stories--most previously unpublished--provide a uniquely intimate look at Peckinpah, their famous friends (including Lee Marvin, Brian Keith, Joel McCrea, and James Coburn), and the business of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s.
Review
"Director Sam Peckinpah, the mad genius of film, managed to drive away almost everyone who worked with him or drank with him. Max Evans stayed loyal to the end. His graphic reflections in Goin' Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All Our Friends make you wonder how he did it."--Richard Gaughran, James Madison University
Review
"A remarkable memoir by a true westerner, Max Evans, on the wild, turbulent life and career of the great Sam Peckinpah, a man who created so much, and destroyed so much, in his all-too-brief life."--John L. Simons, coauthor of Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study
Review
"There's perhaps no writer who more vividly and colorfully expresses New Mexico cowboy culture than Ol' Max Evans. . . . [This] book is chockablock with wild and woolly tales, but according to Evans, the Peckinpah who regularly visited him in New Mexico 'was a whole different human being' than the raucous, often dangerous Peckinpah of filmmaking lore."
--Variety
Synopsis
In this enthralling memoir we follow Evans and Peckinpah through conversations in bars, family gatherings, binges on drugs and alcohol, struggles with film producers and executives, and Peckinpah's abusive behavior--sometimes directed at Evans himself.
About the Author
Max Evans, a novelist, artist, one-time cowboy, miner, and dealer in antiquities, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Among his many lifetime achievements are the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Western Writers of America's Owen Wister Award for lifelong contributions to the field of Western literature, and, most recently, the Texas Institute of Letters Lon Tinkle Award. His novels
The Rounders and
The Hi-Lo Country were made into feature cult films.
Robert Nott has been a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican for more than fifteen years. Among his previous books are The Films of Randolph Scott and He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield.