User talk:RonPrice

SAM

Sam Peckinpah came into my life in the 1950s as a scriptwriter and director of several Western genre television series like The Westerner, Gunsmoke and The Rifleman. My mother sold our TV in 1957, after a six year life history in our house while I was in grades two to six. Occasionally I saw these westerns at the homes of friends during my late primary and high school days. I don’t recall seeing any of these Westerns after 1963. And Peckinpah was an unknown quantity. Knowing who a director was did not play a part in my knowledge inventory in primary and high school. When my pioneer life began in August 1962 on the homefront in Canada, Peckinpah’s film Ride the High Country had just been released in the USA(20/6/62). Again, if I knew anything about Peckinpah it is doubtful and if I even saw the film, I can not recall after 45 years. The same was true of his film Straw Dogs released six months after I arrived in my overseas pioneer post in 1971.

Watching a 90 minute BBC documentary tonight Sam Peckinpah: Man Of Iron on ABC2 in Australia put this director’s life squarely in the context of my own. I had not seen this TV doco made some 15 years ago. Peckinpah was born 19 years before me and I have now lived 23 more years than he. But we shared the stage for 40 years: 1944 to 1984. I don’t want to outline his entire biography. But it was clear that we shared some aspects of our life: obsessiveness, the theatrical element in daily life, mental illness, a world of major value shifts, the personal search for meaning in a violent and absurd world, the feeling of a need for redemption or deliverance from self, an emphasis on action and the poetic, the roller-coaster ride of reputation, health and career, the singular direction to our careers. –Ron Price with thanks to “Sam Peckinpah Internet Sites,” 23 March 2007.

It was good to know you, a little, Sam; better late than never, I suppose, even if you had to be dead for twenty-three years: your life was rockier than mine, more troubled and your mental-illness more horrific than mine. You were more successful in the wide-wide world, more obsessive, more famous, your relationships so very troubled: how did you stand it, Sam?

Did you find any redemption, deliverance in all your living? I found, quite early in my life when you were starting your first film & churning out those westerns, a Man who concentrated His energies on a pivotal purpose—to transmute His tribulations into instruments of redemption and to summon all the peoples of the Earth to the banner of unity through the copiousness of His writings.1

1The Universal House of Justice, 28 May 1992.

--Ron Price 24 March 2007