Goin' Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All Our Friends - by Max Evans (Hardcover)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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Evans's stories--most previously unpublished--provide a uniquely intimate look at Peckinpah, their famous friends (including Lee Marvin, Brian Keith, Joel McCrea, and James Coburn), and the business of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 Quotes

"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

"An engaging . . . collection of a cowboy's adventures in the moving pictures business during Hollywood's last golden age."--The Dallas Morning News

"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

"Evans's clear-eyed memoir not only relates the stories of booze- and drug-fueled binges that have become a standard part of Peckinpah lore, but also provides surprising glimpses of tenderness and sensitivity that enhanced Peckinpah's art and drew people like Evans into his orbit. . . . Film buffs, fans of Sam Peckinpah, and friends of Max Evans (who are legion) will enjoy this revealing book."--The Journal of Arizona History

"Readers familiar with Peckinpah's work will no doubt be interested in [Evans's] observations, as well as in the behind-the-scenes scoops Evans provides. But you need not be a Peckinpah fan to enjoy this memoir, which is interesting and entertaining enough to serve almost as a novel about a loose-cannon filmmaker and the people in his orbit or as a sort of roughneck-cowboy version of a Rat Pack tell-all. . . . There is great warmth in Goin' Crazy and a type of open-hearted storytelling that serves as a counterpoint to so many serious academic treatments of Peckinpah's life and work."--Pasatiempo

"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

"This absorbing, lively book shows us both the Peckinpah we'd expect to see and a Peckinpah whom many may not have known existed: the dreamer, the romantic, the sensitive man. A must for film buffs."--Booklist, starred review

"This intimate biography shares dozens of colorful stories for the first time, including some featuring the likes of Lee Marvin and James Coburn."--Cowboys & Indians