A casual onlooker might have assumed Sam Peckinpah didn’t know who Bob Dylan was when they met during preproduction on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. At the urging of screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, Dylan had agreed to write music for and play a minor role in the Western from the auteur of The Wild Bunch, The Getaway and Straw Dogs. But the film’s editor, Roger Spottiswoode, tells a different story.
Peckinpah was in a hacienda outside Durango, Mexico. It was a hot day, and he was in a tub, naked, holding forth before hangers-on when Dylan arrived. Actress Katy Jurado was pouring drinks. “Sam’s going, ‘Bring Bobby Dylin a drink. Bobby Dylin needs a drink,’ ” recalls Spottiswoode. Peckinpah kept mispronouncing his name and making him uncomfortable. “It seemed to me that Dylan didn’t like to be in company he didn’t know, or didn’t like,” Spottiswoode continues. “But Sam wouldn’t let him go. … He said something like, ‘I hear you play a pretty mean guitar, right? And you write songs and things?’ Dylan says, ‘Uh, yeah, uh …’ ‘Well, Bobby, I’d love to hear a tune. Play us a tune.’ ‘I don’t really do that, Sam.’ ‘You don’t do that? You don’t have a guitar? … Katy, Katy, get him a guitar! There’s a mariachi band [playing] out there, the man needs a fucking guitar.’ ”
Jurado found one and handed it to Dylan. Spottiswoode remembers: “Dylan doesn’t want it, he’s standing by the bath, looking at Sam’s dick floating in the water. Sam’s smiling, drinking and seems completely at home, and we’re all watching. … It seems like he just doesn’t know any better, but Sam knew a lot. There was someone on his turf, a bigger name. It was the best theater in the world.”
This story appeared in the Feb. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.