Friday, February 13, 2015

My Amazon comments on Paul Seydor's New Book on Peckinpah's PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID

on February 13, 2015
Format: Paperback
I've admired Paul Seydor's work since the late 1970s, when he taught The Wild Bunch at USC. In the preface to my Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (1984) I said: "In the academic study of popular culture, some recent film studies are especially close to my work. I point to Paul Seydor's chapter on The Wild Bunch in Peckinpah: The Western Films (1980) as an analysis of the aesthetic implications of textual evidence so much like my own work that I wish I had written it, for with a change in my subtitle it could have been run into this book." Later, after we lost touch, I plotted to reconnect through a "me and Paul" article for Studies in the Novel (Fall 1995), "The Auteur-Author Paradox: How Critics of the Cinema and the Novel Talk about Flawed or even `Mutilated' Texts." There I praised film critics and lamenting the obtuseness of most literary critics. Here, as a kind of overview of Seydor's lifelong methods, is some of what I wrote:

"A book which deals repeatedly with flawed films is Peckinpah: The Western Films (1980), in which Paul Seydor studies the extant forms of the cinematic texts and relates those forms to the circumstances of production. Writing fresh cinematic history, he `reads' the forms of the text in the light of biographical, historical, and specifically textual evidence. The result is scholarship on important American aesthetic documents, and at the same time it is the best sort of criticism, that which grows out of comprehensive scholarship. Repeatedly, his scholarship allows Seydor to break free of previous criticism, such as analyses which deplored a screenwriter's or the director's failures at characterization when in fact the failure (a real failure, accurately identified by the critic) resulted from the studio's alterations of the `text.' Seydor says of the studio's cutting of The Wild Bunch: `many filmgoers and critics familiar only with the cut version were, and are, bothered by the missing scenes and have, as a consequence, criticized the film for its alleged weak characterizations and ill-motivated characters.' Peckinpah was blamed when he was innocent - when, in fact, he had been victimized."

I continued: "In Seydor's study a recurrent motif is the mangling of films during one or another stage of production and another is the creation of coherent films which were subsequently mangled. Often in Seydor's woeful tales what is lost is motivation. He quotes Peckinpah on having to sit in the cutting room and watch someone else cut down Major Dundee: `"What I worked so hard to achieve - all of Dundee's motivation (what it was that made him the man he was) - was gone."' This was material Peckinpah had `both written and shot and cared very much about,' but which the studio `had thought unnecessary to the total effect of the film.' (This notion that the `total' effect can be achieved without a great deal of the total material is one that links the studio executives to textual theorists and literary critics. For all his sympathy with Peckinpah, Seydor judiciously explains that some movies have been damaged less than others. The `mutilation' of The Wild Bunch in no way approached `what was done to Major Dundee (or what, later, would be done to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid),' Seydor says, yet `the net effect of the cuts is to diminish the epic scope slightly, reduce some of the ironies moderately, and lessen the complexity of characters and character motivations considerably.'"

More from "The Auteur-Author Paradox": "In discussing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Seydor acknowledges that critics have suggested that the movie seems to have suffered little from whatever cuts were made. For leaving this impression he credits Gordon Carroll and Roger Spottiswoode: they fought with the studio on Peckinpah's behalf so as to `guide the picture through the bargaining sessions with some of its dramatic sense and unity preserved intact.' He describes what can survive as interpretable and powerful even after severe cuts: `since what was cut are those scenes in which character motivation, social pressure, and personal and professional obligation are seen to generate action, incident, and decision, the released version has, to be sure, a "ritualistic," "mythic," rather "existential" "purity" that is not without a certain hypnotic power, beauty, and fascination. All the same, that purity remains a pretty sporadic, because largely serendipitous, affair, and it is of no help whatever toward filling in the narrative lacunae.'"

As I summarized, "Some of the undeniable power is adventitious, unintended by Peckinpah, and consequently uncontrolled. Informing Seydor's book is a belief that true artists strive to achieve old-fashioned aesthetic goals of coherence and even unity: `Many of the scenes [in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid] are interlocked with Peckinpah's usual intricacy so that, as with The Wild Bunch, removing something in one place usually means something else falling out or failing to cohere fifteen pages or several minutes later.'"

With permission I put on record a description of this new book which Seydor made in an email in 2013:
"The only other book I am aware of that is similar to this one in relating an episode or group of episodes in history to a film is Glenn Frankel's recent, very well received and superb book on The Searchers: the first and by far longest part of his book concerns the real child abductions on which the Alan LeMay novel and the John Ford film are based. This part of Frankel's book is also the one of the principal bases for the enthusiastic reviews it has received. My book is different inasmuch as a far greater share given over to Peckinpah's film and its filmic and literary antecedents and offering an insider's view of its making, the development of the screenplay, the difficulties of the production, and the incredibly contentious editing; but readers and reviewers do seem to like to have some solid historical background when actual incidents or figures of history are involved in works of art."

Here is another comment from 2013: "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid now regularly appears on most lists of the ten to fifty (pick your number) best or most important Westerns. When the British tastemaker magazine Time Out published an annotated list of the fifty best Western films, Pat Garrett placed--are you ready for this?--number two. Yes, it's an idiosyncratic list in some ways, with The Wild Bunch placing fourteenth, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller first, but still . . . . It placed 126th on Empire Magazine's list of the `500 Greatest Movies of All Time' (movies, not Westerns as such). The popular book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die contains four Peckinpahs, including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The site Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 80 82% approval. Now I realize that most of these are not scholarly sources and some of them are even a little silly, as all lists are, but they nevertheless are important barometers of how and where books, films, plays, music, art, television shows and series, and so forth are situated in our culture, what the opinion leaders are paying attention to, and how something is regarded." These emails Seydor at his commonsensical best, alert not just to the ramifications of his current project but to audience responses.

In this new Northwestern UP book Seydor does not repeat what he has said earlier. I quote again from a 2013 email: "One of the things I am proudest of in the new book is that I've managed to examine this extraordinary film in entirely new ways and from entirely fresh perspectives with very little repetition of what I've written before. I managed to do something of the same thing when I revised Peckinpah: The Western Films into the Reconsideration, which is one reason why it was even more highly reviewed than the first edition, reviewers and readers alike appreciative that when I cover the same ground more than once, I do it from new perspectives, usually with new research, that result in original material. This is something I'm known for and I'd like to keep it that way." This is not boasting--it is a cool survey of the history of the place of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in Seydor's working life.

(Aside: When we made contact after "The Auteur-Author Paradox" came out Seydor stopped off on a trip East, bringing with him to our house in SE Pennsylvania the rough cut of Tin Cup, a movie featuring my second cousin Bill Costner and his wife in a walk-on role at the end. We spotted an awkwardness and suggested an improvement. Paul acknowledged the awkwardness but gently explained that we did not have a clue about what a film editor could to do fix the problem. Paul Seydor is an honest man.)

A practical textual theorist and aesthetician in all he writes on Peckinpah and all he incorporates into the editing of film, Seydor is absolutely aware of "the aesthetic implications of textual evidence," and that awareness consists of what he has gained through years of the most meticulous scholarship in written archival documents, oral histories, and archives in which different states of films are located as well as that derived from personal interchanges with, among others, actors, directors, crews, film critics, starting with Peckinpah himself. Seydor, an Oscar nominee, is a great scholar-critic-theorist as well as a film editor. His new book is very, very good.

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