Billy: Times maybe, not me.
The first of an unending series of crises struck when a mounting flange on a 40mm Panavision lens was bent & went undetected. As a result, in the shots made with this lens (almost all of them were masters because it had a short focal length) the entire right half of the screen was out of focus. The film had to be shipped back to MGM in Culver City for development, then back to Durango, so Peckinpah & his crew did not discover the problem until a week later. By that time they had filmed a dozen scenes with the defective lens.
"We started watching the first night's dailies & the shit's out of focus," says Gordon Dawson.
Sam says, 'Can't I expect fucking focus?'
And the second shot was out of focus, and the third shot was out of focus. Sam got so mad he took out a folding chair & he stood up, he almost fell off of it because it was gonna fold, and he took his cock out and he pissed on the screen with this big S and he walked out of the fucking room.
"Bob Dylan & I were sitting in the screening room when he did that," Kris Kristofferson recalls.
"I remember Bob turning & looking at me with the most perfect reaction: What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?"
"From then on," says Dawson, "Every night we watched dailies with this S-shaped piss stain on the screen."
--If They Move...Kill 'Em: The Life & Times of Sam Peckinpah by David Weddle
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