To read Sam Peckhampaw's biography is to understand, some people just aren't cut out for a normal life.

He started young, a rabble rouser of a ranch kid in Central California, skipping school to

spend time trapping, branding, and shooting his afternoons away until his frequent fighting and

discipline problems in high school inspired his parents to send him to military school.

By 1943 he joined the Marines and by the end of World War II he was in China, disarming and

repatriating Japanese soldiers.

It was here that Peckin' Pekin' Pekin' Pekin'

what many film biographers believed to be his creative inspiration.

He came under fire and he witnessed death and torture.

Some believe his alcoholism and later his drug addiction

started here as well. It's not hard to imagine that some of the mental and emotional problems that

haunted him later in life, his mania, his depression, his paranoia were ignited

by those experiences in China too. Post-discharge he went to college and got married to a drama student and started directing, the kind of work that necessitates

the teamwork that if we're putting a charitably, Peck and Pa was just not cut out for.

At first he'd do something like not show up to work in a necktie.

Later on it would escalate to abuse of stage hands and getting himself kicked off of productions.

We've already had an episode about Major Dundee. That was in 1965. What followed

for the next 10 years would be the envy of many a filmmaker of the era and by 77, he was still totally renowned. I mean can you believe

Hollywood producers knowing what they knew about Sam Peck and Pa were still

willing to pay him to direct King Kong and Superman?

I mean, we would have finally been given the King Kong film where he rips the faces off of people

or a Superman film that destroys an entire city block with body counts in the millions.

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