I'm using the same Arkadin quote because I've got a different answer this time. Izcutter gave me a heads-up in an exchange on the Strother MartinMr. Arkadin wrote:Very cool. I don't have Starz, but am enjoying your "play by play". I wish there were some place we could order some of these docs.
tribute thread on TCM. I posted a few hints around here, and the result
was a Father's Day present of a Peckinpah boxed set containing the Starz! special I've been quoting from. The 'Pat & Billy' package runs the
movie on one disc, and the other disc is the movie again, with learned
commentary overlapping. The 'Wild Bunch' package is the one that adds
the Starz! special, plus extra scenes, and commentaries from biographers and critics. 'Cable Hogue' and 'High Country' are also included. (My son
knows how to do this stuff.) Mr. A, that's where to find this material.
One fascinating fact I've run across already: 'The Wild Bunch' opens with the outlaws riding into town where they plan to rob a bank (and where an
ambush is waiting). It seems that Emilio Fernandez let Peckinpah in on one of his childhood memories. He and his little friends would drop a scorpion into an ant hill to watch the resulting attack and fight. Sometimes
they would lay straw over the battle scene and fire it up. Peckinpah got on the phone and demanded scorpions and ants, soon as possible. That's
why the opening finds the Bunch riding past cherubic preteens entertaining
themselves in just that manner. It sets the tone for the violence that follows, and for the whole movie in fact. The ants-and-scorpions scenerio
is duplicated in the final shootout, with the outlaws surrounded by hundreds of Federalies as they face their end.