An engaging . . . collection of a cowboy's adventures in the moving pictures business during Hollywood's last golden age.--The Dallas Morning News
Description
Almost as famous for the legendary excesses of his personal life as for his films, Sam Peckinpah (1925–1984) cemented his reputation as one of the great American directors with movies such as The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Max Evans, one of Peckinpah’s best friends, experienced the director’s mercurial character and personal demons firsthand. In this enthralling memoir we follow Evans and Peckinpah through conversations in bars, family gatherings, binges on drugs and alcohol, struggles with film producers and executives, and Peckinpah’s abusive behavior—sometimes directed at Evans himself.
Evans’s stories—most previously unpublished—provide a uniquely intimate look at Peckinpah, their famous friends (including Lee Marvin, Brian Keith, Joel McCrea, and James Coburn), and the business of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s.
Reviews
Readers familiar with Peckinpah's work will no doubt be interested in [Evans's] observations, as well as in the behind-the-scenes scoops Evans provides. But you need not be a Peckinpah fan to enjoy this memoir, which is interesting and entertaining enough to serve almost as a novel about a loose-cannon filmmaker and the people in his orbit or as a sort of roughneck-cowboy version of a Rat Pack tell-all. . . . There is great warmth in Goin' Crazy and a type of open-hearted storytelling that serves as a counterpoint to so many serious academic treatments of Peckinpah's life and work.--Pasatiempo
Readers familiar with Peckinpah's work will no doubt be interested in [Evans's] observations, as well as in the behind-the-scenes scoops Evans provides. But you need not be a Peckinpah fan to enjoy this memoir, which is interesting and entertaining enough to serve almost as a novel about a loose-cannon filmmaker and the people in his orbit or as a sort of roughneck-cowboy version of a Rat Pack tell-all. . . . There is great warmth in Goin' Crazy and a type of open-hearted storytelling that serves as a counterpoint to so many serious academic treatments of Peckinpah's life and work.--Pasatiempo
There's perhaps no writer who more vividly and colorfully expresses New Mexico cowboy culture than Ol' Max Evans. . . . [This] book is chockablock with wild and woolly tales, but according to Evans, the Peckinpah who regularly visited him in New Mexico 'was a whole different human being' than the raucous, often dangerous Peckinpah of filmmaking lore.--Variety
