Paul Seydor
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Sam Peckinpah Fan
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Thanks kindly, Robert, for your generous review of my book on Amazon.com. As regards some of the questions here: Tony De Zaraga, if you check his credits, went on to have a career in television with only a relative few feature credits. On Killer Elite he probably helped out some, but Garth Craven and Ferris Webster were the original editors, and Webster one day just quit, evidently daunted by the sheer amount of coverage, saying to Garth, "I'm too old for this kind of thing," and left the project. The next time I see Garth, which will be soon, I'll ask him about Zaraga, but I suspect what I've said here is correct: he was employed by Sam as a helping hand but never as a principal editor. Sam confined Monte Hellman almost exclusively to the martial arts footage, of which fairly little remained in the completed film. (This I got directly from Monte.) As I say, the three additional editors were there as helping hands, not as functioning editors in any serious creative sense, and because Spottiwoode and Craven were--theoretically, anyhow--not permitted to touch film in the US. This was eventually ignored, but it does give an idea of how chaotic the post was on this film. By the way, if any reader wants the full information, it is absolutely vital in this book that he or she READ THE ENDNOTES. The story was too multifaceted for me to tell it in any other way than to add a lot of material in the endnotes.
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