Hollywood renegade Sam Peckinpah’s favorite film was John Huston’s ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre,’ and when he co-wrote and directed his own tale of avarice gone awry, the 1974 thriller ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,’ Peckinpah found a cinematic descendent of Humphrey Bogart in the character actor Warren Oates, whose volatile mix of machismo and vulnerability informed a tour de force performance. Unfortunately, ‘Alfredo,’ considered the purest of Peckinpah’s films (i.e. no studio interference), tanked, taking down Oates’ shot at leading-man status in Hollywood. Such is the story of the late Hollywood rebel Oates, as captured by author Susan Compo, who will discuss and sign copies of her biography, ‘Warren Oates: A Wild Life,’ on June 7 at 3 p.m., in Diesel bookstore, Brentwood Country Mart. Before tackling ‘Warren Oates,’ Compo wrote a novel, ‘Pretty Things,’ and two short-story collections. The Pasadena resident was attracted to the challenge of trying her hand at non-fiction. ’I always wanted to try writing a biography,’ said Compo, who searched to see if anything had been written on Oates, one of her favorite actors, who died in 1982. ‘Nothing. I couldn’t believe my luck that there really wasn’t anything out there.’ Compo interviewed a variety of celebrities who worked or crossed paths with Oates, including Dennis Quaid, Dennis Hopper and Mariette Hartley, and various Peckinpah collaborators. She also interviewed three of Oates’ four wives, as well as the actor’s four kids and other family members. ’Warren was so different from his older brother, who is a straight business man,’ Compo told the Palisadian-Post. A rebel all of his life, the Depoy, Kentucky native followed a stint in the Marines by chasing his muse to New York to become an actor. After a television career that included a pair of early-1960s episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ and various television Westerns, Oates found his hard-drinking, hard-living match in outlaw filmmaker Peckinpah. ’They were fatal friends,’ Compo said. ‘Friends who weren’t good for each other, but they understood each other. Both were in the Marines, both were men’s men. They enjoyed a drink, liked women, and some may not realize this, but they really cared about their art.’ Oates played in Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, ‘The Wild Bunch,’ opposite William Holden and Ernest Borgnine. Oates also had small roles in another Sam Peckinpah Western, ‘Ride the High Country’ (1962), and in the director’s Civil War epic, ‘Major Dundee’ (1965). Unlike Peckinpah, Oates’ other major collaborator, underground filmmaker Monte Hellman, was ‘quiet, studied. They were much closer kindred spirits than him and Peckinpah.’ Oates worked on four little-seen films for Hellman, most notably ‘Two-Lane Blacktop.’ Despite ardent defenders in its day, such as emerging film critic Roger Ebert, Peckinpah’s ‘Alfredo’ bombed at the box office, which undermined Oates’ career. ’The studios wouldn’t give him a chance,’ Compo said. ‘He wasn’t a handsome leading man and was on the cusp of the era when you still needed to be.’ Oates lost confidence in ‘Alfredo’ following its cold reception, according to his biographer: ‘He was really conflicted about the film. He didn’t live long enough to see the acclaim many years later. When it bombed, he told people not to see it.’ Although Oates played numerous supporting roles for directors as prestigious and diverse as Norman Jewison and Steven Spielberg, few filmmakers truly saw his leading-man potential and engaged him as much as Peckinpah had. By the late 1970s, Oates worked on ‘whatever he could get,’ Compo said. ‘He enjoyed working on ‘1941’ and ‘Stripes’ because it meant that the younger directors valued him.’ Drug and alcohol abuse took its toll on Oates, who died of cardiac arrest on April 3, 1982 at the age of 53. ’What I was unprepared for while researching my book was how people loved him,’ Compo said. ‘They dropped everything to talk to me.’
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