This week's REPORT FROM SANTA FE is the second part of a special two-part program featuring an interview with Max Evans, one of New Mexico's most beloved writers, discussing his newest book "Goin' Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All Our Friends," an enthralling memoir of his years of friendship with the director.

This show contains more of Max's behind-the-scenes tales and movie clips from Peckinpah's legendary films including "Straw Dogs," "Major Dundee," and "Junior Bonner." Peckinpah's films have become cult classics and Max details the wild and turbulent life of this mad genius of film.

Max Evans introduces his friend, shows clips from his most famous movies, and provides an intimate look at the business of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s. Evans, one of the director's best friends, experienced the director's mercurial character and personal demons firsthand.

Evans talks about this honest and captivating memoir, which follows him and Sam 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 Max himself.

Max Evans is a novelist, artist, one-time cowboy, miner, movie producer, and dealer in antiquities. His books include “Madame Millie,” “For the Love of a Horse,” “Animal Stories,” and "Bluefeather Fellini." Among his many lifetime achievements are the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Western Writers of America’s Owen Wister Award for lifelong contributions to the field of Western literature, and, most recently, the Texas Institute of Letters Lon Tinkle Award. His novels “The Rounders” and “The Hi-Lo Country”were made into feature cult films.

QUOTE:

“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

ACCLAIM

This absorbing, lively book shows us both the Peckinpah we’d expect to see and a Peckinpah whom many may not have known existed: the dreamer, the romantic, the sensitive man. A must for film buffs.”- Booklist, starred review

“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.” – Santa Fe New Mexican Pasatiempo