Peckinpah

After he wrote “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others,” a serendipitous recount of how Davis found himself co-writing and directing an ill-fated remake of Sam Peckinpah’s unsung western “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” Mathews found that the stories started to fit an overall narrative and “became a progression.”

Entering the living room of the family’s Elm Drive home on Aug. 20, 1989, the brothers fired 12-gauge shotguns multiple times at their parents, creating a crime scene so blood-soaked even Sam Peckinpah would have looked away.

But he considered “The Cincinnati Kid,” which he took over when Sam Peckinpah was fired, the first movie that was really his.

The Hollywood western, of course, mythologized this country’s deserts and prairies as dramatic vistas against which such filmmakers as John Ford, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah could foreground their rugged characters.

Filmmaker Sam Peckinpah directed him in the 1975 film “The Killer Elite,” starring James Caan, and the 1978 action comedy “Convoy,” starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw.