Ransohoff felt compelled to fire director
Sam Peckinpah after the beginning
of principal shooting on
The Cincinnati Kid (1965) due to disagreements over the
conception of the film. The incident led to a physical altercation
between the two. In the early 1970s, remarking on their fight,
Peckinpah claimed Ransofhoff got the worst of it: "I stripped him as
naked as one of his badly told lies", claimed the director known as
"Bloody Sam" for the violence in his films. Peckinpah was replaced with
Norman Jewison, a relative newcomer to feature film directing, whose long and
successful career brought him three Oscar nominations as best director
and the
Irving Thalberg Award in 1999 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &
Sciences.
