(1925 – 1984) Film and television director, writer and producer. Most famous for his revisionist western films of the 1960s and 1970s, Peckinpah was also a pioneer of the adult western television dramas of the 1950s and 1960s, when he wrote such programs as Gunsmoke and directed and produced the critically acclaimed series The Westerner (1960). In his film masterpiece, The Wild Bunch (1969), his experiments with editing, slow motion, dialogue and the choreographic depiction of violence and death have been copied and emulated by a generation of action and western film-makers, most notably Walter Hill.