The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, announced today that it has acquired what its curators describe as “a significant collection of items and archives” from the late filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, best known for Western cinema classics such as “The Wild Bunch,” “Ride the High Country” and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”
The donation to the Museum comes courtesy of filmmaker/historian Lathan McKay, who Michael R. Grauer, curator of the Museum’s Cowboy Collections and Western Art, describes as “incredibly dedicated to Sam Peckinpah’s legacy,” and who chose the Oklahoma City institution because of the Museum’s commitment to ensure Peckinpah’s belongs and papers would be “preserved, cataloged, researched, interpreted and studied with great respect.”
McKay, who is also the nation’s premier collector of personal effects of the late legendary daredevil Evel Knievel, concurs with Grauer’s description of his motivations in choosing the Cowboy Museum as the new home of his Peckinpah collection, noting “For me, this journey has primarily been about residing in historical significance and preservation.”
McKay explains his own passion for the often-controversial artistic mission California native Peckinpah, who died at age 59 in 1984. “Sam Peckinpah was the Evel Knievel of filmmakers,” notes McKay. “There is a deep kinship among mavericks and when you look closely, you see these parallels that thread together extraordinary legends and legacies,” adds McKay, who credits both Peckinpah and Knievel with “projecting the message that life is about truly living, not merely existing. A life lived authentically.”
The history of the collection is itself a small movie derived from McKay’s cinephile interests and Peckinpah’s love of the Big Sky Country, which led him to settle in Livingston Montana in the late 1970s.
McKay recalls first hearing from filmmaker Monte Hellman that Peckinpah’s personal effects from Peckinpah’s office and apartment at the historic Murray Hotel in Livingston were being sold off piece by piece. “During a trip to Butte, Montana for Evel Knievel Days,” remembers McKay, “I made a trip to Livingston. And consulting with other film historians, I decided the collection had historical and cultural significance. All items in the collection have been verified for authenticity by either Peckinpah’s long-time assistant and friend, Katy Haber, or his son, Matthew Peckinpah.”
As for the Museum’s long-term plans for the newly acquired items, which includes what McKay describes as “personal photos, movie posters, a selection of gifts, artifacts and documents from his personal and professional endeavors,” the Dickinson Research Center of the Musuem will organize items and have also announced that “once online, the Peckinpah Archive will be available to the world.”
“The DRC team will also create and implement a digitization plan for the most important parts of the collection that will be added to the online image database. Additionally, materials from the Peckinpah Archive will be prominently integrated into the Western Performers Gallery, expanding the Museum’s story about the West in pop culture” explains Kera Newby, former director, Dickinson Research Center and one of the Museum’s Western Americana experts involved in the acquisition.
Matthew Peckinpah, who aficionados will recall as a key child player in several of his father’s film classics, said he is “grateful and honored” that his father’s “contributions to our shared American cultural heritage” will be preserved at the Oklahoma historical setting, and thanked Lathan McKay “for your hard work in keeping history alive.”
Founded in 1955, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum has been described as “America’s premier institution of Western history, art, and culture.
For more information, visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.
