Martin Ransohoff(1927-2017)

Ransohoff felt compelled to fire director Sam Peckinpah after the beginning of principal shooting on A Mesa do Diabo (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.

Have you ever noticed the guys who came from my era of show-business all came from varied background. There wasn't a pattern explaining how we all ended up here.