Straw Dogs (1971 film) days over schedule and $3 million over budget. Left with a limited number of directing jobs, Peckinpah was forced to travel to England to direct "Straw Dogs". Produced by Daniel Melnick, who had previously worked with Peckinpah on his 1966 television film "Noon Wine", the screenplay began from Gordon Williams' novel "The Siege of Trencher's Farm", with Peckinpah saying "David Goodman and I sat down and tried to make something of validity out of this rotten book. We did. The only thing we kept was the siege itself". "Straw Dogs" drew inspiration from Robert Ardrey's books "African Genesis" and "The
The Gladiators (novel) 65BC to explore the search for the just city, the inevitable compromises of revolution, the conflict of ends and means, the question of whether and when it is justifiable to sacrifice lives for an abstract ideal." The novel is generally not as well-known to English-speaking audiences as the later American novel on this topic, "Spartacus" (1951), by Howard Fast, a bestseller adapted for Stanley Kubrick's award-winning 1960 film of the same name, which reached wide audiences and stimulated sales of Fast's novel. The Gladiators (novel) The Gladiators (1939) is the first novel by the author Arthur Koestler; it portrays the