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 Siege of Malta (novel) of its copies, and then published his own "Siege of Malta", which he claimed was "founded on an unfinished romance by Sir Walter Scott". In 1977, it at last became possible for the reading public to form an accurate idea of the novel's plot and style when Donald E. Sultana published his "The Siege of Malta Rediscovered", a biographical account of the writing of the novel together with an extended abstract of its plot and a large number of lengthy quotations from it. A reliable typewritten transcript of the novel was also made by Jane Millgate and deposited in the