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 Trencher's Farm Americanized language or the rape scene. "The List" noted that "Peckinpah's film simplifies Williams' more complex plot and argument to a hideous degree." George and Louise Magruder are renamed David and Amy Sumner, and their eight-year-old daughter, Karen, does not exist in the film. The novel does not contain the controversial rape scene presented in the movie. "The Daily Rotation" noted that in the book "Here, there are much bigger moral questions, as most of the circumstances rely on happenstance, where a rape is never a confusion of circumstance." In the novel, none of the besiegers die. Instead, they are