Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was written relatively fast – in six or seven weeks — and the writer was paid what was for him a huge sum of money by MGM, enough for him to buy land in Nova Scotia, over five thousand miles from Hollywood. The writer felt strangely pleased about the first draft, believing that it was lean and subtly paced with even a few autonomous moments of humor and grace. He had managed, he thought, to sublimate language to image, an obsession that had brought him to the task in the first place.
The original idea, as advanced by the producer, who initiated the project and made it real in terms of money and studio commitments, was to dramatize in contemporary terms the perennial story of Billy the Kid, a purely American myth that has been the subject of over thirty Hollywood films. It was an appealing idea, to be number thirty one, or two on the list. Not only did Billy the Kid appeal to the writer as a romantic myth signifying the sacrifice of youth and freedom, but at one time in his youth he had been convinced that he was a direct reincarnation of Billy the Kid. The shadowy figure of Pat Garrett, at first illusive and alien, became more and more luminous and dominating, even threatening to take over the dramatic form and change the title to one name. Garrett's decision to sell out in order to survive, to live rather than die, to abandon obsolete descriptions of courage and freedom for a more complicated if more corrupt sense of order, began to resonate more and more with the writer, not only because he found himself in Hollywood faced with the usual compromises of being used and courted like a nineteenth-century woman and then inevitably discarded from the hierarchy of power, but Garrett was actually more interesting than the Kid. The killer of freedom is often the true subject of freedom. If the writer had been Billy as a youth, he was Garrett as a man. So the echo of Garrett's shooting of the Kid became the echo of the film, or, to be exact, of the script, the two men becoming entwined like lovers even beyond the last bullet which ended the breath of the younger.
On a more abstract level, the writer, holed up in a Sunset Boulevard hotel, suspended in a weird floating world of his own, became consumed with philosophical questions about the phenomenology of Western space, of establishing a continuity outside of cultural time, and of trying to work the dialectics of interior and exterior space. In other words: of experiencing the present outside of language; of being alone without historical direction. The way it probably was in the West — action without exposition — a rider riding, a man dying — all these considerations the writer kept to himself, of course, such peripheral indulgences being anathema to the Industry, death to the project. It was easier and more real to deal with the actual appeal of American heroes, of how they are attracted to and finally consumed by a great if unconscious intimacy with their own death — how that growing erotic embrace becomes their style and how that style relates to the collective. The frontier, with its pockets of violence and anarchy, set under an immense and impartial sky that demolishes boundaries, is an epic arena to play in. the hero is closer to the bone, simpler and more extreme, so that each act stands unrelieved by lesser distractions. The writer chose the last three months of Billy's life, from the time of his escape from the Lincoln jail to his final confrontation with Garrett in Fort Sumner. It was a free arena. No one seems to know what the Kid did then, only that he had been warned by the Governor and the society at large that to stay in New Mexico meant his inevitable extinction. He was an anachronism that could not be tolerated. What became interesting was Billy's decision not to flee, to accept the consequences of his own myth, no matter how unreal, even though it meant his death… Those are some of the thoughts that surrounded the first draft. What actually happened is another story.
The first draft was liked well enough, even praised, but it soon became obvious that it was too existential, that there wasn't enough conventional action, that the exposition was too spare, too minimal. The producer took the script to other studios. There were no takers. The original director [Monte Hellman], who had just suffered through a failure of his own which the writer had been involved with [Two Lane Blacktop], was thought to be unmarketable. He was forced to bow out. Further changes in the script were asked for. The panic was on. The writer, by this time in Nova Scotia, building a cabin and trying to deal with the more plebeian mechanisms of his life, managed to write a few scenes which dealt more directly with action and the more lethargic fans in the balcony. Time passed. A Star became interested and the project went through a ripple of revival. Another scene was added, another dropped. The Star walked the fence; Billy, he felt, was not humble enough, not liked enough, too cold, too weird sexually, too violent. The Star faded away. Other stars came and went, with even a few commitments. The project floated in a Sargasso sea of false hopes, manic promises, deals behind deals, agent's packages, desperate combinations and fantasies. The usual thing. Time passed. The writer, living in New York and having by this time completed a novel, highly distracted and wired to unreal plans, called the producer in Hollywood. The consensus at that point was that the project, if it was to have any chance at all, needed two, no, three, call it four cash-box scenes. Scenes of high action, cliched exposition, obvious clarity. The writer sat down and wrote them, trying to eliminate the cliches and keep to the original line. A new director [this is Sam Peckinpah] appeared, a director famous for his tantrums, rages, macho passions and banal, highly embarrassing pronouncements. Everyone was elated. The project was revived. The project was on. The writer went back to Hollywood to work for the director. Finally they had two or three conversations about the director's past sexual exploits and about the savage, warlike rigors of the celluloid trail. The script was never discussed. The writer went back to Nova Scotia. Time passed. The writer was called back to Hollywood. Nothing, it seemed, had been done to the script; in fact the director hadn't read it yet. The writer and the director went to Mexico to scout locations and work on the script. The director, who by this time had skimmed the first few scenes, became suddenly thrilled by his own collaborative gifts. In the writer's version, Billy and Garrett never met until the final scene, when Garrett killed him. The director wanted their relationship in front, so that everyone would know they were old buddies. Rewriting was imposed with the added inspirational help of some of the director's old TV scripts. The beginning was changed completely. Extraordinary lines about male camaraderie made a soggy entrance into the body of the script. The writer suspected that the script (not to mention himself) had been reduced to its most simplistic components. He was also aware that the director had an unusual gift for a kind of reactionary theatricality… The story goes on, as the writer, by then semi-paralyzed and strangely attracted to the process of reduction, as if by this experience he could leave such scenes behind forever, drifted into being a witness to the actual film, even, in fact, playing a small part where he was shot several times in the head and chest. But that is not relevant to the script or perhaps to anything else.
The decision to publish this version of the script represents a compromise between the first versions and the final, shooting script. The writer believes this version to be a good read and to be authentically his while still being close enough to the actual film.