Production
Producers Arthur Gardner, Arnold Laven and Jules Levy sought an inexperienced, and therefore affordable, writer to adapt Hoffman Birney's book The Dice of God into a screenplay. Impressed by Sam Peckinpah's scripts for Gunsmoke , Laven hired Peckinpah to write the screenplay in 1956. Peckinpah worked on the script for more than four months, but the producers were unable to raise funding for the project and it was temporarily abandoned, [2] although Laven worked with Peckinpah in television in the ensuing years. [3]
The project's original title was Custer's Last Stand, but when Twentieth Century-Fox announced its upcoming The Day Custer Fell, later canceled for budgetary reasons, [4] the producers changed the script in order to make the characters fictitious.
In 1965, with funding finally in place, the production of The Glory Guys began. However, under Laven's direction, the film greatly deviated from Peckinpah's script, with heightened emphasis on its romantic elements. [2] Peckinpah later called the film "... a total disaster because of the casting. All the people in the picture were good. That is, they’ve all been good in other pictures but they didn’t really belong in that one. It s a wretched film. And one of the reasons I’ve made up my mind not to write any more. But I was on the street. I had to write." [5]
The film was shot in Durango, Mexico, and its climactic battle scene involved thousands of extras on 20,000 acres (81 km2) of land. The scene required several weeks of preparation and filming, including training many horses to fall on cue. [2]
The film's total production cost was approximately $1.6 million. [2]
The titles were created by Joseph Mugnaini for Format Productions.
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