Columbia studio executives feared that the project was out of control, and that Peckinpah was too unstable to finish the picture, so they cut the shooting schedule of the film by several weeks. Heston gave up his entire salary for the film in order to keep Peckinpah on the project – a gesture rarely equaled in Hollywood history. The studio, however, forced Peckinpah to wrap up shooting very abruptly. Heston alleged that Peckinpah, towards the end of the shoot, simply became drunk and wandered off the set, and that he (Heston) had to finish directing many portions of the movie himself. The length of Peckinpah's original cut has been disputed. According to some sources, including the 2005 DVD commentary, the original cut was 4 hours 38 minutes long, which was initially edited down to 156 minutes. Included in the unseen longer cuts were several slow-motion battle scenes inspired by Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai". The movie was also fairly gory for the standards of 1965, and more bloody and violent scenes were cut out. A bombastic musical score by Daniele Amfitheatrof was added to the film despite Peckinpah's protests, as was the title song, "The Major Dundee March", sung by Mitch Miller and his Sing-Along Gang. One of the most bizarre parts of the score was the use of an electronically altered sound – three anvils of different lengths played-back at half-speed every time Charriba or the Apaches would be seen or even mentioned. "Until the Apache is taken or destroyed" was one of the film's catch phrases. At the film's initial release, it was 136 minutes long. After a disastrous premiere – the movie was almost universally panned by critics – an additional thirteen minutes were cut out, despite the protests of Peckinpah and producer Jerry Bresler. Some feel that these cuts ruined the movie's scope and created significant plot holes, though others argue that these plot holes exist even in the extended version. "Major Dundee" helped cement Peckinpah's image as a renegade filmmaker, which he would enhance with the conflicts on his later films, such as "The Wild Bunch (1969)" "Straw Dogs", "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", and "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia". Others, namely Peckinpah's biographer David Weddle (author of "If They Move ...