I had them rented out for like $5,000 a year." The Devil's 8 Milius then got a summer job working at the story department of American International Pictures through a student colleague of his who had begun working there, Willard Huyck. Huyck and Milius worked at AIP under producer Larry Gordon, reading scripts. They eventually collaborated on a rewrite of the screenplay for The Devil's 8 (1968), an action drama about moonshine drivers which ripped off The Dirty Dozen (1968). Milius's name had been mentioned in a 1968 Time magazine article about the new generation of Hollywood filmmakers, which also referred to George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. This was read by Mike Medavoy, who became Milius's agent. Medavoy called Milius "a badboy mad genius in a teenager's body, but he was a good and fast writer with original ideas." Milius began to get writing commissions. He wrote a script entitled The Texans for Al Ruddy at Paramount, a contemporary version of Red River (1948) (never made, although Sam Peckinpah was going to direct it in 1979)— Milius later said it "wasn't very good". He also wrote an original called Truck Driver (aka The Haul) which was purchased by Levy-Garner-Laven, although that film too was not made. Milius later said he "didn't do a good job" with these two early scripts "because in both cases I was influenced by the people who had hired me. They said put this in and put that in, and I went along with it. Every time I went along with something in my whole career it usually didn't work. Usually there's a price to pay. You think of selling out, but there is a price to pay. Usually what people want you to do is make it current." Jeremiah Johnson Milius then wrote Jeremiah Johnson, a story loosely based on the life of the mountain man Liver-Eating Johnson. Milius later said this was "the real breaking point" where he knew "almost overnight... that I had become a good writer with a voice.": I knew that material. I'd lived in the mountains, I had a trapline, I hunted, and I had a lot of experiences with characters up there. So, it was real easy to write that and there was a humor to it, a kind of bigger-than-life attitude. I was inspired by Carl Sandburg. I read a lot of his poetry and it's this kind