film itself. Thus Fielding was given permission to employ his own wide-ranging and eclectic musical skills for the film. It was a remarkable debut score, the first to contain Fielding's signature ability to bring dark irony to his themes. Fielding was now also free to write television scores for hit 1960 shows, Mission Impossible (1966) (though not the best known theme, which is by Lalo Schifrin) and Star Trek in second and third seasons. It was his composing for a contemporary made-for-TV Western, Noon Wine, directed by then-unknown Sam Peckinpah, that led to Fielding's breakthrough score for Peckinpah's first critical and box-office hit, The Wild Bunch (1969) as well as a volatile but ultimately fruitful collaboration between the two men. A neo-noir Western with a wordless, staggeringly violent final shootout still imitated to this day, The Wild Bunch quartet of taciturn, bitter gunmen, led by Bill Holden, are given power, humor and voice largely through Fielding's brilliant score. The composer "caught the weariness, dust, dirt and blood of a vanishing West in a rich underscore that interspersed sprightly action cues with wistful Mexican folk melodies and nostalgic, bittersweet dirges", writes British film composer Heathcliff Blair. The soundtrack brought his first nomination for an Oscar for Best Dramatic Score. "The Wild Bunch gave me a chance to illustrate to the public, and the entertainment industry, that if a composer is given real freedom to create, he can produce a score that is unlike any other ever written", Fielding said later. In his next film outing, the quaint English countryside is blown apart by sadistic violence in Peckinpah's second masterpiece, Straw Dogs (1971) in which Fielding for the first time used Stravinsky-influenced "sound clusters", another highly-influential score whose echoes can be heard, for example, in the following year's The French Connection which has a brittle quarter-tone score by jazz composer Don Ellis. Straw Dogs was also followed by an Oscar nomination. The following year, in Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), a troubled production starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Fielding's score was removed from the final picture. It was replaced by music of Quincy Jones, much to Fielding's shock and dismay, an ordeal documented in a short film by his wife, Camille and daughter Elizabeth Fielding in 2007. Peckinpah then asked Fielding to compose around songs by Bob Dylan, for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). While already lionized for his protest