He had planned to make his debut as director with "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", from his own script and based on the Horace McCoy novel of the 1930s. He wanted to make a low-budget movie without big stars, and even hoped, at one point, to make it in black-and-white. But so many compromises were proposed by the backers of the film that Poe was eventually replaced as director by Sydney Pollack, who immediately demanded an extensive rewrite of the script, made the film in color on a big budget and hired several stars for the leads. Poe was extremely bitter about the experience and never wrote for the cinema again - his only subsequent script credits were for television. One of the actors he had hoped to use was his own wife Barbara Steele, who strongly implied in interviews that Poe had never really recovered from the experience, and even that it had led both to their divorce in 1978 and to Poe's relatively early death at age 58 some two years after that.
