Years passed and Richter became a successful screenwriter. Mac Rauch took Richter up on his offer and arrived in L.A. Richter proceeded to introduce the writer to producer/director Irwin Winkler, who gave Mac Rauch rent money for the next six months. Over several dinners, Mac Rauch told Richter and his wife of a character named Buckaroo Bandy about whom he was thinking of writing a screenplay. Richter and his wife liked the idea and paid Mac Rauch $1,500 to develop and write it. According to Mac Rauch, his script was inspired by "all those out-and-out, press-the-accelerator-to-the-floor, non-stop kung fu movies of the early '70s". Richter remembers that Mac Rauch wrote several stories about this character, then he "would get thirty or forty pages into a script, abandon its storyline and write a new one". Mac Rauch recalled, "It's so easy to start something and then—since you're really not as serious about it as you should be—end up writing half of it... You shove the hundred pages in a drawer and try to forget about it. Over the years, I started a dozen Buckaroo scripts that ended that way."