Digging Deep into John Sayles’ "Matewan"

If it weren’t for Roger Corman, John Sayles may never have come to Hollywood. Back in the late seventies, Roger was looking for a bright new—and inexpensive—screenwriter for one of his low-budget genre flicks. He assigned his longtime story editor, my good friend Frances Doel, to comb through the best literary magazines, looking for a promising young master of prose fiction who could be converted into a screenwriter. In Esquire she discovered Sayles, a youthful novelist and short story writer who was eager to go west. His first screen credit was for the scripting of Piranha, a darkly comic take on the über-popular Jaws that featured, instead of one deadly giant fish, a whole lot of deadly tiny fish. He followed this with a screenplay for Julie Corman’s The Lady in Red, all the while immersing himself in the skills he’d need to succeed as a film director. 

It was not long before Sayles applied his Corman earnings to his own first film as a writer-director, 1980’s Return of the Secaucus 7. (White writing my biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, I was thrilled to speak at length to Sayles about how the lessons he’d learned from Corman contributed to his long career as a maker of truly independent films.)

 In the 1980’s, while writing increasingly impressive scripts for others, Sayles continued to pursue his own idiosyncratic career, exploring a wide range of genres. One of his greatest achievements has been 1987’s Matewan, a powerful drama about the real-life struggle of West Virginia coal miners to form a union, in the face of armed resistance from their bosses.

Walking a fine line between the realistic and the mythic, Sayles captures the downhome heroism of the striking miners as well as the stark beauty of their surroundings. (Legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who surely appreciated the script’s clear proletarian slant, was rewarded by the Academy with an Oscar nomination for this film.)

 Though Sayles’ feelings for the union cause are self-evident, the central conflict in the film is hardly just black-and-white. The striking West Virginia mine-workers (some younger than fifteen) tend to start with a bigoted attitude not only toward the African-American scabs who descend on the town of Matewan but also toward the recent Italian immigrants trying to make their home in this locale. And they’re all too willing to use violence to express their feelings. (Everyone, including the local housewives and a teenaged lay preacher, seems extremely familiar with firearms.) This is a place, it’s made clear, that was founded on God and guns. Sayles himself has fun with the small role of the local minister: he’s appeared in many of his own movies, as well as in the films of others.

Over the years, Sayles has developed a small stock company of actors who return to his projects time and again. Several of them, including Gordon Clapp and David Strathairn, have been with him since campus days at Williams College. Matewan also has a key role for Mary McDonnell: this was only her second film, three years before she found fame and an Oscar nomination for her supporting part in Dances With Wolves. (In 1992, Sayles put her at the center of his Passion Fish, which brought her a Best Actress Oscar nom.) Late great James Earl Jones also plays a essential part in the Matewan action. But the most heroic character is the union organizer, a deeply committed pacifist, played by Chris Cooper, at the very start of his movie career. 

 

 

“Field of Dreams”: If You Shoot It, Will They Come?

It’s hard to imagine how many truly idiotic projects have been launched, over the years, based on a hit movie’s promise that “if you build it, they will come.” To be honest, 1989’s Field of Dreams doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Just exactly WHY do the 1919 Chicago White Sox, in perennial disgrace for their role in throwing that year’s World Series, emerge from an Iowa cornfield because a young farmer who misses the Sixties has constructed a baseball field on his back forty?  Why does this farmer idolize baseball, and long-ago White Sox batting champ Shoeless Shoe Jackson in particular, to the point that he’ll jeopardize his family’s economic future by taking direction from a mysterious voice? (And, come to think of it, why does his feisty wife put up with her husband’s fiscal craziness even though they might well find themselves homeless in future?)  

 But logic is not what Field of Dreams is all about. It’s about dreams, and in particular about the American male’s dream of a father/son bond symbolized by the idea of tossing around a baseball with your dad on a warm summer’s day. The give-and-take implicit in a simple game of catch seems to be craved by many men. At least, it is this element of the film’s climax that apparently turned many male moviegoers into emotional puddles when Field of Dreams screened in cineplexes across America in 1989. The movie attracted critics as well as audiences. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay; in 2017 it was welcomed onto the National Film Registry.

 Before I rewatched Field of Dreams this past week, I of course remembered primarily Kevin Costner as the dreamy farmer with father issues and a great abiding love for America’s game. And I fleetingly remembered Amy Madigan as Costner’s supportive wife as well as Ray Liotta (always a distinctive actor) as the shadowy incarnation of Shoeless Joe. I did not recall Burt Lancaster in a small but key role as Archie “Moonlight” Graham, an actual long-ago outfielder who played only a single game in the major leagues before attending medical school and embarking on a long, distinguished stint as a smalltown doctor. Lancaster’s role, the last of his stellar career, allows him to hint that there are other kinds of glory than those found on a baseball diamond.

 I also didn’t remember that Field of Dreams contains a major supporting role for James Earl Jones, the legendary actor with the basso profundo voice who left us just a few weeks ago at the age of 93. Jones played Terence Mann, a successful novelist who found fame in the Sixties, but now contends with small-minded readers who seek to ban his books. In the course of the film, Mann’s character is discovered to have a secret passion for baseball. Eventually he delivers a long, wonderful speech about baseball and its connection with America past and present. In the up-and-down history of our nation, says he, “the one constant through all the years has been baseball.”  It is baseball that signifies “all that once was good, and could be again.”

 The extras that accompany the DVD of Field of Dreams contain many clips of the film’s actors, producers, and writer/director Phil Alden Robinson. Almost all of them talk about their personal passion for baseball, and share memories of ballgames played with their dads. Jones is the exception: he never played catch with his absentee father. Still, he considered baseball a key part of his DNA, and his joyous performance here proves it. 

 

When You’re Strange: “The Lost Boys”

I recently spent five days in Santa Cruz, California, visiting members of my extended family. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the classic boardwalk and the nearby redwoods, I didn’t spot a single vampire. And now I’m just a wee bit disappointed. Perhaps I should explain: last night I watched a cult classic shot largely in Santa Cruz, though in the film the town goes by the name of Santa Carla. The Lost Boys, directed by Joel Schumacher in 1987, is a horror film of a rather whimsical sort. It posits that each evening the venerable beachside fun zone is overrun with scruffy young biker types who sleep all day, hanging upside down from the ceiling of a convenient seaside cave, and choose to drink something that looks an awful lot like blood.

 Schumacher’s contribution to vampire lore is a fascinating one. I believe he and his writers fudged, just a bit, the classic rules of vampire evolution: I haven’t run into other vampire stories in which you can remain in a half-vampire state until your first kill, with the possibility that you can return straightaway to being fully human if the head of the pack is somehow bumped off. This is part of the optimistic streak that makes The Lost Boys actually endearing. The project began with a smart writer cogitating on the gang of “lost boys” surrounding J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Living in the wild without conventional families, these youngsters formed themselves into a tribe that was ready for anything. And they proved to be desperate to find themselves a mother.

 All of this subtly finds its way into a contemporary story that takes advantage of Santa Cruz’s reputation for a laid-back post-Sixties vibe. Set against the creepy biker guys, led by a spiky-haired young Kiefer Sutherland, is a wholesome family group. Mom Dianne Wiest, trying to recover from a painful divorce, has brought her two sons to live with their curmudgeonly grandfather (Barnard Hughes, who has one of the film’s funniest lines). Hunky Michael (Jason Patric) is clearly restless, looking for a way out of the tight-knit family unit. When a gorgeous young hippie-type in a filmy outfit (Jamie Gertz) wafts by on the boardwalk, he’s a goner. Younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) loves his brother and his dog, and just wants to live out the summer at Grandpa’s in a comfortable way. He doesn’t know what he’s in for when two intense young comic-book mavens named Edgar and Alan Frog (the indispensable Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) decide to educate him about vampire lore. Suddenly, when he sees his big brother start to wear dark glasses indoors, Sam realizes there’s a problem afoot. Set against all of this is Wiest’s amiable Lucy, trying to keep her family in line while pursuing an oft-thwarted romance with a buttoned-down boardwalk shopkeeper played by Edward Herrmann.

 Schumacher himself has credited the film’s long-term success to the casting of brilliant young actors who were just starting their careers. Though Kiefer Sutherland had already shot Stand by Me, it had not yet been released when he went before the cameras in The Lost Boys. Jason Patric had previously made only one film, something called Solarbabies, before The Lost Boys turned him into a heartthrob. Teenagers Corey Haim and Corey Feldman became household names because of this movie, as well as best friends. They later appeared together several times on screen; an A&E reality series titled The Two Coreys (2007-2008) sadly chronicles how their lives went downhill over the years. (Haim died at age 38.) Fame, it seems, is even more dangerous than vampires.

 

 

 

Gena Rowlands Under the Influence

The death of Gena Rowlands last month, at age 94, gave me pause. I had always admired her devotion to her husband, the actor and writer/director John Cassavetes. Married from 1954 until his death in 1989, she was an important part of his work as an indie auteur. Together they collaborated on ten films, two of which (1974’s A Woman Under the Influence and 1980’s Gloria) brought her Oscar nominations for Best Actress. They also raised three children, all of whom now have acting and directing careers of their own. In 2004 she was featured in the popular weepie, The Notebook, as the older version of Rachel McAdams’ character, under the direction of son Nick Cassavetes. But she also performed admirably in the films of others, like Woody Allen’s somber Another Woman and Lasse Hallström’s comedic Something to Talk About. In 2007 her voice elevated the role of the wise Iranian grandmother in the English-language version of Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous animated Persepolis.

 It was heartbreaking to learn that Rowlands lived with Alzheimer’s disease for five years before she died. This news reinforced my vivid memories of Rowlands coping with another mental disorder in A Woman under the Influence. At first it’s not clear that there’s anything wrong with Mabel Longhetti, other than stone-cold fury against her husband Nick (Cassavetes regular Peter Falk). She seems entitled to be aggravated: though a loyal husband and father, Nick  appears (like so many men) to be devoted above all to his work and his work buddies. The well-liked boss of a construction crew, he perhaps can’t help it when the city demands he and his guys labor all night to solve an emergency leak problem, thus forcing him to cancel on a long-planned “date night” with his pretty wife. Still, it’s particularly oblivious of him to show up the next day with his entire crew, expecting that Mabel will host an impromptu lunch party.

 The anger that’s inside Mabel can show up in some surprising ways. When Nick is gone on that overnight emergency, she heads for a local bar, drinks much too much, and picks up a willing stranger. Then, after Nick arrives home with his work gang, she goes overboard as a charming hostess, obsessively flattering and flirting with the guys. But it’s at a children’s backyard party that she seems to come totally unglued, leading to a manic insistence that all the kids exercise their creativity by shedding clothes and manners. This precipitates a chaotic homecoming by Nick, who slaps her, gets into a physical altercation with another parent, and eventually summons a doctor with a large syringe.

 We never see Mabel’s hospitalization, but stick with Nick trying to hold the family (including his own judgmental mother) in check. The film’s final act involves Mabel’s shaky return home, after Nick is finally dissuaded from throwing her a large surprise party. As some critics griped at the time, the movie is long (2 ½ hours) and ultimately bleak. But it takes advantage of Cassavetes’ penchant for keeping the camera locked in place. This makes for extended takes that give us an unflinching view of Mabel’s disintegration, as witnessed by those around her. She’s a woman whose talent for role-playing masks the fact that she doesn’t know who she is. It’s a bold, spontaneous-seeming performance.

 Cassavetes and Rowlands largely financed and distributed this film themselves, shooting on the cheap with faculty and students from the new American Film Institute. That’s why I was gratified to see the names of several of my eventual Roger Corman pals in the crew credits. (Hi, Mike Ferris!) 

  

Spending a Good Evening at Black Rock

Bad Day at Black Rock is by no means a small movie. This 1955 MGM western, shot in color and Cinemascope, features three past Academy Award winners: Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger, and star Spencer Tracy. Also prominent in the film are Oscar nominee Robert Ryan and two rising talents who would win future Oscars, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. Director John Sturges, a former editor, would go on from Bad Day at Black Rock to helm The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. The film’s wide-screen cinematography beautifully emphasizes the wide open spaces of the Lone Pine locales, and the mood is enhanced by André Previn’s haunting score.

  So this is hardly a modest indie. And yet it contains many of the elements I’ve learned to admire in B-movies. For one thing, it’s short and tight, coming in at a mere 81 minutes. Locations are limited; dialogue is clipped and to the point; tension is strong; bursts of action are prized. A mystery bubbles beneath the surface. There’s also, along with moments of dark humor, a subtle strand of meaningful social commentary. (I’m certain my former boss, Roger Corman, deeply admired this film, which captures many of his own aesthetic and social values.)

 Set in the California outback, circa 1945, the film begins with a passenger train arriving unexpectedly at a rural outpost. It disgorges a stocky man in a black suit and fedora, carrying a briefcase. The lounging locals are suspicious, especially when they notice the new arrival has only one arm. As played by Spencer Tracy, he is taciturn and unflappable, even when faced with a decided lack of hospitality. He’s hard-pressed to get a room at the one hotel, even though it clearly lacks for paying guests. When he introduces himself as John J. Macreedy of Los Angeles, and explains that he’s looking for a homesteader named Komoko, everyone becomes icier still. The cowpokes and ranchers hanging around the hotel lobby all seem to be sharing a secret. Down the town’s one main street, the sheriff (Jagger) appears to be drinking himself into oblivion. The veterinarian/undertaker (Brennan) lets slip that Komoko is no more.

 Managing with some difficulty to rent a Jeep, Macreedy heads over the hills toward the burnt-out mess that was once Komoko’s homestead. But the town’s unofficial boss, Reno Smith (Ryan) is not about to leave this intruder to his own devices. He sends the sadistic Coley Trimble (Borgnine) in pursuit, leading to a taut action sequence.

 It would be unfair of me to spell out precisely what happens next. Suffice it to say that eventually we learn what happened to Macreedy’s arm, why he’s so eager to find Komoko, and who among the townfolk eventually come to his aid. I’ll say also that this is covertly a story about the effects of racism and xenophobia, in the wake of World War II. And that, after all the anger and mistrust, the film ends in a moment of modest but genuine hope for a better future.

 The year 1955 was a great one for American dramas, many drawn from the Broadway stage, including Mr. Roberts, Picnic, and The Rose Tattoo. Two of James Dean’s three starring films, Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, were also released. Ironically, Borgnine’s supporting turn in Black Rock was eclipsed by his Oscar-winning good-guy role in Marty, which was also named Best Picture. Though Black Rock was nominated for its script, its direction, and Tracy’s performance, it went home empty-handed. Still, it will live on, in my memory banks and (since 2018) on the National Film Registry.

 

 

 

 

 

A Clue or Two

Video games are hardly my thing. Old-fashioned though it may be, I continue to be fond of board games, especially those that are clever or silly. From childhood onward, I’ve loved the Parker Brothers game, Clue. It was apparently devised in 1943 in Britain, where it was called Cluedo, and advertised as “The Great New Sherlock Holmes’ Game.” I don’t know the year of my parents’ set, the one I still have, but a note at the end of the instruction pamphlet politely tells the purchaser that “any question regarding the rules of ‘Clue’ will be answered gladly if a 3 cent stamp is enclosed.”

 Clue, for anyone who doesn’t know it, comes with a gameboard presenting the layout, room by room, of an English country manor. There’s a ballroom, a kitchen, a conservatory, a dining room, a billiard room, and a study, along with a few secret passageways. In my parents’ version, all these rooms are shown from above in sketch-like fashion: the billiard table once baffled me, and I decided it was a kind of very grand bathtub, with various round things floating in it. As a matter of fact there are no bathrooms at all in this stately home, nor bedrooms, for that matter. But we’re told that poor Mr. Boddy has been murdered. The job of the game players is to figure out (via the cards in players’ hands)  in which room the murder occurred, and with which weapon (a rope? a knife? a candlestick?) And of course, who was the murderer: the dashing Colonel Mustard? The glamorous Miss Scarlett? Wise old Professor Plum?  The dowager known as Mrs. Peacock? What I’ve discovered on the invaluable Wikipedia site is that the game has had many permutations over the years, with—for instance—England’s Reverend Green turning into a middle-aged businessman, then (in the most recent American editions) a handsome playboy. 

 I’ve been thinking about the game of Clue ever since I saw, this past summer, a presumably Broadway-bound production of a stage version that is both very silly and a great deal of fun, with lots of mistaken identity and an elaborate twist ending. This new play is an homage both to the game and to a movie that came out in 1985 and is still remembered fondly, at least by some. (Best in-joke in the play: as the characters are running madly from room to room in pursuit of the killer, someone says, “Who designed this house anyway? Answer: The Parker brothers.)

 That 1985 movie was blessed with a lively cast, including Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Peacock, Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White, Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum, Michael McKean as Mr. Green, Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard, and the toothsome Lesley Ann Warren as a no-better-than-she-should-be Miss Scarlett. (One of the film’s best mysteries: how does her VERY low-cut dress keep from falling down?) There’s also Tim Curry (he of the Rocky Horror Picture Show) as a complicated new character at the center of the plot. All seem to be having a grand old time spoofing the murder mystery films of yore. But there’s also a gimmick that sets Clue apart. Three different endings were filmed, each of which identifies a different murderer, with different methods and motives. Presumably, audiences were supposed to be so jazzed by the idea of seeing variant endings that they’d show up at the cinemaplex more than once. It didn’t happen, but when the film came out on video, all three endings were available to be seen. And some people now regard this crazy little flick as a cult classic. 

 

Stan Berkowitz, Bat Scribe

I first met Stan Berkowitz in the rather grubby offices of the UCLA Daily Bruin. I was a grad student who thought it would be fun to write about movies for my fellow collegians, while continuing to crank out serious literary papers for my profs. And Stan was my oh-so-amiable editor. Decades later we re-connected, when he showed up at one of my book signings. I found out then that—like me—he’d eventually gone Hollywood. In fact, he insisted that, post-college, he was a candidate for the same Roger Corman job that ultimately changed my life. As a graduate of UCLA’s film school Stan doubtless had far better credentials than I did for making B-movies, Corman-style. After all, he was a budding filmmaker, not an English major. Still, I was female, which doubtless helped me get Roger’s nod. Stan instead found work with Russ Meyer, the auteur behind such deathless sexploitation flicks as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  Meyer, unlike Roger, didn’t want women doing challenging work in his offices or on his sets. He wanted them in front of the cameras, flaunting their “Guns of Navarone” bazooms, leaving his all-male crews in a permanent state of arousal.

 Following his Russ Meyer stint, Stan eventually found his way into television, He started out writing for crime dramas like T.J. Hooker, then eventually discovered his niche in the wonderful world of superheroes, crafting shows like Batman Beyond, The New Batman Adventures, Superman: The Animated Series, and Justice League Unlimited, ending up with two Emmys on his shelf. Now that he’s old enough to be considered an expert in his field, he’s decided to share his wisdom in a charming little volume called Beyond the Bat: Secrets of a Superhero Scribe.

 In thirteen lively essays, Stan bares his insights on how to succeed in Hollywood. He describes working with a closet racist, trying to create a show for Middle Eastern audiences that featured Muslim superheroes, and struggling to incorporate Old Testament stories into an animated series for the Christian market. (That chapter is titled: Written by Stan Berkowitz . . . and God.”) He dishes about what it’s like to butt up against a superstar’s vanity. (William Shatner, here’s looking at you!) In one hilarious chapter, he reveals how to get attention for your student film. This involves a curvaceous unclad lass and a whole lot of donkeys.

 Chapter 3, titled “The Green Group,” struck a chord with me by merging a story from Stan’s early life with a discussion of why some people are attracted to superhero characters. Back in the first grade, when learning to read was at the top of the agenda, Stan’s teacher automatically assigned “the little bespectacled kids” to the Blue Group, on the assumption that they would be fast learners. Stan, though, was among the “big, oafish-looking kids” stuck at the Green table, where they were clearly being identified as slow. Fortunately, he and his buddy Gregory (also a Green Group-er) fought back, via their parents, and eventually got moved up to the smart kids’ table. The episode convinced young Stan to distrust the judgment of those in power, and his anti-authoritarian streak has stayed with him from that day to this. No wonder he has gravitated toward characters like Batman and Superman who are essentially vigilantes, going over the heads of elected officials to clean up crime and save the world on their own terms.

 If you think the world of TV production is glamorous, Stan provides a healthy reality-check. And his book, amusingly illustrated by Dan Riba, is a ball to read.  

 

From Your First Cigarette to Your Last Dying Day: “The Outsiders”

 When I was growing up, youth cliques and gangs were a hot topic. West Side Story made it big on Broadway in 1957, and became a must-see film in 1961. It was five years later that S.E. Hinton (Susie to her friends) published a Young Adult novel called The Outsiders. It looked squarely at the lives of teenagers who, because of their looks or family situations, were regarded as social outcasts in their Oklahoma hometown. In the world of this story, teens are divided into two groups. The Socs (pronounced “soshes”) were more affluent, dressed better, and had cool cars with fins. The Greasers worn grubby jeans and T’s, started smoking at a very young age, and didn’t have much use for school. Hinton—who, remarkably, published the novel when she was sixteen—empathized almost entirely with the Greasers, whose underlying pain and sensitivity she understood. The narrator of her novel, Ponyboy Curtis, is a fourteen-year-old who—in the absence of parents—shares strong bonds of loyalty with his three older brothers. Though he's at the fringes of some brutal situations, like a rumble in a local park, he’s basically a good kid who’s polite to girls, loves sunsets, and ruminates over a poem by Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

 Following his acclaimed release of two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, director-producer Francis Ford Coppola turned his talents to The Outsiders, after a librarian and her students at Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, California brought the novel to his attention. Now his goal was to find a troupe of very young actors who could embody Hinton’s characters on the screen. C.Thomas Howell, then fifteen, appealingly played Ponyboy. His brothers—the tortured Dally and the take-charge Darrel—were Matt Dillon and Patrick Swayze. Other rising young actors in the cast were Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and (in a small part) Tom Cruise. A key role, that of a very young Greaser who proves himself both a hero and a martyr, was played by Ralph Macchio, just before he became The Karate Kid. (He apparently was 20 at the time, but convincingly looks about 13.) The film’s final moments, in which a close-up of Macchio is superimposed upon an image of Ponyboy writing his story is either hugely poignant or hugely corny, or both at once.

 As a movie, The Outsiders makes an interesting contrast to the much-beloved West Side Story. Its rivalries are purely social rather than ethnic. West Side Story of course pits Puerto Rican immigrants against white kids whose ancestry is probably not far removed from Ellis Island. But in The Outsiders the divide is almost entirely along economic lines. And, of course, there’s no singing and dancing in this film. Being a Greaser doesn’t seem nearly as much fun as being a Jet. The rumble in which most of the characters participate is less picturesque than grubby, fought in the mud during a driving rain.

 At my L.A. public high school there was not the kind of stark social divide portrayed in the film. Though I never heard anyone called a Greaser, we definitely had Soshes, who vied to gain membership in exclusive social clubs. A more innocent version of the kind of divide portrayed in The Outsiders shows up in both the stage (1971) and the film (1978) versions of a box-office hit, Grease. Hinton’s novel could have been an inspiration for that show, but I suspect there was something in the culture that inspired both projects. Ironically, a version of The Outsiders landed on Broadway in 2024, taking home the Tony Award for best musical.