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.