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. 

 

 

John Sayles: A Man for All Genres

My good friend Frances Doel (hi, Frances!) was the one who brought John Sayles into movieland. Having read Sayles’ lively stories in classy magazines like The Atlantic, she suggested him to Roger Corman as a potential screenwriter. Sayles took to low-budget filmmaking immediately, crafting the hilariously lethal Piranha and the space opera Battle Beyond the Stars. (The latter, a sort of cheapie Star Wars clone,  was also the launching pad for another future director, James Cameron.) Everyone knew from the start that the multi-talented Sayles aimed to direct: he spent much time on the set, soaking up everything he could about how movies were made.

 When I spoke to Sayles for my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, he told me how much his New World Pictures years had taught him about Filmmaking 101: “When do you need suspense rather than action? When do you need comedy to give people a break from the suspense? That’s what I found that Roger and Frances were very good at.” He also discovered how to write for a Corman budget, and how to approach a script in terms of its marketable elements (“How could you advertise this film?”) He put all this to use in 1980 when he had accumulated $40,000 to invest in his directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7. This was, in Sayles’ words, a film in which “I started with very little money, and said, ‘What can I do well?’ ”

 Secaucus 7, a college reunion story often seen as a precursor to The Big Chill, revealed Sayles’ longstanding interest in social groupings. When I think of Sayles’ career, I tend to remember Matewan (1987), City of Hope (1991), and Lone Star (1996), tough dramas focusing on complex interactions in periods of political and economic stress. But Sayles can also be darkly satirical, as in The Brother from Another Planet (1984), wherein a dark-skinned alien (Joe Morton) lands on earth and tries to fit in.  

 I recently visited two Sayles films from the 1990s which may seem out of character, but reveal his skill with actors and exotic landscapes. Passion Fish (1992) is very much a female film, influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. It features longtime Sayles favorite Mary McDonnell as a soap opera star who, after a serious accident, has been left a paraplegic. Returning to her family home in rural Louisiana, she wallows in self-pity until a no-nonsense Black caregiver with problems of her own (Alfre Woodward) enters her life. The story is by no means saccharine: McDonnell’s character can be bitchy, and Hollywood comes in for some well-deserved satirical licks. But it’s a down-to-earth tale of resilience and acceptance, beautifully acted and filmed.

 The big surprise is 1994’s The Secret of Roan Inish, adapted by Sayles from an Irish novel full of mythological creatures. Sayles’ Ireland is not the cheerful domain of Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Nor is it nearly as black as The Banshees of Inisherin. Roan Inish is a family film, with a young girl as its central character, in which terrible things have happened in the past but the ultimate ending is upbeat. Set largely on a mysterious island, it’s surely the most gorgeous film that Sayles has ever made, full of water, sand, gulls, and the seals who share a magical inheritance. I love the fact that it was shot by a late-in-life Haskell Wexler,  another deeply political filmmaker who set all that aside to revel in the beauty and the folklore  of the Irish coast.