On this episode, film critic and historian Edward A. Havens III concludes his two-part look back at the 1980s films of one of cinema's truly gifted storytellers, John Sayles.
----more----
We talk about his three movies from the second half of the decade, as well as many of the films he would make after the end of the 1980s.
The movies discussed in this episode, all directed by John Sayles, include:
Brother from Another Planet (1994)
City of Hope (1991)
Eight Men Out (1988)
Limbo (1999)
Lone Star (1996)
Matewan (1987)
Men with Guns (1998)
Passion Fish (1992)
The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)
Silver City (2004)
If you like what you hear and you haven’t done so already, please make sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcatching source. While a good review and rating won’t increase our chances of being found or being a featured podcast on a podcatcher like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it will potentially help increase the odds of someone who does find the show for the first time thinking that clicking play will be a good time investment for them. And it’s something you can even do while you’re listening to this episode.
On this episode, we will complete our look back at the 1980s career of one of cinema’s true master storytellers, John Sayles.
When we left Part One, Sayles had just seen the near-simultaneous releases of his second and third films, Lianna and Baby, It’s You, in the late winter and early spring of 1983.
Shortly after the releases of Lianna and Baby, It’s You, Sayles would be named one of 34 people to receive one of that year’s MacArthur Fellowships, only the second filmmaker after documentarian Frederick Wiseman to be named.
Often called “The Genius Grant,” The MacArthur Fellowship is a five-year, half-million-dollar grant awarded to individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future.
The Fellowship was designed to provide recipients with the flexibility to pursue their own artistic, intellectual, and professional activities in the absence of specific obligations or reporting requirements. And that’s exactly what Sayles would do.
For his fourth feature film, Sayles wanted to revisit some of the themes he had worked on in his Night Skies screenplay for Steven Spielberg, but set those themes within race relations in America and the immigrant experience of assimilation in a new country.
The Brother from Another Planet would feature the great Joe Morton in his first leading role as The Brother, a mute space alien from… well… another planet, who finds a safe space in Harlem as he tries to hide from two Men in Black who seek to return The Brother to the Another Planet from which he had recently escaped.
Along with Joe Morton, the predominantly black cast would also feature Rosanna Carter, Bill Cobbs, Giancarlo Esposito, Steve James, and future A Different World writer and producer Reggie Rock Bythewood, with Sayles and David Straithairn as the extraterrestrial cops looking to bring The Brother home.
Most of the film would be shot in and around Harlem with Ernest Dickerson behind the camera.
Dickerson had come to Sayles’ attention after shooting Spike Lee’s NYU award-winning student film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, and would go on to shoot the first six of Lee’s feature films, from She’s Gotta Have It to Malcolm X, before becoming a director himself on such films as Juice, Demon Knight and Bulletproof.
Sayles had budgeted the film at $350k, $200k to shoot, $100k to edit and $50k in deferred salaries to core members of the cast and crew, because all of it was coming out of his own pocket, not only from the first $100 of the MacArthur Grant that was paid out before shooting on the film started in November 1983, but also from proceeds of selling Return of the Secaucus 7, a film he also owned outright, to a major cable channel, as well as his fees for writing the screenplay adaptations for the first two books in Jean M. Auel’s Earth Children series, The Clan of the Cave Bear, which was produced in 1985 with Daryl Hannah in the leading role, and The Valley of Horses, which would never be made. To keep costs at a minimum, Sayles would quit the Directors Guild of America, the Hollywood filmmakers’ union he had been proud to join, because he couldn’t afford to pay himself or his assistant directors, Joy Birdsong and Craig Rice, the required guild minimum.
Sayles would have fun and experiment with his camera while making the film. For the first appearance of the Men in Black's at a local bar as the look for The Brother, Sayles would have Dickerson film the scene with the camera upside down, and he would have the scene printed backward for the final print. As filmed, Sayles and Straithairn would start sitting on bar stools, then walk backward towards the front door and out to the street, so when it was projected in the final film, their movements looking very alien.
For another scene, where a card sharp on a subway train makes all the white people disappear, Sayles and a skeleton crew could not get a permit to shoot on the subway, so they would film the scene on an out of service car in a subway museum, while another scene, with The Brother looking out the window of a moving subway car, Sayles and Dickerson would hide a camera under a jacket and steal a quick shot with Morton before they could get caught.
And once again, Sayles would wear many hats on the production. Not only would he be the writer and the director and one of the actors on the film, he would return to his editing bay once again.
Once the film was completed, Sayles and his partner Maggie Renzi would head off to the Cannes Film Market in May 1984, where they would handle the sale of the film to a domestic distributor, while having a foreign sales company to secure pre-sales from international distributors who knew how to handle arthouse films like theirs. They would sell the theatrical distribution rights to Cinecom International Films, a small New York-based distributor founded in 1982 by Ira Deutchman, one of the originators of the United Artists Classic labels in 1978.
At the time of their deal, Cinecom was one of the up and coming indie distributors, already having released such films as Robert Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck, Robert Duvall’s first film as director, Angelo My Love, and Gregory Nava’s amazing El Norte, which would be nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. But 1984 would put the company on the map. In addition to Brother from Another Planet, Cinecom would also release Altman’s Secret Honor, Leos Carax’s first film, Boy Meets Girl, the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which would win the Oscar for Best Documentary Film, and Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert movie, Stop Making Sense. We will be doing an episode about Cinecom in the future. While the early reviews of the film out of Cannes were definitely mixed, Renzi was confident the film could be a crossover hit, equally appealing to both the sophisticated arthouse and African-American audiences. Sayles was equally confident, as he felt it was, despite its meager budget, his most commercial movie to date.
Cinecom must have felt it to, as they would do something unusual for a movie that would be considered an arthouse film, by giving The Brother from Another Planet is a sneak preview at the Embassy 72nd Street, the same theatre where Lianna had opened less than two years earlier, on Friday, September 7th, 1984, before opening the following Friday.
But despite more lukewarm reviews for the film, several of which criticized how Sayles handles a subplot involving a drug lord who is poisoning the community with his illicit wares, The Brother from Another Planet would gross $29 in its first three days at the theatre, just barely beating the first week house record Lianna had set twenty months earlier. In its second and third weeks, the film would gross another $26k each week. The film would open on two screens at the Beverly Center Cineplex on October 12th, and it would gross $20k, which is impressive since the two theatres at the Beverly Center sat a combined 250 people, about 20% fewer seats than the Embassy 72nd, which was still grossing $23 in its fifth weekend.
Cinecom would continue to release the movie, slowly but surely, across America, for the remainder of 1984 and into early 1985. And after eight months in theatres, the film would have grossed more than $4m, and along with the success of Stop Making Sense, would help the company expand their release efforts outside of arthouses and into the major multiplexes, which would help them greatly two years later with the release of James Ivory’s A Room With a View. But, again, we’ll get to Cinecom in another episode.
The Brother from Another Planet was my introduction to John Sayles. I loved how inventive it seemed, borrowing motifs rarely seen in movies since the days of silent film. I loved how it treated The Brother and most of the people in Harlem he would come into contact with, with empathy and sincerity. And it wasn’t until I started doing the research for this series that I realized the film was released months earlier than I originally thought. As I have mentioned numerous times on previous episodes, I was already aware arthouse movies wouldn’t arrive in my teenage hometown of Santa Cruz for several weeks after their initial New York and Los Angeles openings, but I didn’t realize it took Brother nearly five months to get to my neck of the woods.
But the truth is, The Brother from Another Planet was a rush writing experiment, something he dashed off in a week, as Sayles was having trouble finding funding for his passion project.
John Sayles had first heard about the 1920 Battle of Matewan while he was hitchhiking through the backcountry of West Virginia in 1920, between finishing a summer job in the area and returning to Williams College for his fall studies. Now, you may be wondering people might be talking to a total stranger about something that had happened a full half-century earlier? Don’t forget, Sayles was a Psychology student at Williams, and it wouldn’t be out of character for him to just talk to people during his travels. And the people in the region he was talking to, mainly coal miners themselves and families of those who worked in the mines, were still on edge from the murders of United Mine Workers of America leader Jock Yablonski, along with his wife and daughter, the previous New Years Eve.
Sayles became so fascinated by the stories he was hearing that he would briefly delay his return to Williams so he could compile an oral history of the Battle of Matewan. He would learn that May 19th, 1920, the Stone Mountain Coal Company has hired a group of detectives from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to evict a number of families that had living in a tent city on company land, after already being evicted from their company-owned homes because the miners had been on strike for months.
You probably already know being a coal miner is a tough and dangerous job today, but in 1920, working conditions were far worse, and the men just wanted to be treated better, in better working conditions, and be paid fair wage. In fact, any wage, really.
At the time, the Stone Mountain Coal Company paid their miners in something called coal scrip, pieces of paper or metal that resembled money and had a monetary value like money, but could only be spent at company-owned stores, which would charge miners much higher prices for basic necessities than what those same items would cost in a major city like New York City or Chicago. This would keep the miners and their families indebted to the company, since the scrip was technically an advance against unearned wages, and since they could not be deposited in a bank, where it could be saved and accrue interest, any prospects of acquiring generational wealth were eliminated.
Earlier in 1920, buoyed by the success of the United Mine Workers union’s ability to get mine workers in other parts of the country more than a 25% increase in wages and to be paid in real American dollars, more than 3000 coal miners in Matewan signed up to become unionized, knowing full well it could cost their jobs their homes and livelihoods. And Stone Mountain fought back, hard.
Every miner who signed up to become a part of the union was fired, evicted from their homes, and harassed by the Baldwin-Felts detectives who regularly came to town to cause trouble and stress.
On May 19th, eight detectives arrived in Matewan on the Number 29 train from Bluefield, about 92 miles away to the southeast. They were there to tear down the tent city in an attempt to cause further pain and suffering to the miners and their families and get them back to work. While they weren’t able to completely shut down the tent city, they were able to carry out some evictions throughout the day. They would have an early dinner at the Urias Hotel near the train station, where they were going to catch the five o’clock train back to Bluefield. As the detectives were heading from the hotel to the train station, they would be intercepted by Sid Hatfield, the Chief of Police in Matewan and a supporter of the miner’s attempts to unionize, saying he had arrest warrants from the County sheriff for the detectives. Detectives Albert and Lee Felts would then produce their own arrest warrants for Chief Hatfield. And yes, Sid Hatfield was one of those Hatfields. It was his grandfather William Hatfield who lead the family in the famous feud with the McCoys, so Sid Hatfield wasn’t just going to roll over for these detective punks. Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman, who was with Hatfield when the detectives were approached, examined the arrest warrant for Hatfield and declared them a fraud.
Now, unbeknownst to Hatfield, Testerman or the detectives, a number of miners, sick and tired of being treated like sub-humans by the mining company and their thugs, had surrounded the area, armed to the teeth. It’s not known how the battle started, although most stories suggest either Albert Felts or Sid Hatfield had shot the mayor, but when it was done, ten people would be dead: Mayor Testerman, two of the miners, and seven of the eight detectives.
Now, why would the Chief of Police shoot the mayor? Well, that’s a strange side story, but in a nutshell, Sid Hatfield would end up marrying Mayor Testerman’s widow Jessie Lee not twelve days after her husband had been killed, and Thomas Felts, the brother of the two namesake detectives killed during the battle, along with his spy Charles Lively, would spread the rumor Hatfield shot the mayor because he was in love. Jessie Lee would be widowed again fourteen months later, when several men from Baldwin-Felts ambushed him and his friend Ed Chambers on the courthouse steps in nearby Welch, WV, where they were going to be tried on conspiracy charges relating to another union-related battle, based on testimony given by Felts’ lackey Charles Lively.
Sayles would spend the next nine years getting his screenplay about the Battle of Matewan into shape, but he knew he would need to achieve some success as a somewhat bankable filmmaker before he could tackle it.
With the relative success of Brother from Another Planet, he felt he finally had the clout to make it. Cinecom, also happy with the relative success of Brother from Another Planet, would make Matewan the first movie they would finance instead of just acquiring.
Sayles had wanted to shoot the movie in Matewan, in large part because there are no other places in America that look quite like the coal mining hillsides of West Virginia, but the town had become too modern when Sayles scouted locations in the summer of 1986. But he would discover another mining town nearby called Thurmond which still looked like it did back in the 20s. Most of the seventy people who still lived in Thurmond would be hired as extras, and for thirty-one of them, actual speaking roles.
Watching the film then, and watching the film today, it’s almost impossible to believe that, even with deferments everyone working for scale, the film only cost $4m to produce. But that’s how much Sayles inspired everyone to keep costs down to tell this story.
As great as his cast was, and I’ll get to them in a moment, Sayles’ biggest get for the movie was getting the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler to shoot the movie. I’m going to read you just a small list of the films Wexler shot between 1966 and 1978.
Ready?
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In the Heat of the Night
The Thomas Crown Affair American Graffiti One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Bound for Glory Coming Home Days of Heaven
Five of those movies have been added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, and two of the films, Virginia Woolf and Bound for Glory, would win Wexler an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
So why would Wexler want to work on this film? It wasn’t only the challenge of trying to make the movie look like it was actually happening in the 1920s. Wexler was also a political activist who used his camera to capture the struggles of life. He would also write and direct two movies, one of which, 1969’s Medium Cool, had been studied by academics and film students for more than a half-century, lured in not only by Wexler’s cinéma vérité camerawork but how he was able to weave an engaging dramatic narrative out of the social and political counterculture upheaval that was happening in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention as he was shooting his movie. Medium Cool has also been named to the National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” I got to meet Wexler many years later, in 2004, when his son Mark made a fascinating documentary about his dad called Tell Them Who You Are. Wexler did not suffer fools gladly, but he would be quite supportive of those who he felt shared his beliefs. In fact, it would be Wexler who would pull a few strings at the USC Film School to help George Lucas get admitted. Wexler found a true comrade in John Sayles, and his camera work on Matewan truly reflects Wexler’s passion for the material. If it weren’t for Vitorrio Storraro’s masterful work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor that same year, I have no doubt that Wexler would have been the front runner for his third Oscar win.
But I promised to get to the cast. Are you ready?
For Chris Cooper, who today is recognized as one of the best actors working, this would not only be his first time playing a leading role in a movie, it would be his very first movie. He would play Joe Kenehan, a union organizer who arrives in Matewan to help the striking miners.
For Mary McDonnell, who would become world-famous three years later for his starring role in Dances With Wolves, this would also be her first leading role, although she did have a small role in Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks in 1984. She would play Elma Radner, a widow who supports herself and her teenage son by running a boarding house.
James Earl Jones, who needs no introduction, plays one of scab miners brought in by the mining company to keep the coal flowing, who is manipulated into almost killing Joe before can help all the miners.
Sayles’s long-time friend and collaborator David Straithairn plays Sid Hatfield, while their college friend and regular Sayles collaborator Gordon Clapp plays one of the Baldwin-Felts detectives. The remainder of the cast includes Ken Jenkins, who you now know best as Dr. Kelso on Scrubs, Kevin Tighe, best known as Roy DeSoto on the 1970s show Emergency!, Bob Gunton, whose best-known role today is Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption, Josh Mostel, the son of legendary comedic actor Zero Mostel and best known for playing David Paymer’s brother Barry in the City Slickers movies, and Joe Grifasi, who is best-known defense attorney turned Judge Horowitz during thirteen seasons of SVU between 2005 and 2018.
For you indie music fans, then sixteen-year-old Will Oldham is featured as Elma’s son, who is not only a coal miner himself but also a budding Baptist preacher in town. You know Oldham now better by his stage name, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the inventive solipsist Appalachian post-punk singer and musician whose released 25 albums and EPs of hauntingly beautiful music over the past thirty years. And, of course, Sayles is in the movie too, as another preacher in town.
The production would begin in Thurmond on September 3rd, 1986, and would last for seven weeks. In addition to Thurmond, Sayles and his crew would shoot in the Grandview State Park, and at the Coal Mine Exhibition in Beckley, a town that will be very familiar to players of Fallout 76.
Like many movies based on real events, Sayles would take some liberties with the story for his movie. I’m not going to go into all the details of what he changed, but if you do end watching the movie, and you want to learn more about the story of The Battle of Matewan, and of Sayles’s process in creating the screenplay based on his research, I highly recommend seeking out the companion book that came out around the time of the release of the movie. It’s called Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan, and although its been out of print for many years, you can, at least as I research and write this episode in late January 2022, pick up a copy of the 2003 reprint of the book for as little as two dollars on Amazon. I still have my original copy from 1987, which I was able to get signed by both Sayles and Cooper in 2004, while they were doing their press tour for their movie Silver City.
Longtime readers of the FilmJerk website and listeners to this podcast know that I firmly believe there is a right time and a wrong time to release certain movies.
And while I would never think myself as being smarter than someone like Ira Deutchman when it comes to releasing movies, since he’s released several dozen and I have yet to release even one, late summer might not have been the best time to put out a serious independent drama about a coal town massacre. I could understand why Cinecom might want to rush the release right after they received Sayles’s final cut of the film. It is an honest-to-goodness masterpiece. For me, I still think it’s best movie, and I love the vast majority of his movies. But the movie couldn’t exactly rely on star names the way most summer movies did then and continue to do now. It couldn’t count on a hot soundtrack full of top-selling pop bands to fuel interest in the movie. All it could do is hope that critics would love it, audiences would love it, and that would be good enough to bring them in.
Well, the critics did love it.
They responded well to the period look Wexler gave the film. They responded well to the story. They responded well to the acting and the music and the costumes. Of the major critics of the day, only Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune and Rita Kempley of the Washington Post would dissent.
Cinecom would target the 700 seat Cinema 1, one of Manhattan’s ten largest movie auditoriums, for Matewan’s opening engagement on Friday, August 28th, 1987. But because of the movie’s running time, two hours and twelve minutes, the theatre could only show the movie five times a day, even with a nightly 11pm show, as opposed to the seven shows per day the shorter Brother From Another Planet opened with three years earlier. As it turned out, the loss of two showtimes per day was offset by the size of the theatre, and in its first three days, Matewan would have grossed more than $39k, a new record for a Sayles movie.
Now, usually, movie grosses drop precipitously during Labor Day weekend, especially in New York City. Its the final weekend of summer, your last chance to go to the beach before you have to go back to school, last chance to stay out late with your friends before the temperatures start to fall. But Matewan would see its gross increase in its second weekend to more than $50k. Buoyed by the early success of those first two weeks at the Cinema I, Cinecom would move up the Los Angeles release of Matewan to September 11th, and would open the film up in four theatres, the Century Plaza in Century City, the Fairfax 3 right across the street from where CBS shot The Price is Right, the Monica 4 in Santa Monica, and the Universal City Cineplex next door to Universal Studios. In New York, the film would gross another $37k, but the four theatres in Los Angeles could only come up with a combined $20k in ticket sales.
And that’s kinda how it kept going. Strong numbers in New York City, weaker in Los Angeles. Cinecom would keep adding theatres week after week, one theatre in Chicago, one theatre in San Francisco there, a theatre in Seattle, a theatre in Cleveland, but outside of New York, the film just couldn’t catch a break. The film would play in New York City for a good four and a half months, but everywhere else, it would be gone after two or three weeks. After it finished out its national run, never playing in more than 42 theatres in any given week, the film would gross only $1.68m.
The film, however, wasn’t completely forgotten. Haskell Wexler would be nominated by his fellow cameramen in the American Cinematographers Society for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases, and the Independent Spirit Awards would give the film six nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and two nominations for Best Supporting Actor, to James Earl Jones and David Straithairn, and would award Wexler for his work. And Wexler would also be nominated for an Academy Award.
But Sayles wouldn’t really have to worry about awards, as he would already be hard at work on his next movie.
A number of film producers had been trying to make a movie out of Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book, Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series, since it was first published.
For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, the Black Sox Scandal was a Major League Baseball game-fixing scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate led by racketeer Arnold Rothstein. The scandal would lead the owners of the teams to appoint Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to be named the first commissioner of baseball, and help to restore faith in the game within the public eye.
If you listened to last week’s episode, the first part of this miniseries, you may remember I mentioned Sayles sent a copy of his first published book, Pride of the Bimbos, to a Hollywood agent with a little note that said “If I send you a script, will you represent me?”, he would get back a positive response, and that he had a first draft of a script sample on the agent’s desk within three weeks. Well, that writing sample Sayles sent off was an adaptation of Asinof’s book.
Producers Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, who had produced Desperately Seeking Susan, featuring Madonna in her first movie role, and River’s Edge, which featured Keanu Reeves in one of his earliest movie roles, had optioned the screen rights to the book in 1980, and had spent years trying to get filmmakers like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Walter Hill and Philip Kaufman to direct the film.
At one point, they had even spoken to former minor league baseball player turned screenwriter Ron Shelton about making his directorial debut on the film, but Shelton was dead set on getting his own baseball movie, Bull Durham, made. Through a mutual acquaintance, Sanford and Pillsbury would discover sometime in 1985 that not only had Sayles already written his own adaptation of the book, he had written the screenplay because he really wanted to make it into a movie himself.
While Sayles went to work on a fresh rewrite of his original script, Sanford and Pillsbury would get to work obtaining financing for the movie, which they would do by trying to put together a package of some of the hottest younger male actors in Hollywood to play the White Sox players, including Kevin Bacon, Tom Cruise, and Emilio Estevez. While Bacon and Cruise would pass on the project, Estevez would sign on to play third baseman Buck Weaver. He would stick with the project for nearly two years, but when the producers finally got the $6.5m to make the movie, he was already committed to playing Billy the Kid in Young Guns, which was supposed to shoot around the same time. With Estevez out, the producers would go after his younger brother, Charlie Sheen, to play another role, outfielder Happy Felsch. Now, you might remember that both Sheen and Estevez were in Young Guns, but Estevez wouldn’t become involved with Young Guns until after it had a delay in shooting, which would free up Estevez to come back to the movie, but the production had already recast the role of Buck Weaver with John Cusack.
And true to their promise to put together a package of some of Hollywood’s best up-and-coming actors, they would fill the remaining ballplayer roles with the likes of D.B. Sweeney, Michael Rooker, Perry Lang, Jace Alexander and Bill Irwin. Sayles would make sure there was space for his friends David Straithairn and Gordon Clapp, and, of course, a role for himself, this time as legendary Chicago sportswriter Ring Lardner, whose reporting on the scandal would change the tone of his writing for the remainder of his career.
The production would also bring a number of veteran actors into the film, including Michael Lerner, Christopher Lloyd, John Mahoney, and American historian and occasional actor Studs Terkel.
Sayles had dreamed of making the book into a movie for so long, he had originally envisioned Stacy Keach and Martin Sheen as two of the players when he wrote that first draft more than a decade earlier.
As the production prepped to shoot in Cincinnati, Louisville and Indianapolis in September 1987, several of the actors would prepare for their roles. D.B. Sweeney would be able to practice with the Kenosha WI Twins, while Charlie Sheen was able to attend batting practice with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Sheen was especially keen to be a part of the movie.
"I'm not in this for cash or my career or my performance", he would tell a writer for the Chicago Tribune after the movie finished shooting and he was doing press for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. "I wanted to take part in this film because I love baseball.” Eight Men Out would be the first of two baseball movies starring Sheen within seven months of each other.
Before principal photography began on September 16th, 1987, at Bush Stadium in Indianapolis IN, Sayles would put the actors playing baseball players through three weeks of basic spring training-like workouts, run by former major leaguer Ken Berry, a two-time Gold Glove-winning outfielder for, ironically, the Chicago White Sox.
Because the production couldn’t shoot at any of the baseball stadiums until after the minor league season had ended, night shoots would get rather cold. To keep the spirits of his actors up, Sayles would regularly run around while directing in a tank top, shorts and sneakers without socks, even when the temperature dipped below freezing. And because it would get so cold at night in the stadium, the production had trouble getting locals to come out to play fans in the stands, even with the enticements of Bingo with cash prizes between shots, or pictures and autographs with the stars.
One person who would come to visit the set was Ring Lardner, Jr., the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Robert Altman’s MASH, and the son of the person Sayles was playing in the film. Lardner was assigned by the magazine American Film to write about the movie and the production. In his article, titled Foul Ball, with a subtitle of John Sayles’s Eight Men Out, or How My Father Watched the White Sox Throw the 1919 World Series. In the six-page article, which you can find online from the University of California’s Pacific Film Archive website, Lardiner goes into great deal about the production, and notes at one point that the movie was depicting much of the story as accurately as possible, or at least what he knew from his father. There’s also side-by-side photos of Sayles in one scene from the movie as Ring Lardner, next to a photo of Ring Lardner a few years after the scandal, and the resemblance was uncanny. It’s a fantastic article that exemplifies the best of what objective writing about movies could be.
One problem the movie would have as it worked its way through post-production in early 1988 was that Orion Pictures, the company that was going to be releasing the movie, had another baseball movie on its schedule for 1988: Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham. It was decided that Bull Durham, a comedy, would be released during the early summer when the season was in full swing, and Eight Men Out, a serious drama, would be released in the fall, to capitalize on the end of the season and the impending playoffs.
But as we’ve seen time and time again when movies with a similar storyline or genre come out within a few months of each other, the first one out of the gate is usually the more popular one. We just a baseball movie a couple months ago, why would we see another one? That one was funny. This one doesn’t look funny at all. And that’s exactly what happened here. When it was released in June 1988, Bull Durham became an unexpected sleeper hit, never getting higher than fourth place in any week it was playing in theatres, and dropping out of the top ten after only five weeks, but it would end up grossing over $50m by the time it was played out in early 1989. In fact, when Eight Men Out opened in 147 theatres on September 2nd, 1988, Bull Durham was still playing in 521 theatres in its eleventh week of release, and in fact would gross 49% more than in its previous weekend. Eight Men Out would gross $1m that Labor Day weekend, its per-screen average of $7 the second best amongst the top twenty films, beaten only by Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which was riding a wave of controversy and protest no other film in the market could match.
But in its second week, Eight Men Out would lose a dramatic 61% of its opening weekend audience, grossing only $436k in 148 theatres. Bull Durham, now in its twelfth week, would gross $459k, although that was still in 549 theatres. The following week, Eight Men Out would drop another 35%, while Bull Durham would grow another 12%.
In its fourth week, Orion would give the movie another major push, adding another 220 theatres, and the film would see a 112% gain in ticket sales, but that would only be good enough for 17th place. At least it beat Bull Durham again that weekend.
As October and the baseball playoffs started, it seemed that Eight Men Out would carve a small niche in theatres, losing only 12% of its audience in week 5, but that would be the apex of its power. As the playoffs continued, and the Dodgers, originally forecasted to come in fourth place in their six-team division, made their improbable run for the championship, both Eight Men Out and Bull Durham would lose steam quickly. By the time the Dodgers beat the Oakland A’s on October 20th, Eight Men Out was earning less than a quarter-million dollars from 300 theatres, while Bull Durham was practically gone from theatres. Eight Men Out would continue in mostly dollars houses for the remainder of the year, and after seventeen weeks in theatres, it would finish its theatrical run with $5.68m.
The movie deserved better. Critics loved it, and the audiences that bothered to see it would rate it highly. Siskel and Ebert, our critic friends from the Windy City, would split on the film. Siskel would use the word “fascinating” more than once to describe the movie, while Ebert found it to be “oddly unfocused.”
At awards time, the movie would only get a single nomination from any group, but it would be a major feather in Sayles’s cap, when the USC Scripter Awards would nominate it as one of the best screenplays of the year.
As the 80s came to a close, Sayles would continue to branch out. In 1990, he would create the NBC legal drama Shannon’s Deal, which would only last for thirteen episodes in 1990 and 1991 but would be highly regarded for the quality of its writing and character development.
And like in the 80s, Sayles would write and direct six more movies in the 90s, and every single one of them was exceptional.
1991’s City of Hope, an ambitious story of corruption and community in a small Eastern city, would feature previous Sayles stars Chris Cooper, Joe Morton, Jace Alexander and David Straithairn, as well as Angela Bassett and Gina Gershon.
1992’s Passion Fish would bring Sayles his first Academy Award nomination for writing, and he would also direct his Matewan co-star Mary McDonnell to another Best Actress Oscar nomination, as a daytime television actress who tries to drink herself to death at her childhood home in Louisiana, until Alfre Woodard shows up as a caretaker hired to pull the actress out of her self-pity.
1994’s The Secret of Roan Inish was a major left turn for Sayles, his first film to be set and shot outside of the United States, a folktale about Irish selkies, seals who could shed their skins to become human. Sayles would re-team with his Matewan cinematographer Haskell Wexler to give the 1940s period film as authentic a look as possible.
His best film of the 90s was inarguably 1996’s Lone Star, a Tex-Mex Neo-Western murder mystery set in a small South Texas town. Now, you want to talk about a cast to die for, Lone Star has it. Chris Cooper stars as the town sheriff, who lives in the long shadow of his dad, played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaughey in his single best role ever, whose local legend hasn’t waned even years after his death. Elizabeth Pena, Kris Kristofferson, Clifton James, Joe Morton and Frances McDormand also star in the film that many critics then and today consider to be Sayles’s masterpiece. It would certainly be his most awarded movie. In addition to being nominated a second time for an Academy Award, the film would also be nominated for Best Picture from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Independent Spirit Awards and the Golden Satellite Awards, and Sayles the writer would also be nominated for a Golden Globe, a Spirit Award and a Writers Guild Award. It would also be the highest-grossing film of his career, with more than $13m in ticket sales.
Not to tie up the show any longer than necessary, but this is how I know Lone Star is a great movie. Back in the summer of 1996, when it was making its way through theatres, I was managing a three-screen theatre in the town of Watsonville CA, on the southern edge of Santa Cruz County. Watsonville was primarily a farming town at the time. Many of your frozen vegetables were grown, processed, frozen and shipped out of Wastonville. As such, much of the town spoke Spanish either as their primary or only language. Here was a film that was equally in English and Spanish, and I was able to convince my boss that we might actually do some business with a movie that was heavily in Spanish but wouldn’t necessarily alienate English-speaking audiences. We booked the film for a week. And then another week. And then a third. And a fourth. As I suspected, the film would bring in both English and Spanish-speaking audiences.
Now, normally, when we got a film, I would watch it after I built up the print, to make sure everything was built up properly. But I had already seen Lone Star twice by this point, and since you QC a print until after your theatre was closed and all your customers were out of the building, I decided I wasn’t particularly in the mood to stick around until almost 3am to watch a two hour and fifteen-minute movie I had already seen twice in the past month.
When the film was done playing at my theatre, and I needed to break the print down to send it to the next theatre that was going to be playing it, I discovered I had built the film up incorrectly. Whichever theatre had the film before me had broken it down incorrectly, and put the heads and tails leaders for reels 5 on reel 6 and the leaders for reel 6 on reel 5. And no one in four weeks noticed the story was being played out of order, because the film already bounces around between two different time periods. That’s how good the film was.
1998’s Men with Guns was born out of a conversation with author Francisco Goldman, who had an uncle who was a doctor in Guatemala involved in an international health program, and how his uncle had discovered a number of his former students who he had sent off to be village doctors had been murdered by their own government. Sayles would fashion a story that mirrored what Goldman had told him about his uncle’s crisis of conscience. Outside of Mandy Patinkin, the cast featured non-American Latino actors from Central and South America who would never again appear in an American movie, and would feature no less than five languages native to the region where the film was shot and took place.
1999’s Limbo takes place an economically devastated Alaskan town, and features David Straithairn as a fisherman with a troublesome past who dates a woman played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio whose young daughter does not approve of him. When the fisherman witnesses the murder of his shady brother, he, the woman and the kid must go on the run into the wilderness to survive.
The 2000s would see a slowdown of Sayles’s output as a writer and director, with only four movies made during the decade, the best being 2004’s Silver City, a political satire which once again features Chris Cooper, this time as a George W. Bush-like Republican politician running for Governor of Colorado who gets involved in a murder mystery when he hooks a corpse in a lake during the shooting of a campaign commercial. And because of Sayles’s stature as a master filmmaker, he would be able to hook a treasure trove of actors to star in this very liberally slanted lower budgeted movie, including Danny Huston, Richard Dreyfuss, Tim Roth, Maria Bellow, Daryl Hannah, Ralph Waite, James Gammon, Thora Birch, and Billy Zane.
There’d be two more movies in the 2010s, but we’ve not seen a new movie from Sayles since 2013. If you’re listening to this episode in late January 2022, during its first week of release, Sayles happens to be in Los Angeles right now, only a few miles from where I wrote and recorded this episode, speaking after showings of his movies during a career retrospect at the American Cinematheque, which I did not know about when I started to write and research these episodes. I haven’t seen anything come out about what he’s saying at those events, or if there’s any news about if he’s ever going to make another movie.
Of the Sayles-written and directed movies he’s made over the past forty-plus years, many of them are available to stream online, or at least rent or buy from various services.
1980’s Return of the Secaucus 7 can be streamed from AMC+, or rented or purchased from AppleTV.
1983’s Lianna can also be streamed from AMC+, or rented or purchased from AppleTV, or from Amazon.
1983’s Baby It’s You can be rented or purchased from AppleTV or Amazon.
1984’s Brother from Another Planet can be streamed from AMC+, Fandor, The Film Detective, Hoopla, PlutoTV, or Tubi, or rented or purchased from AppleTV or Amazon.
1987’s Matewan is not currently available to stream, rent or purchase online, but one can find a pretty decent copy of the film on a very popular video website. Just search for Matewan Full Movie on that site.
1988’s Eight Men Out can be streamed from HBO Max, or rented or purchased from Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Redbox or Vudu.
1991’s City of Hope can be rented or purchased from Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play or Vudu. 1992’s Passion Fish can be streamed from Crackle, The Criterion Channel, Fubo, Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex, PlutoTV or Vudu, or rented or purchased from Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play or Vudu.
1994’s The Secret of Roan Inish can be streamed from Amazon Prime, Hoopla, Kanopy, or Tubi, or can be rented or purchased from Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Redbox or Vudu.
1996’s Lone Star can be streamed from Hoopla, or can be rented or purchased from Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Redbox or Vudu.
1998’s Men with Guns is not currently available to stream, rent or purchase online, but one can find a pretty decent copy of the film on a very popular video website. Just search for Men with Guns Full Movie on that site. But be careful, because you’ll also find a Michael Madsen movie called Man With a Gun, which is not the same movie.
1999’s Limbo can be rented or purchased from Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Redbox or Vudu.
2002’s Sunshine State can be streamed on Amazon Prime, or can be rented or purchased from Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Redbox or Vudu.
2003’s Casa de los Babys can be streamed on AMC+, or can be rented or purchased from Amazon.
2004’s Silver City can be streamed from Amazon Prime, Kanopy or Tubi, or can be rented or purchased from Amazon or Google Play.
2007’s Honeydripper can be streamed from Crackle, Fubo, Plex, PlutoTV, Tubi or Vudu, or can be rented or purchased from Apple TV or Amazon.
2010’s Amigo and 2013’s Go for Sisters cannot be streamed, rented or purchased from any site, and is not available on that major video website.
And with that, we’re going to say goodnight after a pretty long episode. Thank you for joining us. We’ll be back soon with Episode 71, about the long-forgotten 1980 Dennis Hopper movie Out of the Blue, which is currently enjoying a theatrical re-release in arthouse theatres in America. Look for that soon.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.
FilmJerk: The 80s Movie Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.