Quote of the Day (John Sayles, on Music and Movies)

“Movies are visceral as well as intellectual. Unless you give someone a CD to listen while reading a book you don’t have the same experience you do with film, which allows you to use music in incredible ways.  In a movie you have this whole other thing you can do – rhythm [is] the spine of the story. I use music sparingly though and this is the reason some people come out of my films saying what was that. We don’t have wall-to-wall orchestral movie music telling them how to feel.   In doing that, I do lose some people but it’s really, really important to use music to support the story.” — Indie actor-screenwriter-director-novelist John Sayles interviewed by Antonio D’Ambrosio, “An Interview with John Sayles,” The Believer (Issue 61, March 2009)

Quote of the Day (Filmmaker John Sayles, on Why ‘Every Movie is a World’)

“Every movie is a world. When you enter that world you should learn very quickly what are the rules of this world. I often use Steven Spielberg, who is very good at tone, as an example. In the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford is getting chased. There is comic violence when he pulls out a gun and whacks this guy with a sword. The same filmmaker did Schindler’s List.  There is no comic violence in that film. It’s a wholly different world.  The rules are set right away: this is real and nothing is going to happen here that we’re going to laugh at.” — Indie actor-screenwriter-director-novelist John Sayles interviewed by Antonio D’Ambrosio, “An Interview with John Sayles,” The Believer (Issue 61, March 2009)

Quote of the Day (John Sayles, on Writing Screenplays With Budgets in Mind)

“[When writing for independent film producer Roger Corman], [h]e would always say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about the budget.’ Then the poor directors would come squealing, ‘I’ve only got $800,000 to shoot this thing!’ I wrote a science-fiction movie for [director] James Cameron. The fun with that was that anything I could think up, if he liked it, he would invent it. Even if the technology didn’t exist. He’s so good at that stuff that there were no restraints in the storytelling. When I’m writing for myself, though, it’s different. For instance, the movie I’m about to make in Mexico is half in Spanish. The minute you have any subtitles in a movie, you’re talking about a much smaller potential audience. So you have to worry about what it’s going to cost. The minute you have any kind of action or adventure in a movie you probably increase your chances of selling it overseas, and so you can think about a little bit more of a budget. Of course, action-adventure usually costs more to make.”—Screenwriter-director-actor John Sayles quoted in “Back to Craft: David Goldsmith Speaks With John Sayles,” Creative Screenwriting, Volume 9, #4 (2002)

This Day in Film History (‘Return of the Secaucus 7’ Boosts Indie Movement)

Sept. 5, 1980—With a simultaneous prominent spot at the Toronto Film Festival to go along with a wider release in the U.S., The Return of the Secaucus 7 marked a kind of coming-of-age for the American independent film industry. 

The directorial debut of John Sayles, who had paid his dues as a screenwriter and script doctor for horror honcho Roger Corman, was a low-budget affair with plenty of dialogue. He had expected it would be shown on an outlet like PBS rather than movie theaters, and its original subpar performance on its original New York release did not help matters.

But more successful runs in Boston, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles led to a more successful return to the Big Apple, along with Top Ten citations for the year 1980 in Time, Roger Ebert's Sneak Previews, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

Sayles would be the first to tell interviewers he was not the first filmmaker to go outside the Hollywood system—John Cassavetes, for instance, he noted, encouraged “this feeling that there’s no rule that says you can’t make a good movie without studio money and somehow get it on a screen somewhere.”

But The Return of the Secaucus 7 came out when the VCR created an at-home audience for prior art-house mainstays like, say, the French new wave. Theaters suddenly needed to replace them. The modest but real profits that Sayles generated (on a budget of only $40,000) demonstrated that success in this form was indeed possible.

That same year, with Robert Redford helping to establish the nonprofit Sundance Institute, an infrastructure was being put in place that would provide resources that would enable directors to tell their stories as they wished—and provide an alternative to the screenplay-for-hire financing mode that Sayles followed when he was starting out in the industry.

For his directorial debut, Sayles shot his script about seven college friends who come back together a decade after their arrest on the way to a massive protest. The title is a wink at the infamous “Chicago 7” trial that encapsulated the student unrest of the Sixties. In contrast, Sayles’ group has been arrested before the big protest in DC—in Secaucus, New Jersey, for heaven’s sake!—and they’re unlikely to be remembered in the annals of their time.

With males and females thrown together, the goings-on end up having sex with one another—except for one member who stands apart from it all.

Now that I’ve told you the plot, you must be thinking, “Where have I heard that before?” And yes, Sayles’ film does remind many people of The Big Chill, which was released three years later.

Lawrence Kasdan, the writer-director of The Big Chill, has stated that he never saw The Return of the Secaucus 7. Whatever the case may be, it is true that Sayles (directly or indirectly, through The Big Chill) kick-started an entire genre best thought of as "friends reunion" movies and productions, including The Decline of the American Empire (1986); Peter's Friends (1992); Everything Relative (1996); Indian Summer (1993); Grand Canyon (1991); The Myth of Fingerprints (1997); The Men's Club (1986); and Beautiful Girls (1996).

To adhere to the self-imposed spartan budget, Sayles followed several practices:

*Maximize a single locale. In the book Off-Hollywood, Sayles recalled: “I decided to make the film at a ski lodge, which was cheap to rent out-of-season. We were able to use it as our set, as well as lodging for the crew and actors.”

*Use individuals in multiple roles. Sayles himself was not only writer, director, and editor, but played motel clerk Howie. Offscreen partner Maggie Renzi acted in effect as business partner, too: Not only playing Katie Sipriano, but serving as unit manager, assistant editor as well as location manager.

*Use cheap music whose rights don’t need to be acquired. Out of necessity, these were folk songs created by his Boston-based friends. That must have rankled, because for his third film, Baby, It’s You, Hollywood financing enabled him to secure the rights to enormously popular songs he deemed essential to the time, in the same way that The Big Chill had. But this opened the door so much to interference by Paramount Studios that he resolved to avoid this in the future.

*Avoid well-known actors. The major cast members of The Big Chill had each, in some way, been involved in high-profile projects, and would go on to become even more successful. In contrast, Secaucus 7 featured five actors who had only appeared in one production prior to this film. Only two actors became famous afterward: Gordon Clapp (NYPD Blue) and David Strathairn (in just about everything). Several of Sayles’ actors never appeared in another film.

In several later films—notably Matewan, City of Hope, and Lone Star—Sayles was able to create complex, challenging stories way out of the Hollywood mainstream. But these projects could not have been made without the favorable reception given Return of the Secaucus 7.

Quote of the Day (John Sayles, on the 1980 GOP National Convention)

“In 1980, I covered the Republican National Convention in Detroit for a magazine [The New Republic]. The Republicans put most of their delegates across the river in a hotel in Canada. They put cardboard over the windows of the buses so when they went through the funky Detroit neighborhoods they wouldn’t see them on the way to the Joe Louis Arena. These delegates from Kansas and other parts of the country did not even see these neighborhoods, so in effect they could never admit that these areas exist. They never saw them. This is what you’re asked to do for most American films, and it may be appropriate for certain movies, but it’s one of the reasons that Americans don’t know anything about their own history.” — Indie actor-screenwriter-director-novelist John Sayles interviewed by Antonio D’Ambrosio, “An Interview with John Sayles,” The Believer (Issue 61, March 2009)

Forty years ago today, in his third attempt, Ronald Reagan took the decisive step in his 12-year campaign to achieve the nation’s highest office when he accepted the Republican nomination for President. He would go on to move the GOP in a new, more conservative direction and solidify the support of the party faithful in a manner not seen until the rise of Donald Trump. 

The so-called "Rockefeller Republicans" of moderate liberals--named for the New York Governor who, 20 years before, had successfully pressed Richard Nixon to add a more pro-civil-rights stance to the party platform at that year's convention--were well on their way to dinosaur status.

With a genial smile and a wave of the hand, Reagan had also confirmed that the Republican commitment to civil rights that had been a part of its philosophy since Abraham Lincoln had considerably softened—or, at very least, had become secondary to its visceral dislike of government, the primary means for ensuring equality before the law.

In his acceptance speech at the convention, Reagan hailed "that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries." It is easy to miss from the sonorous tones that the word "racial" is missing from this list. From the perspective of 2020, it is much harder to miss a particularly piquant phrase: "a great national crusade to make America great again."

The role of racism in the GOP realignment that began with Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 is a fraught one. Arguing that race has been central to the swing toward the GOP over the last half-century is counter-productive, as it not only angers individuals who resent being labeled racist, but also fails to account for the concerns of particular elections, including prosperity and national security.

But the observation by filmmaker John Sayles offers another way of viewing this. After the postwar period of convulsions over race, much of the electorate preferred not to look at its continuing presence on the American scene. It was just too ugly and painful. Better to move away, even to block one’s view of this.

That tendency was embodied in Reagan. In a PBS “Newshour”roundtable discussion of "The Reagan Legacy" with Jim Lehrer following the President’s death in 2004, historian Richard Norton Smith noted that Reagan was “one of those classic examples of conservative Republicans who on the personal level would gift their shirt off their back to someone in need whoever it is but who on a cultural and philosophical level can often be accused of at least insensitivity.” He was personally kind to individual African-Americans.

In recent years, Reagan’s stock among historians has risen, with Siena College Research Institute poll results released last year showing that he had risen from 18^th in the last time these scholars were surveyed to 12^th. But I think that improvement will itself come in for revision, and that Reagan will slip back to something close to his prior ranking.

Although the U.S. economy recovered in the Reagan era, the results were not shared evenly. Inequality rose during his eight years in office, as shown by Capital and Main’s Abby Kingsley in an article for Fast Company Magazine. Numerous initiatives begun during his administration widened the gap between rich and poor, including:

* The Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981, which made hundreds of thousands of families ineligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children;

* A 74% reduction in the budget allocation for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1980s;

*Reagan’s 1981 breaking of a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which dramatically underscored the decline of American unions;

*The 1981 tax cut, which reduced the tax burden for the top bracket while redistributing it toward the middle; and

*Stock buybacks' legalization in 1981 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which encouraged corporations to prioritize stock value over distributing earnings to employees through bonuses or salary raises.

African-Americans’ economic advances, only recently gained, were materially affected by all of this. Reagan’s tone and rhetoric likewise signaled that Blacks could not look to the federal government for help. 

Campaigning in Georgia in 1980, the candidate noted that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was “a hero of mine.” His continual invocation of “states’ rights” cut little ice with a group that had heard that concept used to undercut their rightful demand for their own rights at the ballot box and in the workplace.

Reagan's belief in laissez-faire government was matched only by his laissez-faire managerial style—a work practice that got him in trouble during the Iran-contra scandal. He simply did not notice things, much like the bus riders from outside Detroit who propelled him toward the Presidency in July 1980.

Whatever else happens this election year, there will be no more cardboard that can be used to obscure  problems experienced by African-Americans. It will be impossible to turn away from them again, and the burden will be all the heavier on Americans 40 years after the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to find the solutions that he did not see as a priority.

Quote of the Day (Indie Auteur John Sayles, on the Difference Between Film and Fiction)

“A script is to a movie as a blueprint is to a building. So many of the things that will later be major, visceral aspects of the storytelling — cinematography, music, sound effects, costume, performance, the rhythm of the editing — are only just indicated or assumed, and will be realized by a team of talented collaborators. The fiction writer has to serve all those functions alone, with his prose, selecting information so a handful of notes let readers hear the symphony. A screenwriter creates potential — a novelist has to fulfill it.”—Indie screenwriter-director-actor John Sayles (The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Eight Men Out), quoted in “Up Front,” The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 2, 2011

Quote of the Day (Indie Auteur John Sayles, on Why He’s Not a Studio Executive)

“I did this script called Watch the Skies, where the last page is about an extraterrestrial being left behind on Earth. It became the first page of the script for E.T. While I think it didn’t inspire them, I did write the script for Spielberg’s company. They asked if I wanted any credit and I said no, since I really didn’t have any part of the final script. I also thought that it was a nice script and if they kept the budget down it could be a nice little Disney movie. Now you can see why I’m not a studio executive.”—Independent screenwriter-director John Sayles, interviewed by Antonino D’Ambrosio in "John Sayles," in The Believer Magazine, March/April 2009 (full text not available online)