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‘Matewan’ director, producer attends regional screenings

By DAVE LAVENDER

HD Media

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. — When he was a senior at Mount Pleasant High School in upstate New York in 1967, John Sayles helped his high school football team go undefeated.

John Sayles

And this fall, Sayles, who earned letters in basketball, baseball, track, and football, went back to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that season in his hometown.

On Saturday, Sayles, the consummate indie writer, director and maker of film, came back to the Mountain State with his longtime partner and producer Maggie Renzi to celebrate the 30th anniversary of another win, of sorts, for the home team – the duo’s 1987 film “Matewan,” which highlighted the rarely told labor history story when miners rose to fight the coal companies for safer working conditions and living wages.

“Matewan,” which was filmed in Thurmond, West Virginia, and around the coalfields of West Virginia with many local extras was screened at the LaBelle Theater in South Charleston Saturday as part of the celebration.

A voracious life-long reader who makes most of his living as a writer — he’s written 12 books and all 17 films he has directed – Sayles, who grew up in the shadow of a giant General Electric plant, said he was drawn to “Matewan” because it was an incredible story about the struggle of working people that was not told in history books outside of, say, Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History.”

“I kind of stumbled upon it,” Sayles said by phone Wednesday. “I did a lot of hitchhiking in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I was hitchhiking through Kentucky and West Virginia, and there was at the time a very contentious run-off for the presidency of the United Mine Workers between Tony Boyle and Jock Yablosnki, which ended up with Yablonski and his wife and daughter being murdered. So before that happened I got a lot of rides with coal miners who would vent about how bad it was getting and about how contentious it was, and there were a couple who said, ‘Well if we are not careful we might have another Matewan massacre. I had no idea what that was, but I did a little research and there was not much written about it at the time. I got fascinated by it, partly because I was always into ingesting early labor history when unions were not accepted. That particular story seemed to stand for the principle in a lot of other stories, and it has this kind of western movie structure that usually has a series of confrontations that end up more serious until there is a showdown on Main Street at high noon.”

Often called the Godfather of Bootstrap Cinema, Sayles, who made his first film, “The Return of the Secaucus 7,” for $40,000, said it took about three years to scrape together funding to make the film. Using money from other writing gigs and the success of the quirky Harlem-based sci-film “The Brother From Another Planet,” Sayles and Renzi got the needed funding – about $3.5 million – to come to West Virginia to film.

While today, a majority of TV and films are not shot where they are said to occur, Sayles said then, in the days before incentives, there was no question they were coming to Southern West Virginia.

“With film incentives to shoot in places you are now shooting in states like Louisiana, New Mexico or Georgia — that is where the biggest incentives are in the U.S.,” Sayles said. “I am writing on a TNT series, ‘The Alienist,’ based on a Caleb Carr book, and it is supposed to be set in New York City in 1896 and it was shot in Budapest, and it is only about the economics of it. The ‘Hatfields and McCoys’ mini-series was shot in Romania. We really didn’t have incentives back then, so it made sense to go to the place where it happened. We went to Matewan itself, but it had changed enough that we didn’t think we could use it. Then we found Thurmond, so we focused there and stayed in Beckley. It’s not many times that you find a town that has a railroad track in the middle of it instead of a street. It just had a feel to it with the mountains and the New River right there.”

While it certainly was the framing of that one-of-a-kind setting that helped the film and its cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, it was wall-to-wall solid acting that made the New York Times review say, “There’s not a weak performance in the film, but I especially admired the work of Mr. Cooper, Mr. Tighe, Miss McDonnell, Miss Mette, Mr. Gunton, Mr. Strathairn and Mr. Mostel.”

Mr. Cooper, Chris Cooper, was starring in his first major role, and he, David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp, would each go on to appear in at least four Sayles films.

“You hire good actors that are not well known, and you look like a genius,” Sayles said. “I directed the first movie that Robert Downey Jr. was in that his dad didn’t direct, but I have nothing to do with him being successful, so some of it is luck. There was this momentum, though, in the early 1980s where we were able to raise more than $3 million to make this movie and not have it dependent upon us getting movie stars. Chris Cooper had not been in a movie, Mary (McDonnell) had not been in a movie, and even James Earl Jones was not that well known; he was more a theater actor.”

Sayles said they also utilized many actors in the region, including a young Louisville actor, Will Oldham, who has morphed into well-known singer-songwriter Bonnie Prince Billy.

“We kind of stumbled upon Will Oldham. He did theater in Louisville, and he was the right age and had heard this accent his whole life, and so we were not going to have to take a kid from Hollywood and put him in a dialect class for half a year,” Sayles said. “There were a bunch of people from the area for whom this was a really nice showcase. We intentionally left a lot of small parts open and did a lot of casting in West Virginia. There were 10 or 12 speaking parts that we found locally. That had two advantages where we didn’t have to pay someone to fly in and have these were actors who not only had the accent but who understood the story.”

Sayles, who wound up writing “Thinking in Pictures,” a book about the making of “Matewan,” which has never been out of print and which is taught in film classes around the world, said he is glad to see West Virginia embracing the story, and its history, at such places as the Mine Museum, which opened in spring of 2015.

“When we first went to Matewan there was really nothing there about that history,” Sayles said. “When the movie came out they put up a plaque, but often people don’t pay attention to working people’s stories. This is not the most glorious history in the world. It is an ambush, and people on both sides were killed, and people killed afterwards on both sides. It was like the American Civil War; it is hard, bitter history. I think one of the things all of us have to do is to deal with history as honestly as we can. It is not celebratory, and we can’t just pick the best parts and ignore the tough and bitter parts. It is great that the Mining Museum is honoring the guys who did that job. There is very little coal mining anymore with people going down in the ground; it is mostly strip mining now. But there was something heroic about the people who were able to cull a living out underground that way. The union aspect of it, and the fight for better pay and for safe conditions, that is a whole other story that belongs in a museum all to itself. But anything that brings more people into West Virginia is a great thing. It is such a cool place, and either tourists or people just driving through don’t discover it or don’t get out and take the time to meet the people. Anything that gets them off the highway and to get to meet the people is great.”

In a state that forged the national labor movement literally with the blood of West Virginia workers, Sayles said it was a shame to see West Virginia become the 26th right to work state.

“Some of that movement is that there has been 50 years of very well financed anti-union propaganda, and so people have a pretty strained view about unions,” Sayles said. “The thing about the unions is that to have a good one you have to work at it. You have unions that are like any organization – they can become corrupt and lazy, and they can end up not doing what they were meant to do when they were formed – but I basically think that right to work is crazy. You can’t depend on an employer to always be looking out for you. Every once in a while there’s a good employer who does that, but usually they are a better employer if you have some sort of collective bargaining. Like in West Virginia, unions are most powerful when the employer has to be there, and usually that means a mineral deposit or something that is not mobile. I understand the main reason they are not as prevalent as they used to be is because a company will just say, ‘We will pick up and go to Indonesia and have everything made cheaper and where people are making chump change and people don’t care. They are going to wear those sneakers, and they don’t care if children worked on them or if people don’t get what they deserve.’ And that goes back to the theme of ‘Matewan’ the movie – the union in a big sense. … when we say ‘we,’ who are ‘we,’ and who are we excluding. I am afraid right to work makes a very small ‘we’ that starts to look a lot like ‘I.’ ”

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