SOURCE: McGhee, Dorothy. “Solidarity Forever.” American Film 12, no. 10 (September 1987): 42-6.

[In the following essay, McGhee examines the making of Matewan, outlining the difficulties involved in producing a period film on a shoestring budget.]

October 1986. Down in Ingram Branch, in the mountainous heart of West Virginia, the evening air is sharp and chilly. A rickety, unrestored church, home to John Sayles's visiting film shoot, is lit with grotesquely bright klieg lights, and Allied vans full of production equipment and costumes block a bumpy gravel road. Most of the crew, with the exception of cinematographer Haskell Wexler and one or two others, are in their twenties and early thirties, and I find myself waiting for the grown-ups to come back to recapture their positions at the helm.

Welcome to the new filmmaking. No tantrums. No hierarchy. No studio honchos in Gucci loafers and starchy designer jeans. There are no limos here. Nor Winnebagos. There's beer instead of champagne, rice cakes instead of caviar. Accommodations for the entire cast and crew are at the Econolodge across the road from the Appalachian Bible College.

Above all, there is a halo of conviction about the Sayles set that more closely resembles the dedication of a political campaign than a movie production. More than fifty percent of the crew are women—many of them department heads. The pay is minimum scale. “My usual salary is four times what I'm making here,” reports Oscar-winner Wexler with a certain satisfaction. “But I'm getting four times more in personal enjoyment. You seldom get to do something with your professional life that has character, dignity, and significance.”

The project is Matewan, a “low-budget epic,” as Sayles describes it, which is shooting entirely on location in West Virginia. With its nearly ＄4 million budget, Sayles, thirty-six, could leap from his current status as master of the major-minor movie to master of the minor-major movie. “Sayles hasn't had the budget to do work that will go down in film history yet.” Wexler explains. “He's found cheap ways to make his mark instead.”

Matewan touches on a piece of American history that you don't find in the average school book: the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars of 1920 and 1921, the largest armed insurrection in America since the Civil War. During the mine wars, close to nine thousand miners defied an army of some two thousand state constabulary, deputy sheriffs, and civilian volunteers, ignoring a presidential ultimatum to lay down their arms.

The film concentrates on an early chapter of the mine wars known as the Matewan Massacre, a shoot-out in a small town by that name between striking miners and armed agents—called “thugs”—hired by the coal companies from the dreaded Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. At the beginning of the film, the coal companies are importing blacks from Alabama and Italians from New York to work as strikebreakers. But these scabs, overcoming complex racial and linguistic divisions, leave the mines and join the local miners. The strikers eventually confront the company thugs in a dramatic shoot-out that takes the lives of several detectives, the town's pro-union mayor, and a number of striking miners, including the union's organizer (played by Chris Cooper).

The primary tension in Sayles's dramatic script revolves around the strikers' debate over the use of violence. Matewan is a consideration of armed resistance and the events that trigger it. It is a film about personal choice.

Matewan's producers are Sayles's long-time associates Maggie Renzi and Peggy Rajski, both in their midthirties. Rajski began her film career as a secretary for an industrial film company. “You're either good at producing or not,” she says, stopping briefly to talk as movie equipment is moved off the vans for a morning shoot. Married to Zero Mostel's son Josh (who plays Mayor Cabell Testerman in Matewan), Rajski first worked with Sayles as his production manager on the 1983 film Lianna, which cost just over ＄300,000 and grossed about ＄1.5 million. She remembers, “They didn't know what a production manager was, but everyone told them they needed one.”

Coproducer Renzi, who plays an Italian miner's wife in Matewan, credits her facility for producing to her mother. “My mother was a great hostess. She knew how to have enough chairs and plates for everyone and she knew how to make people talk to one another pleasantly. The same skills are essential to producing a film.”

Renzi has lived with Sayles since before the days of Return of the Secaucus Seven, his 1980 portrait of aging baby-boomers in which she plays the laconic and perceptive hostess at whose home the former roommates congregate. However, she bristles at any emphasis on her relationship with Sayles. “People will say I f—ked my way to the middle,” she says, rolling her eyes.

Matewan was ready to go into production in 1984. “We already had the phones installed at the Econolodge,” says Renzi, “but one of the big investors dropped out.” Instead, Sayles, Renzi, and Rajski hastily produced The Brother from Another Planet, the story of a black extraterrestrial who lands in Harlem. Pulled together in about six weeks for a total cost of ＄400,000, the movie received mixed reviews and subsequently grossed about ＄4 million.

Cinecom distributed Brother in close collaboration with Sayles, Renzi, and Rajski, who insisted on participating in the film's carefully engineered release. “Once you've worked so hard to make a film,” Rajski says, “you don't want just anyone to distribute. We want an uncommonly full say in distribution strategy: how to position it and where to put it.” The collaboration was successful enough for Cinecom to finance Matewan.

“They are banking on John as director, of course,” continues Renzi, “but they are also banking on Peggy and me as producers, and that we can bring the movie in under budget.” The conviction on the Sayles set is that, for its nearly ＄4 million, Cinecom is getting a ＄10 million film. “We hired a bunch of thrift shoppers,” Rajski says proudly of her production staff. James Earl Jones, who plays a militant black miner, says, “You come here because you know the money is going to be spent on the film.”

The ways of the low-budget champs are myriad. Of the forty-seven speaking parts in the movie, twenty-three were cast locally. The wardrobe budget, supervised by twenty-seven-year-old costume designer Cynthia Flynt, is just under ＄25,000, from which Flynt provided fourteen hundred different costumes for three hundred extras and the principal cast. One day Flynt, who buys clothes by the pound in New York City, had a staff of only three to clothe fifty extras and eleven principals. “Over the years and after many low-budget films,” Flynt says, “you learn how to shop.”

Production designer Nora Chavooshian, thirty-two, had only ＄97,000 with which to dress thirty-one locations to period specifications that included a ＄7,000 line item for an antique steam engine rented for two days. Transforming a tiny town called Thurmond into the Matewan of the twenties was a major undertaking that included adding facades to a row of turn-of-the-century buildings, one of which was entirely gutted by fire. The crew also affixed the facade of a hardware store to a railroad building, milling the lumber themselves at local mills.

Chavooshian, Sayles's production designer for Brother from Another Planet (which boasted a whopping ＄5,000 production-design budget), bought or rented all her props and dressings in the area, bringing nothing with her from New York. “Research is an important element,” Chavooshian says from the threadbare top floor of the turn-of-the-century railway station that serves as her headquarters. “John was very specific, clear, and communicative about what he wanted. He's worked on this project so long; he's done an incredible amount of research.”

The Matewan project has been on Sayles's mind since he wrote Union Dues, his novel about sixties radicals that was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978. That year, he wrote the Matewan screenplay, went to Hollywood, and began writing hip horror films for Roger Corman (Piranha, Alligator, The Howling). Although Matewan circulated among the majors, “it was always something I knew I'd have to make independent of the studios,” Sayles explains. “I knew they weren't going to get any more interested in it than they already weren't interested in it.”

Matewan is different in some respects from Sayles's previous works. With a background rooted primarily in the written word, Sayles is an acknowledged master of character portrayal and dialogue rather than of place and sight; traditionally, he has been praised for his ear rather than his eye. In Matewan, however, Sayles has immersed himself in an environment of rugged, natural beauty that includes steep gorges and rapid rivers, tiny rustic hamlets and shantytowns, and a local population from which to choose extras who have faces that speak of the hard hills from which they come. The images are compelling and powerful and may, in conjunction with Wexler's expertise, give Matewan a cinematic depth that has been missing in Sayles's films.

In contrast to Sayles's previous almost determinedly up-to-the-minute hipness, Matewan is a period piece. And Sayles is dealing with violence on a large scale for the first time. “Technically,” he says, “it's represented problems for me because I've never dealt with all those special-effects things before.”

An even bigger challenge was working with a large crew, one that was totally union. “All along we've worked with union people, but we were basically doing flat deals and they weren't officially union pictures,” Sayles says. “So on this, we have to be much more cognizant of turnaround time for the crew and those kinds of things. It would make sense, for instance, not to have broken for lunch just now, because the sun is going to go behind that mountain at four-thirty. Union rules don't always make sense in relation to what you're doing. That [affects] the moviemaking: Sometimes the movie isn't as good because you don't have as many takes. On the other hand, the people you get to work with are sometimes better and so you can go a lot faster. There are pros and cons.”

For Brother from Another Planet, many crew members were black. “It's nice to have a lot of women on this crew, but we have only one black person on this set. And that's because we're doing a NABET and IA crew, and they have very few black people on their rosters. I mean very, very few. The blacks are not in the union. That's another down-side of doing a union thing.”

Although Sayles is a member of the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild and a former member of the Meatpackers Union, he does not belong to the Directors Guild. “The reason I'm not in the Directors Guild,” he says, “is that I can't afford to be and still make movies. You can pay yourself and rip up your own checks. But once you have a guild director, you have to have a guild production manager, first assistant director, and second AD, and on and on. Not only is that a huge amount of money to pay out, it's difficult to justify to the other people working on the picture why they're getting paid a tenth of what these other three people are getting, when these other three people aren't working any harder than they are.”

Despite such egalitarian leanings, however, the feeling on Sayles's set is not one of a collaboration but of an auteur performance. The story, the dialogue, the sets, the takes, the vision, come directly from Sayles. He might walk quietly and unpretentiously around the set, giving new depth to the notion of “casual,” but he is clearly the font of instructions. He issues them in an unequivocal voice. “This movie is thoroughly his picture,” says Wexler, who has worked with such directors as Milos Forman and Elia Kazan. “I'm thoroughly his servant. I'm not called on for creative input; he has it so completely in mind.”

Sayles says his direction is informed by certain questions. “I always ask—for man, woman, child—‘How does this person see the world? What do they know? What don't they know? When they walk into this particular situation, what do they see, given who they are, given what they want?’” In Matewan, he had a number of factors to keep in mind when determining his characters' reactions to the events around them, including sexual attitudes and class distinctions. “You also have to put the racial thing into perspective,” Sayles says. “I talked to Tom Wright [who plays a black miner] and James Earl Jones. I said, ‘OK, you're coming from Alabama in 1920, the year they set the record for lynchings. Probably coming to West Virginia, you don't expect people up here to be any better than they were down there, so when you push back, you push back like this’”—Sayles makes a cautious, wary motion with the palm of his hand—“‘you don't push back like that,’” and he makes a defiant, aggressive chop with the heel of his hand.

With the release of Secaucus Seven, Sayles became a pioneer of the quality independent film, traveling around the country and giving countless interviews in major cities. In the process, he deliberately built a name recognition for himself. If, like Brother from Another Planet, Matewan fails to get good reviews, Sayles hopes his name will still pull in an audience. “In New York City, Brother really got pretty bad reviews, but it still broke house records,” Sayles claims. “If you're lucky, you've built up enough of a following so you can at least get enough people in during the first two weeks for word of mouth to grow.”

Although best known for his under-＄500,000 productions, including three rock videos for Bruce Springsteen (the fees from one of which he sent to Nicaragua), Sayles does have one other multi-million dollar production to his credit: Baby, It's You, a ＄3.5 million, coming-of-age comedy set in the early sixties that starred Rosanna Arquette. Baby was released in 1983 and distributed by Paramount.

It was not a happy experience. There were disagreements over casting, storyline, editing, and distribution. “All I felt that they were doing was wrecking what it could be,” remembers Sayles.

Asked if he would consider making another studio movie, Sayles responds, “It was a great crew. And it was nice to have three million dollars. But the pitfall is that you don't have control over the movie. It was hard to edit with this constant threat hanging over your head: ‘We can fire you if we want to.’ The politics of it were messy.

“I'd be happy to make a studio movie,” Sayles continues, “if they'd let me cast anybody I wanted to and give me final cut. But I don't think there are that many directors who get that unless they've made the studio people millions and millions of dollars. I have nothing against using studio money, and I have nothing against the studios making a profit. I even like some studio movies. But your track record is determined by how much money your last movie made, and unfortunately, after Baby, It's You, my track record was worse than when I started.”

But all that may be history. Sayles, Renzi, and Rajski hope Matewan will have a broader appeal than any of John's earlier and perhaps more oblique works—which may, perhaps, make him attractive to the studios once again. “Matewan is a little more of a ‘story’ story in that there's a narrator at the beginning, middle, and end,” Sayles says. “And because there is some so-called action in it—people shoot each other—it will be considered more programmable.” Yet like all other John Sayles films, Matewan has an off-Hollywood sensibility. “It's a difficult movie because of its violent ending,” Sayles reflects. “It's a hard pill to swallow. It has a complex morality.”