[In the following essay, Isaacs disputes Sayles's account of the connections between his novel Union Dues and the film Matewan.]

John Sayles's Thinking in Pictures is the kind of book Stirling Silliphant had in mind twenty years ago when he agreed to chronicle, for The University of Tennessee Press, the making of the movie A Walk in the Spring Rain from his own script. A crucial difference is that Sayles was writer/director on Matewan and Silliphant writer/producer on Walk. While Silliphant could describe his reconception of the Rachel Maddux novella for the screen (for Ingrid Bergman's return to Hollywood from her long exile) and trace its production, Sayles can analyze the whole process, the gestalt, the total (re-)conceiving of a story in cinematic terms. But both would be valuable contributions toward essential considerations in the study of narrative film.

When Silliphant decided not to chronicle his production and urged me to write an analysis to accompany the Maddux text and his screenplay, the project took on a different aspect. (Incidentally, his decision was not made, as has been suggested, because he foresaw the ultimate failure of the picture. Indeed, at the time he still had high hopes for it, and the total cooperation he insisted on for me—from crew, cast, and studio staff—testified to his enthusiasm for our book as well. It was just that other scripts and other productions took precedence over academic effort.)

In any case, the emphasis had been shifted to more literary/critical concerns. Admiring the writer (author of the fantasy classic The Green Kingdom) and the work of Silliphant, dissatisfied with what Bluestone had set up as guidelines for studying “novels into film,” I was interested in the emergence of narrative strategies and tactics to translate the whole texture and structure of a story's world from one medium to another. What was lost was first-hand, hands-on, technical experience with filmmaking which no crash course, despite a faculty of cooperative, cordial instructors, could supply. But, of course, what limited the ultimate usefulness of Fiction into Film: A Walk in the Spring Rain¹ was the limited achievement of the movie itself—a disappointment to Maddux, to Silliphant, to me, and perhaps to everyone associated with it (expect Bergman, who loved it and never understood why it wasn't a hit).

My expectations for Sayles's book on the making of Matewan were far from disappointed. Whatever problems or quibbles I had with the movie, Thinking in Pictures² at least accounted for the choices made, the conscious strategic and tactical choices in the creative process of a certain kind of storyteller. Indeed, Sayles illuminates a number of aspects of that collaborative, political process, especially the ways in which the pieces of the process itself must be “edited” with an integrity of design, a wholeness and cohesiveness of vision, in order to produce an artifact greater than the sum of its parts.

It is when I focus my (admittedly special-interest) attention on the fiction-into-film section of Thinking in Pictures that disillusionment sets in. Sayles acknowledges that in the writing of his second novel, Union Dues (1977), he read much about labor history and became interested in the story of the Matewan Massacre, involving a Hatfield cousin in Mingo County. And that is all he says about Union Dues in Thinking in Pictures.

In a central scene of the novel, a group of young radicals and displaced persons sits passing guitar and bottle around. Each in turn performs a character-appropriate, context-appropriate, age-appropriate number. And when it is Hobie's turn, he tells a tale of his native West Virginia (not Hatfields-and-McCoys country—that's not his “part of the state. They're over by the Kentucky border, Mingo County …”³, just as Pappy Dan Radnor told it to him, about what “happened when he wasn't but thirteen or fourteen years old. And he was a preacher. Around … the coal camps” (209). And behold, the story that he tells is the story of Sayles's Matewan, complete with Joe Kenehan, Hickey and Griggs, Bridey Mae, and Dan's own sermon.

Here […] are the texts, the synoptic gospel from Union Dues [quoted first] and the corresponding verses from the shooting script of Matewan in Thinking in Pictures [quoted in the second passage]:

Friends, I wanna tell you tonight about the blackness in the heart of man. And I want to warn you about the many and devious ways that Satan will hide from us the truth of who our real friends are. … An' I'm gonna do it with a story from the Patriarchs.

Now we all know about Joseph and how out of all Jacob's twelve children he was the smartest and the smoothest, and how his brothers got so jealous. …

So when this feller Potiphar bought him for a servant, he just smiled … and vowed if he was gonna be a slave he was gonna be a good one. Just makin' the best of a bad situation. Well, he put his heart to his work and he was honest and kindly in all his dealins … and before you knew it he was runnin' the household and the fields and just taking care of all of Potiphar's business for him. The only trouble was Potiphar's wife. She was what you'd call a loose woman. … He said, “I been good to Potiphar and he's been good right back to me; how can I go slippin round with his wife? Don't you tempt me, woman.” Also in Potiphar's employ at this time is a couple spies from one of his enemies. They can plainly see the wanton lust of his wife and they also see how it would be good for their purposes to get young Joseph out of the way. So they come to Potiphar's wife. … “Joseph, your servant,” she says, “he come in here and tried to make me lie with him. Only when I called out he fled, leavin this here garment as evidence. And not only that, … he's been … plotting with your enemies, … wants to take over the household and have you killed.”

…

Potiphar … had no reason to misbelieve his wife, and after all, Joseph was a slave, a foreigner. … He gathered all his slaves and household workers together … and they went and they slew Joseph dead. Cut him from gut to gizzard and left him bleedin in the stream. And lo, they never learned of the lies Potiphar's wife had told, and they all went to their Maker unrepentant, with innercent blood on their hands!

(215-217)

I wanna tell you tonight bout the blackness in the heart of man. Gon warn you bout the many an devious ways in which Satan will hide from you the truth of who your real friends are. Gon do it with a story from the Patriarchs.

Now we all know about Joseph and how out of all Jacob's twelve children he was the smartest and the smoothest, and how his brothers got so jealous—

So when this fella Potiphar bought him for a slave, Joseph just smiled and vowed he was gonna be a good one. Makin the best of a bad situation.

He put his heart to his work and was honest and friendly in his dealins and fore you knew it he was just about runnin' Potiphar's household and fields and all his business for him. The only trouble was Potiphar's wife. Now she was what you might call a loose woman—

an Joseph said, “I been good to Potiphar and he been good right back to me; how can I go slippin round with his wife? Don't you tempt me, woman.” Also in Potiphar's employ at this time was a couple of spies from one of his enemies. They seen the wanton lust of Mrs. Potiphar and seen it would be good for their purposes to get shed of young Joseph. So they come to Potiphar's wife—

“Your servant Joseph,” she says to Potiphar, “he come in here and tried to make me lie with him. Only when I called out, he fled, leavin' this here garment as evidence.

An not only that, he been spyin and plottin against you with your enemies. he means to take over here and have you kilt—”

Potiphar had no reason to misbelieve his wife. Joseph was a slave an a foreigner. So he gathered up all his servants and household workers and they went and slew Joseph dead.

Cut him from gut to gizzard and left him bleedin in a stream. And lo they never learnt of Mrs. Potiphar's lies, and went to their Maker unrepentant, with innercent blood on their hands.

(136-142)

In the movie the sermon is intercut with a scene at the miners' camp, and with reaction shots of the miners in the congregation who are getting the allegorical message, and Hickey and Griggs, drunk and giggling, who are not. But ironically, while the camp scene is absent, even the reactions of the listeners in church are part of Hobie's retelling of Pappy Dan Radnor's story.

Was it Sayles's intention in Thinking in Pictures to exaggerate the distinctions between novelistic and cinematic storytelling? Surely, given an accurate recognition of the screenplay's origins in the book's text, the reader finds that intention subverted, those distinctions blurred, and more questions raised than answered. One of those questions, perhaps, is whether a storyteller can ever be believed about how his own stories get told.

Notes

1. Rachel Maddux, Stirling Silliphant, and Neil D. Isaacs, Fiction into Film: A Walk in the Spring Rain (The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville, 1969).

2. John Sayles, Thinking in Pictures (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1987). Further references will be made with page numbers parenthetically in text.

3. John Sayles, Union Dues (Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1977). Further references will be made with page numbers parenthetically in text.