SOURCE: Davis, Thulani. “Blue-Collar Auteur.” American Film 16, no. 6 (June 1991): 18-23, 49-50.

[In the following essay, Davis explores Sayles's role as spokesperson for the working class.]

Hoboken, New Jersey, seems an unlikely place for American film-making, even though one of the few things you ever hear about it is that On the Waterfront was filmed there. However, when independent filmmaker John Sayles migrated to Hoboken after making his first film, he found what has become the weathered landscape of a John Sayles film: the face of decaying urban working towns all over, unglamorous, exposed to the elements—physical and spiritual. It is a landscape he re-creates even if he shoots in Cincinnati, and his films are about the kind of working-class people who live in this small immigrant-built town that had its heyday when New York's harbor was teeming with ships. Although Sayles spends less time there now, he has used this “Hoboken” concept of an American landscape to create some distinctively American films, carved out of the gritty, unfulfilled promise of the real places where most of us live.

Now 40, Sayles recently completed City of Hope, which promises to be the most important film in the Sayles repertoire. At the same time, the filmmaker, who started out as a fiction writer, is publishing Los Gusanos, his third novel, a story of Cubans caught up in the 30-year legacy of the Cuban revolution. His career is something like the average writer's idea of a wish fulfilled: He is an accomplished novelist, and he makes his own movies—exercising total control over both kinds of work. And he still has time to develop shows for television and to write the occasional screenplay for someone else. Though he seems a very serious sort of fellow (who would have to be a workaholic), he's even camped it up on screenplays that have the words alligator, piranha or howling in the title.

No longer a young upstart or an emerging director, Sayles is regarded as one of the foremost independents in the country. His work is consistently gutsy, iconoclastic and passionate about ordinary life—in short, everything one might expect from an independent. Like John Cassavetes, he is one of a handful of independent American directors whose work constitutes a singular vision that is bound to be influential for filmmakers coming behind him. City of Hope, his seventh film, is the vision of a mature Sayles: impeccably written in pithy, concise language, well-acted and well-shot. It is grimly tough, yet stubbornly hopeful, complex like its maker. I went to talk to Sayles on several occasions just as he completed City of Hope, a period of weeks roughly spanning the duration of the ground war in Kuwait, when most of America was glued to all-news radio or TV.

On one of those days, I ask him to show me around Hoboken, the quintessential Saylesian town, where he shot scenes for several projects. Hoboken is the kind of city that would have lots of sons called up for the war, and so the streets are liberally festooned with red, white, blue and yellow. Giant ribbons adorn nearly every door, sizable Old Glories maybe every second or third door, along the long, narrow residential streets. Flags are plastered to the plate-glass windows down the town's commercial strip. Not a cool, faceless Northeastern city, Hoboken has a strong emotional side, fickle toward the pasta merchants bringing gentrification and loyal in the observance of rituals.

Maggie Renzi, Sayles' longtime producer and the woman with whom he has lived for 17 years, is rushing off to a store. She tells me that the tall, skinny brownstone houses flush to each other are dressed up year-round with some sort of decoration, most recently twig wreaths with changing baubles. And sure enough, she points out one piece after another that could qualify as installations in a downtown gallery: a crown of thorns with tiny Christmas lights, yellow ribbons and a miniature flag. Sort of a humble salute to God, country, hostages, resurrection, all at once. We leave her at the deli and round the corner to a school, now refurbished and full of kids, in which Sayles shot Lianna at a time when it was boarded up awaiting repair.

Always a working man's town, with very few posh mansions for the wealthy, Hoboken looks as though the city builders tried to accommodate as many of the German and then Italian families as possible by jamming small units close together. Sayles points out that it is nearly impossible to park movie vehicles on these streets, where double-parking is a theoretical concept. He spots the remnant outposts of each of the immigrant groups that came to Hoboken, peppering the history with commentary about the nearby coffee processing plant that is putting more of his neighbors out of work. At a certain point, we can hear the plant humming in the distance and he muses on how intrusive the sound was when he tried to shoot nearby. “And you should smell it on freeze-dry day—the whole town smells of coffee. It's a strong smell; that's why sometimes when cops would find a body that had been dead a while somewhere, they would have somebody go in and pour coffee grounds over the place. It cuts the smell.”

On the John Sayles walking tour of Hoboken, one sees turn-of-the-century “men's” hotels near the old ferry and train depots where workers could crash on weeknights, one hears anecdotes from Sayles' seemingly extensive novel reading and, of course, one gets a view of locations from movies. An insomniac, Sayles says he stays up late reading or writing. I can see that people might have trouble keeping up with his kind of energy; it's a challenge for me to keep up with him walking. Sayles is tall, over six feet, and strides in great steps, up hill or down, without benefit of a coat, hat, gloves or belongings, regardless of the weather. When I've spotted him running into a Spike Lee premiere from the Times Square subway station, the outfit was much the same—a shirt and jeans—and even on a 20-degree day in Manhattan, he appears wearing only jeans, a shirt and a sweatshirt, and he pushes up his sleeves as he walks.

At the crest of the ridge overlooking the Hudson and Lower Manhattan, he shows me where Woody Allen likes to shoot some of his views of the Big Apple, and as we descend toward the old docks, he gives me a thumbnail history of the downfall of the longshoremen's work that thrived there. We pass a playground where he believes Marlon Brando met Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront and the site where the docks it was filmed on once stood, and then, passing some expensive new housing going up, we reach the 1907 Lackawanna Line railroad station. Standing on the cobblestone drive at the front door, he peers through an old loading area framed by an ironwork gate and says, “This was a shot in either Zelig or another one of Allen's period movies. I think it's Zelig. The characters stepped out here, supposedly off a boat from Europe.” The copper-roofed station with distinct Art Nouveau styling over the entrance would have been perfect. Inside, the hot dog stands and convenience shops serve another era's commuters. Next on the tour is the weary city hall that Sayles had in mind for City of Hope.

Sayles presents himself as a kind of easy-going, uncomplicated person, but he really is anything but that. Anybody I ask about him very soon uses the word complicated to describe him. Another independent who worked with him years ago tells me that Sayles is “not what he seems to be. He gives you this simple, low-brow man but he's high-brow, low-brow and middle-brow, all mixed up. It's not quite a dishonest picture you get at first but. …” His voice trails off. “He's very tough, but when you read his book on making Matewan, for instance, everything sounds so peachy, and yet, I remember his editors saying it was a tough time.”

Easy-going, yes, but control is something of a compulsion, Sayles reluctantly concedes. This is a man who offered his novel to the publishing world (without an agent) on an “as is—take it or leave it” basis, with no movie clause, and got a deal reported to be around ＄200,000. His editor at HarperCollins, Terry Karten, who pulled his book out of the pile, read it and loved it, says that when she read his cover letter, she said, “Now, here's a guy who knows what he wants.” And he got it. She says her most important task on the book was to “mobilize the forces” in the publishing house to get the book published and a marketing strategy developed. When I ask her to compare him to other writers, she says he's “political like Don DeLillo” (White Noise) and “in his storytelling, he is similar to Gabriel García Márquez [One Hundred Years of Solitude] in that there is a wealth of individual stories woven around a slim narrative thread.” Not bad. I'm not sure I'd try to compare Los Gusanos to a García Márquez tale, but one could probably throw out the name Robert Stone (A Flag for Sunrise) as a writer with whom Sayles shares the idea that the ordinary individuals, with their dreams and hopes, play their parts but are damaged by the “big picture” of powerful international forces.

Sayles makes a point of letting interviewers know he has worked as a day laborer and talks like what they used to call “a working stiff,” consciously low-brow and just one the guys, and yet, he may talk about history or small-press books. A number of his friends, he tells me, aside from those in the independent film world, are writers. He may talk about conceptualizing a picture by inhabiting the bodies of characters as well as their minds, or distancing effects and authorial points of view, as he does in Thinking in Pictures, his book on making Matewan. He takes an interest in a million subjects, from inner-city politics to basketball, to international issues, to working on plays.

Some people talk about themselves, which he enjoys well enough, but John Sayles will talk about anything. Completely without pretension, he is still proud, I think, to have been dubbed something very special when, at 32, he received a MacArthur Foundation Award, given every year to 20 or so Americans in diverse fields for innovative work. It is also known as the “genius award.”

On my first trip to Hoboken, we walk down to a corner of town sitting near the river. Over pasta and Diet Coke, Sayles says the most frequent comment he got when he started showing his scripts around was, Who's the hero? If that was a question, one can imagine the reaction people may have had to the high moral ground usually taken in his films, or what I call the “ground-level” authorial point of view, and the absence of standard plot dynamics. But then, his films are hard to compare to most of the films made in America, which, after all, are usually linear, and he doesn't write in the common movie conventions. (Sayles' novels are even more complex in structure. He describes Union Dues as “kind of like the Civil War, except you had five sides fighting,” and Los Gusanos has at least four factions of Cubans who have taken distinct positions on politics in a country they haven't lived in for years.) If John Sayles walks to the sound of his own drum, he is at least patient. This is a man who waited eight years to do Eight Men Out and started Los Gusanos 13 years ago. And he is a much sought-after filmmaker who will still show up at a Lower East Side art center where they're showing a film of his and talk to the audience. But then he's the guy who made one movie because he had a dream about a black extraterrestrial who was lost in the subway but understood the graffiti on the trains to have a secret, coded meaning.

Whatever the mysterious mix that is John Sayles, most of it is put to good use in his newest film, City of Hope, which cost less than ＄5 million and was produced with money from RCA/Columbia in exchange for video rights. The film will be distributed this fall by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. City of Hope was shot on a 30-day, five-week schedule on 40 locations in Cincinnati, where costs were lower and it was easier to move around than in New Jersey. The movie is a harvest of lessons learned over the 12 years Sayles has struggled to make pictures. Among the actors in City of Hope are a few from Sayles' unofficial repertory—Joe Morton, Vincent Spano, David Strathairn, Jace Alexander, Chris Cooper and Sayles himself—and the rest have been known for superb work elsewhere, many of them stage actors: Tony Lo Bianco, Frankie Faison, Gloria Foster, Anthony John Denison, Miriam Colon, Bill Raymond, Ray Aranha and Angela Bassett. The sprawling film, which has 38 featured characters, puts to use all the know-how learned in the days when Sayles used to drive every weekend from New York to Boston to edit a film. The production team put in eight weeks of preproduction, filmed in six-day weeks and shot an average of five pages a day.

I talked to David Strathairn, who has worked in four other Sayles films, about the Sayles method. In City of Hope, Strathairn plays the character Asteroid, a street person who eerily mimics the sounds of voices around him (a character who may remind people of the strange, stuttering man in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing). Strathairn went to college with Sayles, and he has shared living quarters with Sayles and Renzi from time to time. Sayles is “extremely well-prepared” for a film, says Strathairn, “as far as shots, angles, what he wants from each scene. He does copious research beforehand.” He says that by now, they've worked together so long that he has an intuitive sense of what the director wants. “A lot can be done without the formalities,” he says.

City of Hope was designed with long master shots which demonstrate the driving concept of the work, that all the forces moving this city are interconnected. The camera is almost always in motion, moving, for instance from a deal among pols in the foyer of a City Hall to a conversation between two women headed toward them from the hall. “There are a lot of master shots,” says Sayles, “that follow characters and then pick up a second group of characters. A lot of scenes are played in one without cutting.”

In the film's fictional Hudson City, Sayles brings together the dialects, rhythms and concerns of some of the people seen in their own spheres in his other films: Italian-American, Irish-American, African-American, Latin, Eastern European. As they push and pull each other, every move made by one character affects the story of all the others, or, as the writer-director puts it, “their hands are in each other's pockets.” Sayles describes the film's concept as a kind of knot in which the stories cross each other, and he shot it in such a way that the idea is impossible to miss. It's paced so that you're not allowed to drift from the pressures that pile up as the worlds within collide. Says Sayles, “My word for the movie is relentless.” He laughs, as if he enjoys being relentless.

“I think what I wanted to get at—in the writing and in the style of shooting—is the fact that, like it or not, people depend on each other. We're stuck with each other, and we have to deal with each other one way or the other. And if you don't hurry up and deal with it—well, the war is a good example.”

The film's starting point and sometime center is the story of Nick (Vincent Spano), the downwardly mobile and alienated son of well-connected contractor Joe (Tony Lo Bianco). Nick bails out on a no-show job on one of his father's sites and the same day ends up in the heist of an appliance store owned by a family friend. Entering the picture as well are a black city councilman (Joe Morton) who has been heretofore out of touch with the community, black community leaders, a corrupt mayor from the “old school,” two black kids who are assaulted by cops and, in turn, assault a jogger, and members of the white middle-class and poor Puerto Rican communities.

After seeing the film, I ask what interested him most about these characters he's locked together in a tight fist of city politics. It's a cold day but the waiter brings Sayles a huge Diet Coke brimming with ice. He drinks and leans back, looks attentive, as he almost always does. “One of my ideas,” says Sayles, “which I told all the actors, is that nobody gets to start from scratch in this kind of world. Like Joe Morton's character—he's a guy who came down off the hill, 'cause he was teaching in college. Intellectually, he knows a lot of stuff that he hasn't experienced viscerally.” Sayles slips into his character's place. “He realizes, Wait a minute, I don't get to start from scratch either. There's all these deals that have gone before me and those expectations, and I gotta carry them on my back, too. There's a billion pressures that I just stepped into.” He steps out of the character's shoes and smiles and cracks a joke. “It's like David Dinkins getting to be mayor of New York. It's one of those good news/bad news things: It's good news you got elected but the bad news is you're the mayor of New York! Try and get some sleep.” Sayles laughs.

One of the most interesting aspects of City of Hope is that no matter how ugly the action gets between any two people or groups in the film, there are no villains in this corrupt city. Every character is delineated in such a way that his or her humanity is left intact, along with the pressures that put him or her on whatever corner they occupy—even if they bust kids up against a wall or assault an innocent passerby or burn people out of their homes. The main characters, without solving anything, get the best handle on what the problem is, particularly Nick and Joe.

“Finally, I think the thing that's important between the father and son is the kid is finally getting the father to face the fact that he needs some straightening out, too. He bought into this thing and he bought into that thing and he's not in control of any of it. And not many guys get that chance. You know, they get bitter or they close off their minds. One way or the other, they don't even get to look at the problem, and then they usually don't blame it on the right people when they do get fucked up. Usually, they find somebody below them, and it's all their fault.”

Once again, Sayles steps backs from the particulars to his more global view. “There is this idea that inner cities are just going to be abandoned, that the money's going to be stripped from them, and whoever wants to deal with them can deal with the problems. And that people are going to have their little enclaves and take out of their own pocket to buy a police force or good schools and, in a perverted way, that's the American Dream: I'll take care of my own and fuck the rest of you. Finally, though, I think that leads to bigger crises. Joe Morton's character says, You pay now or you pay later. I think with that kind of polarization and abandonment, you pay later.”

Sayles looks at his characters in this film as having been forced to a point of decision and/or compromise, a moment when they have to figure out what they can give, what they can live with. It's the concern of a grown-up artist. His earlier films in many ways explored the struggle to identify one's self or to find communities of identity. The films chart his own personal growth, but it is a development shared by a generation.

John Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York, “a town,” he says, “where General Electric is year by year withdrawing and the population is dwindling.” In 1968, he went off to Williams College. Over lunch one day in Manhattan, Sayles recalls those early years. I pick him up at the Path station and we walk to the restaurant. I spent some time trying to figure out what kind of food he would like. He doesn't seem like the poached-salmon type, so I make my decision based on the availability of Diet Coke and a choice between pasta-sorta stuff and hamburgers. When we get there, he has no reaction whatsoever to this nice, if unremarkable, place but I discern that he's probably hungry because when I ask him about college, he says, “To me, it was like, I'd never had food that good. Everybody was complaining but I thought, Geez, it's like a country club.

“It was real pretty, and people seemed reasonably tolerant of each other. I was a psych major 'cause that seemed the easiest way not to have to go to too many classes.” He was having bad bouts of insomnia then, so he stayed up all night watching movies. “And then I slept until Jeopardy and lunch was right after that. Morning classes, forget it. I really didn't go to too many classes. I had never read that many books before, so I went into the library and I'd read 12 books a week sometimes. I'd never read Faulkner or Hemingway or any of these American guys, so even though I took almost no English classes, I just started reading everybody—James Baldwin, Mark Twain. I continue to have enormous gaps.”

After college he traveled around, working sometimes as a day laborer, meat packer or hospital orderly and sometimes just living on unemployment. (The hospital experience is fully exploited in his novel Los Gusanos, in which a number of the characters work at the bed-pan level of health care in a nursing home.) Sayles started writing fiction, and in 1975 he won an O. Henry Award for his first published story. That same year he published his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, which became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In 1977 he won another O. Henry and published Union Dues, which was nominated for a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1979 he put out a collection of short stories, The Anarchists' Convention. Even if he had done nothing else, this would be impressive.

In the late '70s, Sayles hooked up with Roger Corman's New World Pictures and started writing screenplays. It is fairly well known that the writing of movies like Piranha, The Lady in Red, Battle beyond the Stars and The Howling financed Sayles' leap into filmmaking. (My favorite is Alligator.) He says he got the job with Corman because the woman who hired him happened to be a reader of short stories who knew his work. But there he also got a first-hand look at how scripts are turned into movies and how to watch the budget while writing. More recently, he has done several scripts for other independent filmmakers; Unnatural Causes, a television film on Agent Orange starring John Ritter and Alfre Woodard; and developed the critically acclaimed Shannon's Deal for NBC. When I ask if he's ever written a screenplay he hated doing, Sayles replies, “No. I've done second and third drafts I hated doing because of the politics of collaborating with the people I was doing it for. At some point, I would just say, Guys, this is just getting different, it's not getting better. If you want to go in this direction, I think you should get another writer. Sometimes they're just finger-fucking it to death 'cause a new executive has come on board and he has some ideas.

“There have been movies that I've been disappointed in, but the screenplays, I felt good about when I sent them out into the world. But, you know, that's like starting a bill through Congress: It can come out the other end being exactly against what you were trying to do in the first place.”

In typical child-of-the-'60s fashion, Sayles says of his film training, “Instead of going to film school, I made movies,” followed by, “In the early days, my crews were no more experienced than me.” Sayles' first film, Return of the Secaucus Seven, made from ＄60,000 in screen-writing money, came out in 1980, was well received by the critics and became an underground favorite, if not quite a hit. The film was one of the first to treat the transformation being visited on the '60s counterculture generation by life in the “accommodate-reality” '70s. Lianna (1983), his second film, deals with a woman coming to terms with being a lesbian as she raises two kids in a working-class town. Then came Baby, It's You (1983), about an upper-middle class girl and her relationship with a working-class Italian boy.

In 1984 Sayles used part of the five years of financial support from his MacArthur award to make the film based on the black-extraterrestrial dream. Wry and ironic, The Brother from Another Planet became a cult classic. Matewan (1987), a beautifully shot, elegiac film that dealt with the 1920 coal miners strike in Matewan, West Virginia, followed three years later. Although selected for the Directors Fortnight at Cannes and well-received abroad, the film suffered here from a critics' backlash after their several years' love affair with Sayles. Critics began to carp about his sentimentality for the downtrodden, and this spilled over on his next film, Eight Men Out (1988), which was based on the 1919 Chicago White Sox baseball scandal. In many ways, though, Eight Men Out was a less successful film than the others, sometimes beautifully done and sometimes too slow. It also proved less successful in getting audiences into the theater.

When Sayles talks about the political changes that occurred during his developing years, he also describes many of the concerns of his films. “To a certain extent, in the '60s, people felt like they had to go to their own corners. The political energy went from the desegregation movement into the counterculture and antiwar movement, into the women's movement. The rhetoric and energy moved from one to another. But that didn't mean that the people who were left behind just disappeared. The black movement became more of an all-black movement, more urban and less about the South. The antiwar movement stayed in some ways, but the women separated themselves to a certain extent, at least the most radical women did. It seemed like a time when everybody needed to define themselves. I think the energy of that separation has kind of diminished. The number of people in that vanguard movement is smaller now, bubbling still, but it's not the front lines anymore. There were a lot of casualties. People got separated from the rank-and-file of their movements. And now those same people are older and they have more to lose.”

Sayles' films have focused on the problems of communities, and they are also concerned with personal ethics. “I think often I've been dealing with people in communities, sometimes people in communities that are surrounded by other communities that are not necessarily friendly toward theirs. Secaucus Seven is about people who, although spread out all over, are a kind of community of ideals. They come together to plug into that. Lianna is definitely about a woman who's been living as a stranger in this mass community and then she finds there might be another subcommunity that at first she is very scared of and then a little more comfortable in. But she has to deal with both because she has kids. Eight Men Out certainly is about ethics. Each of the guys who betrays his teammates has a different button that is pushed for him to say, Yes, I'll do it. Even within that, there's the ethics of the one guy who knows about it and won't throw the series but also won't rat on his friends. Matewan and City of Hope have the big similarity that they are about how people live together. In Matewan, there is a very, very short alliance between these immigrant miners, the black miners and the mountain guys. It's basically there because there is a common enemy who is just as threatening to all of them, and they somehow realize that. In City of Hope, you see that those alliances tend to be personal, not group alliances; some people get beyond the alliances, and some people don't even like to admit they exist. But the system itself thrives on those differences. In a coal camp, they really did put guards between the Italians and the Yugoslavs and the blacks and the hillbilly miners 'cause they didn't want them talking to each other. They said it was because they'd fight, but it was really because they'd talk.”

And what about the working-class focus of Sayles' films while there are so few other films about everyday working people? He doesn't serve up any self-righteous stuff about Hollywood producers not being interested. He says they're apt to say, OK, fine, we're doing a working guy, but then they shift gears immediately and start talking about costs and marketing issues. While he says the film world has “ceded the real-life-problem drama” to TV, there still is an absence of working-class dramas in film and television. “They've had plebeian characters,” Sayles says. “I remember in The Life of Riley, the guy was a riveter or something,” he laughs, “but you never saw him on the job. I think it's partly because it's just difficult to dramatize that stuff. And in terms of money, it's a set. It's easier to use the usual conventions that have been set up by the movies and other things. That's why Hitchcock was always having his characters be architects. Nobody knows exactly what architects do, and they don't have to go in every day and punch a clock, so they can go off and have an adventure, and you don't worry about, oh, is he going to lose his job? He's an architect.”

It goes without saying that John Sayles has arranged things so that we don't have to worry about him losing his job either. He would like to have more time to shoot a film, which means, in essence, more money. He rarely mentions other filmmakers but in this case, he says that if Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro “have something they want try, they can stop and look at it, they have time to rework scenes.”

When I ask him who knows him really well, Sayles says, “Most of my friends do. My friends who're actors who're in my movies probably do, but no people in Hollywood or anything like that.” Many of those people that he has worked with in the old scuffling days are now in Los Angeles, actors like Vincent Spano and Joe Morton. Another person who's been in the Sayles “crew” is Peggy Rajski, who produced Brother, Matewan and three Sayles videos for Bruce Springsteen, and coproduced Eight Men Out. She says, “He has learned that if you work with a lower budget and split up your financing sources, you're able to maintain creative control.” Now producing Little Man Tate, Jodie Foster's directorial debut, Rajski started working with Sayles in the days when the crew was no more experienced than he. “They didn't know any better than to hire me,” she jokes now. “We all grew together.” Of his relationship to Hollywood, she says, “Are they after him to write scripts? Yes, all the time. Are they beating his door down to direct? No.”

Although he is not beating down Hollywood's doors either, Sayles maintains a friendly long-distance relationship with the place. At the moment, he is writing a project for Jonathan Demme about the sinking of the cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis at the end of World War II. While he is no longer working on Shannon's Deal, he maintains consulting ties to the show. He has also been talking with Suzanne de Passe at Motown about a possible television version of Brother from Another Planet. But it looks as though Sayles has been wise enough to figure out what feeds his imagination and what doesn't. I hear it in the details he mentions like hearing a choir of children's voices coming from an elementary school near his Hoboken headquarters. He says they sing the national anthem with a Spanish accent. Or it might come from the East Indian video shop, where he tells me, they can only acquire 20-year-old movies. It is the sights and sounds of a real community where the fancy soap shop is in danger of going out of business but the auto parts store stays for decades.

As I listen to the anecdotes, I think how much like a writer it is to invest places with the mystique of movie shots and little-known lore. The only historical marker in Hoboken observes that the first recorded baseball game took place there. History and baseball buff Sayles says that Hoboken is only one of several sites credited with history's first baseball game, that the word recorded is significant.

When shooting City of Hope in Cincinnati, he tells me, he visited a little place that was supposed to be a stop on the Underground Railroad. He does this everywhere he goes. You can be sure that wherever Sayles lands next, he will use the markers to see where he is. And then his films will tell the tale.