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11/13/2019 11:00 PMIn the late 1960s and early 1970s, while hitchhiking through coal country in West Virginia and Kentucky, John Sayles got to talking with some mine workers who were worried about a bitterly contested United Mine Workers election between Tony Boyle and Jock Yablonski, a battle that Boyle resolved by embezzling money from union funds and hiring hitmen who murdered Yablonski, his wife, and daughter.
“The coal workers were telling me how it was going from bad to violent,” Sayles remembers. “They said, ‘we’re going to have another Matewan massacre on our hands.’” As Sayles learned more about Matewan, he found a story that demanded to be told. “It had all of these elements that were relevant to the whole modern-day labor movement, plus it had the shape of a classical gun-fight western. And that was a story that was familiar enough for most audiences.”
The critically acclaimed film that is the result, Matewan, released in 35-mm format in 1987, tells the story of a local miners’ struggle in a West Virginia coal town. Their efforts to form a union resulted in an all-out war in 1920 that left 10 people dead. Matewan recently received the honor of gaining entry into the Criterion Collection, which means a digitally remastered version is available on DVD, along with a host of extras. To help celebrate, Sayles will be participating in a question and answer session, along with a viewing of the remastered movie, at Madison Art Cinemas on Thursday, Nov. 21 at 7:45 p.m.
His Hometown Theater
Sayles, who lives in Guilford with his wife and long-time creative partner and collaborator, Maggie Renzi, who is one of the producers of Matewan, says he’s looking forward to the event at Madison Art Cinemas with theater-owner Arnold Gorlick.
“Since we live nearby, we actually go to that theater quite often,” he says. He says he hopes the event, along with others he has planned, will help get the word out that Matewan is once again available, in a format that makes the experience of viewing better than ever.
“Basically the movie was in limbo for years, because of somebody who had the rights to it, but who was not taking the responsibility of doing things like paying the actors residuals. That’s been resolved,” he says. The Criterion Collection release, which became available last month, includes two new documentaries on the making of the film featuring Sayles, Renzi, production designer Nora Chavooshian, and actors Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell, Will Oldham, and David Strathairn.
It also includes a short documentary on the impact that the production of the movie had on West Virginia, when Matewan was filmed there. A sixth-grader named Morgan Spurlock, who lived about a half hour from where the movie was being made and begged his mom to take him to see the action, thought the process of movie making was magic and decided he wanted to make movies some day. He later became a documentary filmmaker himself, best known for work that includes Super Size Me and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
“He was an 11 year-old kid when we were making that movie,” Sayles says.
What is it About Humans?
Sayles says for fans of the movie, the experience of watching the remastered version will be as good, if not better, than watching the original movie. Scratches have been removed, the color has been improved, and the sound is better as well. Sayles says the themes the movie address have stood up to the test of time, as well.
“One of the questions the movie asks is whether we need something catastrophic to pull us together,” he says. In the movie, coal workers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds eventually pull together against the mine owners working to subdue them by depriving them and their families of their jobs, homes, and sources of food and sustenance. “Those workers would not have gotten together except their treatment was so bad. And, you know, we were united on 9/12 and then that started to fall apart. We were more united after World War II than we are today. What is it about humans beings that only a crisis tends to bring us together?”
The need for workers to be united is as strong today as it has ever been. He says there is irony in the fact that teachers in West Virginia demanding a decent wage and reasonable health care costs, took the lead in a 2018 wildcat strike that later spread to several other states before achieving some of its goals. And what does it say about us that we live in times where even teachers, the people entrusted with our children and so, in some ways, our future, have to go out on strike to get a decent wage?
“Very specifically, I know people who are trying to organize Walmart workers. Hospitals. There’s still a need for some way to get some kind of day in court when it comes to labor situations,” he says. “Just because certain kinds of unions don’t exist doesn’t mean we don’t need to organize labor.”
New Novel in January
Sayles’s recent work includes Sonora, The Devil’s Highway, a 2018 film that focuses on racism in Mexico in 1931, and a dangerous trip through the desert. He also has a novel coming out in January, called Yellow Earth, which focuses on the shale oil boom and bust from 2009 and 2015 on the site of the Three Nations reservation on the banks of the Missouri River in North Dakota.
Sayles says the novel tells the story of people who saw their city explode from a population of about 15,000 to, six months later, about 45,000, “and almost all of them single males. The cops don’t get paid anything more. The teachers don’t get paid anything more. There are no new roads being built. They’re building these man camps out of old containers to put the people in. And crime goes up. It’s like a tidal wave hits the community.”
The novel’s release, in late January, will bring Sayles to the Guilford Free Library, 67 Park Street, Guilford, where he is planning a discussion of the novel on Thursday, Jan. 30 at 7 p.m.
Whether it’s in the form of a novel or a movie, or in some other form, the key for Sayles seems to be to keep telling stories that demand to be told.
“If you want to tell a story, just do it,” he says. “Do it as a play. Then get your friends together and read it out loud. Do it as a backyard movie. Do the $1.98 version of the movie, and put it online, and see if you get some hits. Write it as a book. Just do it.”