Don Harvey and Michael Rooker as 1919 Sox players in John Sayles' 8 Men Out.
Sayles, before the screening: "I'm interested in how we get to be where we are."
If you try for, say, ten or even 20 years and can’t get that movie script financed, just turn the tale into a novel.
Following that creative prescription — which is hardly as smooth as it sounds, and really requires both a depth of commitment to getting your story told as well as a literary talent equal to the directorial/visual — is what legendary (well, to some of us) independent filmmaker John Sayles has been successfully doing. Especially for the last decade or so.
That biographical skein emerged Thursday night in a brief but charming and informative talk as Sayles was on hand at the basement screening room of Yale’s Humanities Quadrangle complex, at 320 York St., to introduce Eight Men Out.
That’s his 1988 film (based on Eliot Asinof’s 1963 eponymous historical account) of the conspiracy of a group of Chicago White Sox players (they soon were tarred the “Black Sox”) to throw the 1919 World Series in exchange for secret payments from high-rolling gamblers of the era, notably Arnold Rothstein.
The 35 mm screening treat was part of the Yale Film Archive’s monthly offering, “Treasures From the Yale Film Archive” series, and drew 75 cinephiles as well as a handful of adoring baby boomer Sayles groupies like Chip Anderson and Eileen Reader.
They hail from Guilford, where Sayles has been living for the last eight years. He’s occasionally taught courses at Yale and in 2015, four of Sayles’ films were featured in a program of the Arts & Ideas Festival.
Sayles' fans Eileen Reader and Chip Anderson
Click here for an in-depth interview Independent Editor Tom Breen did at that time about Sayles’ impressive filmography, how independent films get made or don’t, and about Sayles’ abiding themes that “consistently explore the political compromises, cultural ideals, and socioeconomic realities that define contemporary American life.”
That very much is true of Eight Men Out.
In that film there are abounding baseball pleasures to watch – the old-fashioned gloves hardly bigger than what I use to garden with today; the crack of the heavy, pre-homerun-era ball; the “you’re a busher” and the other salty diamond argot; the sense of deeply understanding the personal lives of the young players, American working class gods in ill-fitting baggy uniforms; and experiencing the sweat, dust, dirt, and dangerous spikes of the world of the infield that the film lovingly evokes.
Yet to say Eight Men Out is a baseball film is to say that All The President’s Men is a movie about journalism. In fact, the Archive’s hand-out for the film notes that Sayles wrote his initial script in 1977 (before his directorial debut in Return of the Secaucus Seven) after seeing All The President’s Men because he saw the similarities between the Black Sox conspiracies and Watergate and the cover-ups.
It’s a film about the bosses versus labor, greed versus innocence, power versus dignity, and how an ideal, like integrity and love of a game can –or cannot – survive the economic forces at play.
After he wrote the screenplay in 1977, Sayles said, “I called the agent and he said, ‘Kid, this will never happen. One of the players always comes out of the woodwork and threatens to sue.’ Eleven years later I got to make the movie. So how’d we get to make it? Probably there was no one left to sue us.”
Not much changed in the script either, as Sayles told his attentive audience, about all the young actors who had agreed to work at scale, except Charlie Sheen had to be moved into the outfield.
Other tidbits about the making of the film:
“This was before CGI [computer generated imagery], so a big problem was the crowd. You can’t shoot a World Series with empty seats, and only 500 people had shown up [at Bush Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, where the film was being shot.] We had to keep moving the extras around.”
None of the actors, Sayles said in answer to an audience member’s question before the screening, had player doubles or back-ups. That is, the budget didn’t allow that and so one of the criteria for choosing the actors was they be good athletes, Sayles said, and they were. The actors themselves were required to perform the actual hitting and fielding.
However, D.B. Sweeny, who was playing Shoeless Joe Jackson, was more experienced at soccer than baseball. Yet Sayles told him that in one sequence there was no way around it: he had to hit a triple, off a fairly hard pitched ball, “And I’m going to follow you uncut from first [base] and I’ll meet you at third. He was such a good athlete, it only took him a dozen or so pitches to hit one into the gap.”
Another audience member asked how, in a low budget film, he had gone about casting the Sox’s opposing players: “The opponents were guys in an Indianapolis soft ball league. They had, you know, mustaches and big hair [of the time.] So I told them, ‘You got to shave and have a silly haircut [to mimic the tonsorial styles of 1919]. One came to me [after he’d gone to the barber] and said, I scared my wife.’”
What is Sayles up to now?
Last month Penguin/Random House brought out Sayles’ new and well-reviewed novel. Titled Jamie MacGillvray, it tracks the story of a young Jacobite Scotsman from his capture at the Battle of Cuollden in 1746 to the American colonies, as an indentured servant, and then on to the Battle of Quebec, the first major American army loss in the Revolutionary War. It’s 700 pages long and Sayles said it first came to life as, yes, a screenplay he wrote 20 years ago and couldn’t get financed.
“I get to make movies when I’m lucky enough to get the financing,” he said. “But I’m [also] a novelist.”
And the award-winning fiction — Pride of the Bimbos, in 1975, Union Dues, 1977, and the short stories in The Anarchists” Convention — all saw the light of day before the movies.
When a story, like Jamie MacGillvray, is really good, he said, “I don’t just leave it. I’m interested in how we [how people] get to be where we are. Everything is more complex and interesting [when you get into it],” he said.
Sayles said that when he was at Williams College he was a psychology major, he never took a history course. But his career since is an immersion in it. “I like to know how people make their choices. And if you follow Howard Zinn, there all those [people] who don’t get talked about at all.”
What happens when Sayles shifts from the screenplay of a story to the novel-writing of the story? Was his method to have the fully written screenplay open on the desk as he transformed the story to a novel?
Not quite, was the answer.
“I look at it again, which usually means I go into more depth, into research. In a novel you need to think more visually. In a movie [script] you tell your designer, ‘I need a ship, from the year 1746.’ If I’m writing it, I really have to think about it [in order to convey that level of detail.]”
Chris Anderson (he was wearing a baseball cap, which is why this reporter interviewed him) said he and his wife Eileen Reader were hardly super baseball fans, yet very much fans of their fellow Guilford resident John Sayles, whose other events in Guilford they have attended over the years
“We don’t have many thoughtful filmmakers [like him],” she said. “I’m such a fan, I wish I knew when his birthday was!”
“He’s a voice that needs to be heard,” said Anderson
Up next for Sayles is a nearly finished novel based, yes again, on a previously written but unproduced screenplay. He is calling it To Save the Man. “It’s set at the Carlisle (Indian) Boarding School – before Jim Thorpe went there.”
Great film. My favorite character was Ring Lardner.
A New Haven connection is Greasy Neale, my great-uncle. He led the Cincinnati Reds batting with .357 and always said the White Sox only threw the first game. From 1934 to 1940 he was an assistant coach for the Yale football team. My father used to bicycle from Clark's Dairy to the field with a milkshake to help with his ulcer. From Yale he went to the Philadelphia Eagles where he won two NFL championships. Was he the only person at the apex of two iconic US sports?