Through discussion of films such as 'Return of the Secaucus 7', 'The Brother from Another Planet' 'Matewan' and 'Sunshine State', this study uncovers themes of racial and sexual otherness, capitalist excess and the erosion of community in the work of John Sayles.

In 1980, art house audience word of mouth about an unusual new movie, Return of the Secaucus Seven, launched the career of director John Sayles and with him the era of the independent filmmaker. Sayles has remained a maverick, writing, directing, editing and even acting in his own films. He has directed such diverse films as The Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Lone Star, and received two Academy Award nominations. Here is the chronicle of Sayles' career--including the story of his inauspicious beginning as a second-string actor, and his work in fiction, theatre, music videos and television. The author argues that the importance of Sayles' signature plain visual style has been overlooked. A chapter is devoted to each of Sayles' feature films, offering background material on production funding, a plot sketch, an analysis of important characters, and a look at the language, setting, and politics. Each chapter also traces Sayles' technical development--his camera work, editing, musical arrangement and mise-en-scene. The book includes a complete filmography and a bibliography.

Interviews with John Sayles who worked on such widely varied projects as The return of the Secaucus seven; Baby, it's you; Brother from another planet; Matewan; Passion fish; Piranha; Alligator; The howling; Apollo 13; City of hope, Lone star; Shannon's deal.

In Yellow Earth, John Sayles introduces an epic cast of characters, weaving together narratives of competing agendas and worldviews with lyrical dexterity, insight, and wit. When rich layers of shale oil are discovered beneath the town of Yellow Earth, all hell breaks loose. Locals, oil workers, service workers, politicians, law enforcement, and get-rich-quick opportunists—along with an earnest wildlife biologist—commingle and collide as the population of the town triples overnight. Harleigh Killdeer, chairman of the tribal business council of the neighboring Three Nations reservation, entertains visions of "sovereignty by the barrel" and joins forces with a fast-talking entrepreneur. From casino dealers to activists and high school kids, everyone in the region is swept up in the unsparing wave of an oil boom. Sayles’s masterful storytelling draws an arc from the earliest exploitation of this land and its people all the way to twenty-first-century privatization schemes. Through the intertwining lives of its characters, Yellow Earth lays bare how the profit motive erodes human relationships, as well as our living planet. The fate of Yellow Earth serves as a parable for our times.

What choices--creative, practical, and technical--make a movie what it is? Here a gifted writer and filmmaker takes us behind the camera and provides a full description of the movie-making process.When John Sayles turned from writing fiction to making movies, he did so with little help from Hollywood: Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles's first movie as director and writer, was produced with 60,000 of his own money. Many films later, he still works outside the studio system and guides every phase of his productions.Now Sayles has written an illuminating book about the complex choices that lie at the heart of every movie. Using the making of his film Matewan as an example, he offers chapters on screenwriting, directing, editing, sound, and more. Photographs, sketches, and the complete shooting script illustrate this engaging account of how Sayles's curiosity about a coal miners' strike in the town of Matewan, West Virginia, became a screenplay--and then a movie.

Insightful, focused case studies of screen performance from diverse directors with a range of contemporary styles and approaches.

America's independent films often seem to defy classification. Their strategies of storytelling and representation range from raw, no-budget projects to more polished releases of Hollywood's "specialty" divisions. Yet understanding American indies involves more than just considering films. Filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, festivals, critics, and audiences all shape the art's identity, which is always understood in relation to the Hollywood mainstream. By locating the American indie film in the historical context of the "Sundance-Miramax" era (the mid-1980s to the end of the 2000s), Michael Z. Newman considers indie cinema as an alternative American film culture. His work isolates patterns of character and realism, formal play, and oppositionality and the functions of the festivals, art houses, and critical media promoting them. He also accounts for the power of audiences to identify indie films in distinction to mainstream Hollywood and to seek socially emblematic characters and playful form in their narratives. Analyzing films such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), Lost in Translation (2003), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Juno (2007), along with the work of Nicole Holofcener, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, and the Coen brothers, Newman investigates the conventions that cast indies as culturally legitimate works of art. He binds these diverse works together within a cluster of distinct viewing strategies and invites a reevaluation of the difference of independent cinema and its relationship to class and taste culture.