John Sayles
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John Sayles is an American motion-picture director, screenwriter, novelist, and actor who since the 1980s has been among the most prominent independent filmmakers in the United States.
His films include, among others, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), Passion Fish (1992), Lone Star (1996), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), Men with Guns (1997), Limbo (1999), Sunshine State (2002), Casa de Los Babys (2003), Silver City (2004), Honeydripper (2007), Amigo (2010), and Go for Sisters (2013).
photograph: Mary Cybulski
Primary Contributions (1)
John Ford was an iconic American film director, best known today for his westerns, though none of the films that won him the Academy Award for best direction—The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952)—were of this genre. His films,…
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Publications (3)
A Moment in the Sun (February 2012)
It’s 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time.Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall Doctorow and Deadwood...
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The Anarchists' Convention and Other Stories (April 2005)
Before John Sayles was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, he was a National Book Award-nominated writer of fiction. The Anarchists' Convention is his first short story collection, providing a prism of America through fifteen stories. These everyday people—a kid on the road heading west, aging political activists, a lonely woman in Boston—go about their business with humor and resilience, dealing more in possibility than fact. In the widely anthologized and O. Henry Award-winning "I-80 Nebraska,"...
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Thinking In Pictures: The Making Of The Movie Matewan (July 2003)
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...
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