The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Filmmaker’, by Veronica Geng

Next up on the essays shelf:

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

David Thomson concludes his entry on John Sayles in his The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by saying that he believes the novel may be “his true calling”. David Thomson is sometimes spot-on, and sometimes he is completely way off, but I think that’s an interesting observation. John Sayles has taken such an independent individualistic path. He started out as a novelist and a short-story writer. He got a MacArthur Fellows grant (the “genius” one). He directed shows in summer stock. He wrote screenplays for Roger Corman. He had a full life and career before he threw his hat into the film-maker ring. His first film was Return of the Secaucus 7.

He wrote and directed the film. It was made for $40,000 (money Sayles had earned from his writing). The film made back that money tenfold. It came out in 1980 and was an important symbol for the independent film movement. It’s a quiet story, friends talking, playing basketball. You can see how many of the films that came out in the 80s that were similar (The Big Chill, even the John Hughes pictures) were inspired to some degree by Secaucus 7.

I really like Noel Murray’s piece on Sayles on the AV Club. Murray writes:

Sayles also stood out for his crowd-pleasing streak, and even today, the movies he writes, directs, and edits are designed to appeal to anyone interested in involved stories and complex characters. But it all started with the directly conveyed, fundamentally entertaining Return Of The Secaucus 7, which presents a reunion of former student radicals and surveys how the free-love generation deals with a developing desire to settle down.

I think the first Sayles movie I saw was Baby It’s You, and that was sheerly on the strength of Roger Ebert’s recommendation. But I went on to see all of them, Lone Star, Secret of Roan Inish and the others. I like his dedication to talk, in this oh-so-visual medium (as everyone keeps telling us), and I like his core group of actors, his ensemble.

The following “Talk of the Town” piece, by Veronica Geng, is from 1981. Secaucus 7 was playing for a “brief run” at the Quad Cinema (which is still there, and still showing independent films. My cousin Mike’s film Certainty had a “brief run” there as well.) Geng meets up with Sayles to talk with him about his career, his writing, horror films, and Secaucus 7. The entire piece is one long quote from Sayles, which is fantastic. There’s no editorial comments, nothing in between us and him. It’s a good format, especially if the interviewee knows how to tell a story and talk, which Sayles clearly does.

Here is an excerpt where Sayles talks about working with actors and the editing process.

I love the detail about how Sayles bought an editing machine and spent a night reading the manual. That’s how guerrilla this whole thing was.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Filmmaker’, by Veronica Geng

I had no pressure but from myself, and a responsibility to the actors – that they look good. If you’re an actor in a film, you don’t have an audience to tell you whether it’s working; you only have a bunch of technicians – who are worrying about focus and stuff – and the director. I’m the only net they have. So I told them, “Any time you feel you have a better take in you, tell me. I will always use the best acting take when I start editing. If it’s not the best technical take, that doesn’t matter.” Because the important thing about this film – it isn’t true of horror movies necessarily – is that you believe in the people. It helped that we were living together in a ski lodge and that they had to cook together and play volleyball together. I was paying them about eighty dollars a week and room and board, which is about what they had been getting in summer stock. I said, “If this movie makes any money, which I doubt, you’ll get up to Screen Actors Guild minimum for the year.” The same with the technicians.

Editing is the best part. You are just there with the film, making the story out of the film. You learn what you covered wrong. You learn things about writing, because you realize that a scene plays without all this dialogue or that you need more dialogue here or some sound in the background. I rented a flatbed editing machine and spent a night going through this damn manual – it was like Christmas Eve and trying to figure out how to put a bicycle together. I cut for one or two hours a day; I was doing all this screenwriting to pay for the editing machine – five hundred dollars a month. With a couple of sequences that are pure editing – a basketball sequence and some diving – I was able to play around. Most of it was salvaging. The time transitions are in the lines, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to shoot a lot of footage and carve a movie out of it. Film stock – on most budgets it’s a tiny fraction of the budget, on ours it was a third. In Poland and India, they shoot about four to one – they just don’t have much Kodak film. In Poland, they’re on the state, so there’s no overtime; they just rehearse the hell out of things, with the camera but without pulling the trigger and exposing the film, and when they’re ready to go they shoot it. So very often they get great stuff in one take. But it would cost a fortune to do that here.

The main thing I don’t like about the film business is that you do too much work that doesn’t have anything to do with filmmaking. It’s like Karl Wallenda saying that when he’s on the wire he’s alive and the rest is waiting. When you’re writing or directing a film, you’re alive, and the rest is advertising.