john sayles

ah yes, my John Sayles saga finally attains closure.

actually closure was reached last Friday, but I didn't realize it until this afternoon.

I interviewed Mr. Sayles and his longtime partner and producer Maggie Renzi, before Christmas, in advance of the release of Honeydripper, a movie filmed and set in my home state of Alabama.

lovely people. just about exactly the type of couple you might hope to meet at a dinner party. accomplished, well-spoken, well-informed. just delightful.

would've been a great interview except (except) my recorder didn't work. something I didn't realize until about 1:30 the next morning as I'd planned on a day off from work to meet a 36-hour deadline for the Voice film section.

and things pretty much got worse from there.

trust me, it's a long, long, ugly story. not only from the job frustration of faulty equipment, editorial misunderstandings and such, but from feeling so damn bad that Maggie and John (I interviewed him again by phone the following afternoon) had been so patient, given so much of their valuable time and for a while there it looked as if there would be nothing, nada, zilch to show for it.

but last Friday my interview, or at least part of my interview with John Sayles, ran in the Village Voice blog. of course, my intro's all screwed to hell ("at a recent dinner near at a restaurant near City Hall" when the dinner was actually at the City Hall restaurant, for example - can't waste time checking on something like that), but that's pretty much how this particular journey went.

it's always something.

in any case, here's the link to that Voice posting.

(and here's the intro I submitted (it ain't great, but it's certainly better): Just before Christmas I take the subway down to Tribeca to meet John Sayles, recipient of two Academy Award nominations for screenwriting among his sixteen written and directed films. A down-to-earth cinematic artist with an ample amount of acting work and several screenplays for movies he didn’t direct. The author of five works of fiction. A National Book Award nominee and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (a/k/a “the genius grant”). A filmmaker who’s been labeled “indie icon” (for 1979’s path-clearing Return of the Secaucus 7) more times than December snow has been forecast in his hometown of Schnectady. In short, a suitably busy, suitably accomplished fellow who once said of his upstate upbringing, “I never thought about being a writer. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.”
One of Sayles’ most noted films, Eight Men Out, dramatizes the loss of baseball’s innocence through the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. And Sayles’ first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, relates the travels of a transvestite softball team.
Which means that, high above the discernible din of a couple dozen holiday-partying Citibankers who inhabit the bar area of City Hall restaurant, over fried oysters and countless soft drinks, John Sayles and I talk about baseball. And the beginnings of rock and roll which inform the changing times within his sixteenth and latest film, Honeydripper.)