Despite not having made a film of his own since 2013 (the under-appreciated “Go For Sisters”), John Sayles is having quite the year. In January, his 1996 neo-Western mystery film “Lone Star” entered the Criterion Collection with a 4K UHD edition that features interviews with director of photography Stuart Drysburgh, as well as an interview with Sayles himself conducted by “El Norte” director Gregory Nava. Then in April, his largely unavailable 1991 inner-city saga “City of Hope” received the Blu-ray release many fans had been pining for since a restoration was screened at Sundance in 2016 for the 25th anniversary. Adding to this newfound availability of quality copies of his work, a large number of Sayles’ films are currently streaming for free on apps like Tubi, Kanopy, and Pluto TV, as well as cost-based apps like AMC+, Starz, and Prime Video.
At no other point in his career has his library of work been more accessible — and the point isn’t lost on Sayles. Sitting down for an interview with IndieWire to reflect on “City of Hope”, Sayles has as much to say about the struggle of getting his work out there as he does about the making of the film.
“Very often what happens with movie like ours,” Sayles told IndieWire, “the first five movies, six movies, seven movies we made — I don’t think any of those distributors exist anymore. We have literally had studios — when we call and say, ‘Well, you’ve got our movie, are you going to do something with it?’ They say, ‘No, we don’t have your movie.’ So we say, ‘Well check again.’ And they say, ‘Oh geez, I guess we do.’ It’s not just a big enough thing in their mind to really exist. Or to bother spending more money on.”
To watch “City of Hope” and to think it isn’t something worth seeing is a travesty. Set in a small, fictitious New Jersey municipality called Hudson City, the film plays as an epic made up of a collection of loose threads, all knitted together to form a portrait of an inner-city that’s eating itself from the inside-out and outside-in. One thread follows a property developer (Tony Lo Bianco) who’s in bed with city hall and the mob and his purposeless son (Anthony Spano), who refuses to accept patronage jobs, instead opting to build his own criminal rep. Another, a Black, progressive councilman (Joe Morton) experiencing his first lessons in one-hand-washes-the-other politics. Almost on the periphery, a possibly unhoused, definitely mentally-ill street wanderer named Asteroid (David Strathairn) who mimics news stories, advertisements, and others with a terrified veracity. It’s a character that carries a certain prescience for society-at-large today and our current content-hungry, fear-based consumerism.
“He’s picking up on all these things that are going on,” says Sayles of Strathairn’s character, adding, “just in a really extreme way. The thing of all the advertising — the kind of visual pollution, noise pollution — he feels the pressure of that, that other people feel, but are not so conscious of feeling.”
In this, Sayles sees the connections to where we are today as well, saying, “If you’re also on TikTok and a bunch of those other things, and you’re playing video games that are a hundred times faster than they were when we made the movie, there’s a lot of bombardment on what you’re thinking, and it’s not surprising that a lot of people choose, ‘I’m only gonna watch this. I’m only gonna get my news here. This is the world I want to believe in. I’m cutting everything else out.’”
To have this much depth, awareness, forethought, and pain all within one character that is ostensibly a background figure in a film of background figures just goes to show the inherent value in Sayles’ before-its-time masterpiece. It’s about the little conflicts, internal and external, that touch us all in ways we don’t realize, turn big, and keep us from moving forward, individually and as a society. It’s less of a historical document than a reflection of things unchanged. Working again with cinematographer Robert Richardson — they collaborated on his previous film, the baseball drama “Eight Men Out” — Sayles maximized the minimal budget they were working with and brief shooting period by incorporating a visual style that maintains many long master shots and reflects the drifting nature of all his characters, as well as their interconnectedness.
“Basically, it’s the point,” Sayles says, “that here are all these interest groups and ethnic groups in this city, who think, ‘Those people have nothing to do with my life.’ I’m over here, they’re over there. But for the audience what you realize is, wait a minute, we’re seeing all this machination without a cut. We’re trading off from one group to the other — it’s also why we shot widescreen [2.35:1], cause we often had six or eight people — we’ve got three people coming up the hallway, and two people coming across and who knows which one we’re going to — and without it being too jerky a move, you can drift from one to the other in a master shot. Especially if you have a widescreen and you can warn people, ‘Oh somebody else is coming into focus, we might be following them.’”
One of those characters we follow is played by a young Angela Bassett in only her fourth film role. As the wife to Morton’s councilman character, their dynamic serves as a template for the kind of relationship America would come to revere through the prism of a much larger political couple.
“I always feel like I should get credit for inventing the Obamas,” jokes Sayles as he thinks back on casting Bassett. This was the first time they worked together, but they would go on to collaborate on two more films, “Passion Fish” and “Sunshine State.”
“She’s just a good actress,” said Sayles of Bassett. “I had seen her in, you know, a couple plays and she went on very quickly to do bigger roles and we were lucky enough to get her back on some other things. But there are a bunch of actors who I had been hoping to work with for a long time and I got a chance to on this. You know, huge cast.”
Some of those actors featured in the film, including Frankie Faison and Bill Raymond, years later would go on to take part in another examination of interconnectedness surrounding the lives of those involved in inner-city life — HBO’s hit series, “The Wire.” For those who haven’t seen David Simon’s sprawling chronicle of Baltimore’s criminal underbelly and those charged with keeping the peace, each season explores a different angle of the city’s tangled web, from its ganglords and police officers to its government and education system. Like “City of Hope”, it aims to follow more than lead, albeit with a range and depth not possible with one two-hour feature film. Sayles, who’s watched a lot of “The Wire”, but not all of it, understands the comparison, but hesitates to take credit for Simon’s genius, saying, “I don’t know that anybody saw this movie and were inspired. I think they were inspired by the same things that I was.”
Another apparent difference, whereas “The Wire” prided itself on actually shooting in Baltimore and surrounding areas, Sayles opted to shoot in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood instead of an actual New Jersey city. Sayles says, “We looked at Newark, we looked at Jersey City, I was living in Hoboken at the time, and what we realized is that with five weeks, we need a city where the traffic wasn’t so bad. And I had shot — we had shot — a bunch of the scenes in ‘Eight Men Out’ in Cincinnati, specifically in that Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, that urban renewal kind of passed it over and didn’t do anything to it, so you had this housing stock and you know, kind of, a good inner-city look and enough buildings that were about six or seven stories high. So we ended up shooting there, but we never had a problem getting around town.”
These different facets of Sayles’ filmmaking — preparing for as much as he can beforehand and incorporating cheaper techniques and practices that match his narrative goals — are what make him a true independent to this day. Unfortunately, his business model hasn’t really worked in recent years, with most feature film distributors being more attracted to what Sayles and others call “event movies”.
“The hardest thing to get made today is a standalone feature,” says Sayles. “So if you’re going to sell people on it, it has to be like an event. And if you come in with a 92-minute movie, it’s not an event. Even though that’s a length a lot of people feel comfortable with — with their attention spans — it’s just a movie. And it might be a good movie or whatever. There are a lot of movies that are two and a half hours long and there’s only 90 minutes of story — of good story. But they needed to make it an event to get people excited about it and maybe get the major actors to say yes and all that kind of stuff.”
Rather than give up on his creative endeavors entirely, however, Sayles has found different outlets to put his art out into the world, writing novels — including last year’s highly acclaimed “Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade’s Journey” — continuing his work as a screenwriter-for-hire, and making sure his past work is seen by as many as possible in ways that contribute back to those involved in their making. Discussing preference between physical media and streaming, Sayles is careful not to pass judgment on either format, saying, “Both are ways to get your movie seen. So my ideal is that they’re available in both places. Because most of our movies were made with a patchwork of investors and there are cast and crew people who have points in them, I appreciate it when there are some residuals that come back, so I prefer that people don’t go to YouTube and look at a version that’s just been lifted. So we usually go and check out each movie every once-in-a-while and say to YouTube, ‘Actually, you don’t own the rights to that, so take it off your service.’”
Also competing with YouTube are FAST Channels like Pluto TV and Tubi, where a great deal of Sayles’ work can currently be found. At a time when streamers continue hiking prices and bundling, while at the same time making less and less new content, these free, ad-based apps are democratizing streaming and entertainment writ-large in a very — dare I say — hopeful way. Pulling up their respective home pages and scouring through relatively well-curated lists of films and television shows is reminiscent of what it once felt like to go to the library as a kid and the freedom of finding something that may change your life. So often when I’m on Netflix or Max these days, I’m reminded of the price of admission and how these companies are effectively pricing people out of cultural growth. Speaking with Matthew Belloni last month for his podcast “The Town”, Tubi CEO Anjali Sud believes the channel’s success, present and future, lies in “a really solidly executed combination of being free, of listening to our audience with a large on-demand library, and we’re focused on serving that audience and showing them and giving them more of the things that they like and it really is that simple.”
Furthering the point, Sud added, “It is different to be 100 percent free, right? We’re not asking you to subscribe to an ad tier or to subscription tier. We’re not trying to upsell you. The fragmentation and friction is reduced. It’s just as easy to start watching a movie on Tubi as it is to open up TikTok.”
And with TikTok’s existence proving more and more tenuous within the United States, perhaps now is the time to start transitioning younger generations to more long-form viewing habits. Where these FAST channels really set themselves apart are in their massive libraries. Like with TikTok, you can spend hours just scrolling through options, which for many, is half the fun. People claim it’s getting harder and harder to find something worth watching, which is why many of us sacrifice our viewership to whatever’s thrown in front of our face, but part of honing your sense of culture is investigating. After all, what was channel surfing twenty years ago? What was going to the record shop fifty years ago? We all have had to work to have taste, but at the end of the day, it’s always worth it and that message is reinforced by the heightened presence of John Sayles’ filmography, both on streaming and in physical media.
This isn’t to say more work isn’t needed. There are plenty of films, including others in Sayles’ filmography, that continue to struggle to see the light of day. However, Sayles still has hope for the future of cinema’s preservation.
“Our friend, Nancy Savoca and her husband Rich Guay, who’s her producer, and other good people have started this organization Missing Movies,” Sayles tells IndieWire, saying, “especially for independent filmmakers, but even for people who’ve made things for the studios. There’s a lot of movies that you would love to see, but…how do you see them?”
In thinking on this question, I’m reminded of “City of Hope” and the message it tries to send by the end of the film. As one of the characters we’ve followed lays bleeding out in a construction site, another calls out to the street for help, but is met with Strathairn’s Asteroid, a mimic who’s only response is to start yelling help himself rather than run off to find some. What is Sayles trying to tell his viewers? Perhaps that our salvation doesn’t come from the actions of others, but rather our own. In the same respect, if we as consumers care about the art and culture we’re taking in, maybe we have to start becoming more active participants in its redemption.
