Return of the Secaucus Seven

John Thomas Sayles (born September 28, 1950) is an American independent film director and screenwriter who frequently plays small roles in his own and other indie films.

Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York, the son of Mary (née Rausch), a teacher, and Donald John Sayles, a school administrator. He was raised Catholic and took to labeling himself “a Catholic atheist”. Both of Sayles’ parents were of half Irish descent.

He attended Williams College, where a small incident provided an inkling as to his future career. In 1972, while participating in the school’s biannual trivia contest, Sayles’ team was tied with another after eight hours, forcing the game’s first sudden death overtime. Sayles was able to cite a particular line of dialogue from the 1960 film The Time Machine, thus clinching that semester’s championship.

Like Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, among others, Sayles got his start in film working with Roger Corman. Sayles went on to fund his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7, with $30,000 he had in the bank from writing scripts for Corman. He set the film in a large house so that he did not have to travel to or get permits for different locations, set it over a three-day weekend to limit costume changes, and wrote about people his age so that he could have his friends act in it.

In 1983, after the films Baby It’s You (starring Rosanna Arquette) and Lianna (a sympathetic story in which a married woman becomes discontented with her marriage and falls in love with another woman), Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship for $40,000 a year for a five-year term. Sayles used the money to fund the fantasy The Brother from Another Planet, a film about a black, three-toed slave who escapes from another planet and finds himself at home among the people of Harlem in New York City, largely because he is incapable of speaking.

In 1989 he created and wrote the pilot episode for the short-lived television show Shannon’s Deal about a down-and-out Philadelphia lawyer played by Jamey Sheridan. Sayles received a 1990 Edgar Award for his teleplay for the pilot. The show ran for only 16 episodes before being cancelled in 1991.

Sayles has funded most of his films by writing genre scripts such as Piranha, Alligator, The Howling and The Challenge. Having collaborated with Joe Dante on Piranha and The Howling, Sayles acted in Dante’s movie Matinee. In deciding whether to take a job, Sayles reports that he mostly is interested in whether there is the germ of an idea for a movie which he would want to watch. Sayles gets the rest of his funding by working as a script doctor; he has done rewrites for Apollo 13, The Fugitive, and Mimic, among others, and finds the job rewarding since he gets to help other writers tell their stories and also meet other directors and watch how they work.

One such genre script, for an unproduced film called Night Skies, inspired the project that would eventually become the highly successful and moneymaking film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That film’s director, Steven Spielberg, later commissioned Sayles to write the script for Jurassic Park IV.

He has written and directed his own films, including Lone Star, Passion Fish, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Matewan. His films tend to be politically aware; social concerns are a theme running through most of his work. He serves on the advisory board for the Austin Film Society.

In November 1997 the National Film Preservation Board of the United States announced that Return of the Secaucus 7 would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Sayles works with a regular repertory of actors, most notably Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, and Gordon Clapp, each of whom has appeared in at least four of his films.

In early 2003, Sayles signed the Not In Our Name “Statement of Conscience” (along with individuals such as Noam Chomsky, Steve Earle, Brian Eno, Jesse Jackson, Viggo Mortensen, Bonnie Raitt, Oliver Stone, Marisa Tomei and Susan Sarandon) which opposed the invasion of Iraq.

In February 2009, Sayles was reported to be writing an upcoming HBO series based on the early life of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis. The drama, tentatively titled Scar Tissue, centers on the rocker’s early years living in West Hollywood with his father. At that time, Kiedis’ father, known as Spider, sold drugs (according to legend, his clients included The Who and Led Zeppelin) and mingled with rock stars on the Sunset Strip, all while aspiring to get into showbiz. —Wikipedia