Return of the Secaucus Seven
Lianna
Baby, It's You
The Brother from Another Planet
Matewan
Eight Men Out
City of Hope
Passion Fish
The Secret of Roan Inish
Lone Star
Men with Guns (Hombres Armados)
Limbo
Sunshine State
Casa de los Babys
Silver City
Honeydripper

ABOUT THE CAST

JOE MORTON ("The Brother")

When he was cast in the title role in The Brother From Another Planet, Joe Morton was already famous in certain circles (and attracted attention from fans on the set in Harlem), for his duel role on the long-running soap opera Another World, as Dr. Abel Marsh and his rock-star twin brother Leo Mars. Morton's only previous work in movies had been a brief appearance in another pioneering independent production, Joan Micklin Silver's Between the Lines (1977).

The role of a telepathic mute in The Brother was ironic assignment for the New York City native, a trained theater actor and singer much in demand for voice-over work. Morton made his Broadway debut in Hair and was nominated for a Tony for his performance in Raisin , the musical adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Raisin in the Sun .

Morton is now a charter member of the John Sayles Stock Company, having played major roles written specifically for him in City of Hope (1991) and Lone Star (1996), and he is firmly established as one of America's finest actors. He has appeared in dozens of major movies over the past fifteen years, including Trouble in Mind (1985), Crossroads (1986), The Good Mother (1988), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), The Inkwell (1994), Speed (1994), and Apt Pupilb> (1998). He was seen most recently in Michael Mann's film Ali.

As a voice-over performer Morton worked on the PBS documentary series American Cinema and Jazz. He was a regular on the TV series Equal Justice and New York News, and has made guest appearances on many other programs, including The X-Files, Law and Order, and Homicide. He currently has a recurring role on the popular WB series Smallville, as a geologist researching the properties of Kryptonite.

Since 1985, Joe Morton has been married to Nora Chavooshian, the Production Designer of John Sayles' films The Brother From Another Planet, Eight Men Out, and Matewan. They have two children.

DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER ("Malverne Davis")

An internationally recognized jazz vocalist and musical theater performer, Dee Dee Bridgewater was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. While still in college she began singing and touring with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, and made her New York debut with the band in 1970. She was soon making successful recordings with Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, Roland Kirk, and others.

Bridgewater first won fans outside jazz circles in 1974, when she created the role of Glinda the Good in the original Broadway production of The Wiz, winning a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Her signature song in the show, "If You Believe," became an anthem for fans.

Bridgewater has continued to pursue both stage work and her packed recording and concert careers. She appeared in the Los Angeles and touring productions of Sophisticated Ladies, with Gregory Hines, Hinton Battle, and was nominated for a Laurence Oliver Award for her London performance as Billie Holiday in the musical Lady Day.

Since relocating to Europe in the early 1990s, Bridgewater has won two Grammy awards for her acclaimed tribute album Dear Ella (Polygram, 1997), which also won the French Victoire de la Musique award as Best Jazz Vocal Album. Her most recent release was Live At Yoshi's (Universal/Verve, 2000), recorded during a tour of Japan.

Dee Dee Bridgewater lives in Paris with her husband and three children.

CAROLINE AARON ("Randy Sue Carter")

Her small role as a waitress in John Sayles film Baby, It's You (1983) led Randy Sue Carter to her pivotal appearance in The Brother From Another Planet, playing a character close to her own Richmond, Virginia roots.

Since making her big screen debut in 1982, in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, the hard-working character actress has specialized in what she calls "junior yenta" roles, notably as a restaurant customer who orders risotto with a side of pasta in Big Night (1996). In 1989 she appeared as the Woody Allen-character's sister in Crimes and Misdemeanors and has become a regular in Allen's films, appearing in Alice (1990), Husbands and Wives, (1992), and Deconstructing Harry (1997).

In feature film, Caroline Aaron has played important supporting roles in Working Girl (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990),Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Primary Colors (1998), Lucky Numbers (2000), What Planet Are You From? (2000), and many others. Her most recent big screen appearance was as the white-trash mother of David Spade's title character in the comedy Joe Dirt (2001).

Recent TV guest appearances have included featured roles on 7th Heaven, The Practice, NYPD Blue, and Frasier.

STEVE JAMES ("Odell"/stunt coordinator)

Steve James may have been most famous for a role in which he spoofed his heroic screen image, as the accident prone street fighter Kung Fu Joe in Keenan Ivory Wayans' blaxploitation parody I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988). But James was also the genuine article, a rising star in the world of martial arts action movies when he died of cancer in 1995, at the age of 43.

A native New Yorker, born into a show business family, James attended C.W. Post College as an Arts and Theater major, and did his first work in films as a member of the Baseball Furies street gang in Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979). This literally faceless appearance in full clown make-up led to steady work as a stuntman in New York-based productions like The Wanderers (1979), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Ragtime (1981).

Like many American martial artists James first found work as a star performer in Hong Kong, in Enter the Game of Death (1978) and Bruce vs. Black Dragon (1977). Upon his return to the States, he worked in mainstream films like Mask (1985), Weird Science (1985), and The Player (1992), while quickly becoming a favorite of action fans in The Exterminator (1980), the American Ninja film series, and many others. "He was often cast as the hero's sidekick," observes an on-line fan site devoted to James, "despite usually being a better actor and a better fighter than the star."

Steve James played the title role in the pilot episode of the Fox TV series Mantis, which aired shortly after his death.

TOM WRIGHT ("Sam Prescott"/stunt coordinator)

In addition to his work in The Brother, as social worker Sam Prescott, actor and stunt man Tom Wright has appeared in three other films written and directed by John Sayles, Matewan (1987), City of Hope (1991), and Passion Fish (1992).

Hailing from Englewood, New Jersey, Wright has worked as a stunt performer on such major films as Blue Steel (1990) and Do the Right Thing (1989), and as an actor in Reversal of Fortune /i>(1990), i>Forget Paris (1995), Tales from the Hood (1995), and Gridlock'd (1997), in which he co-starred with Sayles.

Tom Wright's most recent film releases are Alex in Wonderb> (2001) and Pursuit of Happiness (2001). His stunt training came in handy during the 1998/99 TV season, when he was a regular on the CBS series Martial Law, playing the straight-arrow partner of Hong Kong high-kicker Sammo Hung.

Wright plays ex football great "Flash" Philips is Sayles' upcoming Sunshine State.

BILL COBBS ("Walter")

Born in Cleveland, Bill Cobbs began acting as an amateur in his teens at the world famous Karamu House Theater. After a tour of duty in the Air Force, Cobbs left Cleveland for New York in 1971, at the age of 36, to see if he could turn his hobby into a career.

After several years of theater work, notably with the Negro Ensemble Company, Cobbs made his film debut in 1974 in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. He has been working steadily ever since, assembling a long list of screen credits that includes Greased Lightning (1977), Trading Places (1983), Silkwood (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Bird (1988), New Jack City (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and That Thing You Do! (1996).

Almost 20 years after his appearance in The Brother From Another Planet, Bill Cobbs returns to the Sayles fold in June 2002, in the director's newest movie Sunshine State.

DARYL EDWARDS ("Fly")

After making his big screen debut in Fort Apache the Bronx (1981), Daryl Edwards has become a mainstay in New York-based film productions, making notable appearances in Splash (1984), Almost You (1984), Power (1986), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), Picture Perfect (1997), and A Price Above Rubies (1998). His long list of TV credits includes recent guest stints on NYPD Blue and Law and Order . Edwards can also be seen playing Franklin, the security guard who becomes an accidental hero, in John Sayles' 1991 film City of Hope.

LEONARD JACKSON ("Smokey")

A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Leonard Jackson's early career was linked with the brief flowering of edgy African-American cinema in the 1970s, with major roles in Bill Gunn's legendary Afro-vampire thriller Ganja & Hess (1972) and in Five on the Black Hand Side (1973). Edwards wrote and played the title role in the crime comedy Super Spook (1975), and appeared in Car Wash (1976) and The Color Purple (1985). He was seen most recently in Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (1996), as the father of the bedeviled painter Jean Michel Basquiat, and in Richard Donner's Conspiracy Theory (1997), co-starring with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. His TV work ranges from Kojak in the 1970s to Law & Order in the 1990s. During the 1990-91 TV season he played Henry 'Harry' Cupper on the popular PBS children's series Shining Time Station .

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

JOHN SAYLES (writer/director/editor/"Man in Black")

John Sayles was born on September 28, 1950, raised Catholic in what he describes as the "middle-class factory town" of Schenectady, New York, the son of two elementary school teachers.

To hear him tell it, the young John Sayles was a "sub-verbal loner," obsessed with sports, who did well in school mostly because he had a sticky short-term memory. Sayles says that even in his teens "filmmaking seemed like the natural thing," although at that point telling stories on paper was a more practical alternative: "About the third grade, eight years old, I started to write stories. It was just something to do for myself."

As a student at Williams College, Sayles began to act in plays and in his senior year tried his hand at directing with a student production of Bruce Jay Friedman's Steambath. He found the director's role surprisingly congenial: "All of sudden there was a reason for me to talk about something."

Sayles graduated from Williams with a psych degree in 1972, and continued writing while supporting himself with blue-collar jobs. His first published story, "I-80 Nebraska, m.490-m.205," which had appeared in The Atlantic, was re-printed in an O. Henry Prize anthology in 1974, and his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, was published by Atlantic-Little Brown in 1975.

Over the summers of 1975 and 1976, Sayles kept his acting and directing muscles in trim, joining future collaborators David Strathairn, Gordon Clapp, and Adam Lefevre at The Eastern Slope Playhouse, in North Conway, New Hampshire. His second novel, Union Dues, was published in 1977, and won Sayles his first literary agent. Through an affiliated talent agency in Los Angeles, he was able to break into movies re-writing the rip-off Piranha (1978) for legendary B-genre specialist Roger Corman.

Sayles wrote two more films for Corman, The Lady in Red (1979), and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), along with Alligator (1980) and Joe Dante's breakthrough film The Howling (1980). With the money saved from those assignments, along with his advance for his first short story collection, The Anarchists Convention (Little Brown, 1979), he was able to bankroll his first movie, The Return of the Secaucus Seven.

Filmed in just five weeks in 1978, in 16mm, with a cast built around his actor classmates from Williams, David Strathairn, Maggie Renzi, and Gordon Clapp, and with a crew that came complete with its own equipment from a Boston firm that normally made commercials, Secaucus Seven was released almost two years later and eventually turned a tidy profit on Sayles's $40,000 investment. It also set the pattern of self-motivated and often self-financed independence that has been the hallmark of his career.

In the wake of Secaucus Seven, Sayles wrote and directed two plays, New Hope for the Dead and Turnbuckle, linked one-acts set in the world of professional wrestling. But it took him more than three years to raise the $300,000 he needed to shoot his second film, the lesbian-themed Lianna(1983), again in 16mm, in and around the town of Hoboken, NJ.

Baby, It's You (1983), Sayles' first and so far only picture for a major Hollywood studio (Paramount), was based upon an autobiographical story supplied by its producer, Amy Robinson, a high school romance across lines of class and ethnicity starring Vincent o and Rossanna Arquette. After a series of test screenings Sayles' preferred cut of the film was eventually released, but with only half-hearted studio support.

After completing The Brother from Another Planet, Sayles hired the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler (Bound For Glory) to shoot Matewan (1987), based upon the true story of a violent coal miner's strike in West Virginia in the 1920s. Chris Cooper (Lone Star) played an itinerant labor organizer leading a racially divided group of miners. Sayles subsequently published a book about the production, Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

For Eight Men Out (1988), Sayles returned to an eleven-year-old "show script" based on Elliot Asinof's book about the Chicago "Black Sox" gambling scandal of 1919. Described by one sportswriter as "the most authentic baseball movie released to date," Eight Men Out was meticulous in its re-creation of the game's legendary "dead ball" era, when a bucolic pastime was being rapidly transformed into an urban corporate enterprise.

Throughout the 1980s Sayles continued to finance his own films as a screenwriter for hire on more high-profile projects such as The Challenge (1982) and The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986). His original screenplay Breaking In (1989) was filmed by director Bill Forsyth, with Burt Reynolds and Casey Siemaszko. Sayles also directed three popular music videos for Bruce Springsteen ("Born in the USA, "Glory Days" and "I'm On Fire"), and created a network television series, Shannon's Deal normal'> (NBC, 1989-90).

Although Sayles insists that the title of his next film, City of Hope (1991) "is not entirely ironic," his complex depiction of the tangled social and political life of a mid-sized American city found corruption and compromise lurking around every corner. The films also marked a new level of complexity in Sayles' storytelling, with the dramatic arcs of many vivid supporting characters woven together around two central figures: the troubled son (Vincent o) of a self-made immigrant real estate developer, and an idealistic politician (Joe Morton).

Also in 1991, Sayles published his third novel, Los Gusanos (HarperCollins), set in Cuba and in the Cuban exile community of Miami, a story that had been in the works for almost a decade.

Sayles first Academy Award nomination arrived in 1992, for his original screenplay for Passion Fish, an oblique examination of race relations in the Deep South, exploring the complex bonds of affection and power linking invalid former soap star (Mary McDonnell) and her live-in nurse (Alfre Woodard). Passion Fish also earned an Oscar nomination as Best Actress for co-star Mary McDonnell.

Sayles' films of the past decade have won him many new fans as his ambitions as a storyteller, and his budgets, have steadily expanded. Haskell Wexler returned to shoot the stormy Irish seacoast in Donegal for The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), a gentle fantasy based upon a novel by Rosalie K. Fry, a childhood favorite of Sayles' life and business partner Maggie Renzi. And in Lone Star (1996), Chris Cooper (Matewan, City of Hope) played a conflicted sheriff attempting to solve a 12-year-old murder case in a small town on the Texas-Mexico border. The film snagged Sayles his second Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Men With Guns (Hombres Armados, 1997) was another bold departure: a political road movie filmed in Mexico, entirely in subtitled ish. And in 1999, Sayles took cast and crew to Southeastern Alaska, near Juneau, to shoot i>Limbos, with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and David Strathairn, his self-styled "Joseph Conrad movie" about an ad hoc family unit stranded on a remote island.

Sayles has appeared regularly as an actor in his own films, and in films for other directors, including Joe Dante's The Howling (1981) and Matinee (1993), Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986), Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992, Eric Schaeffer's My Life in Turnaround (1993), and Vondie Curtis-Hall's Gridlock'D (1997).

Sony Pictures Classics will open Sayles' newest film, Sunshine State, this summer. Angela Bassett and Edie Falco star as resort-town residents in Florida struggling with the push and pull of family ties and ultra-corporatization. And in August Sayles will begin production in Mexico on his fourteenth feature film as a writer-director, Casa de Los Babys, about childless American women who travel to an unnamed Latin American country hoping to adopt children.

"To me," Sayles says, "storytelling is about making some sense out of stuff, making some kind of a connection. The movies I've made and the books and plays I've written have always been about things that I feel I need to know more about and want to figure out. Even if making a movie that doesn't show in a thousand theaters is not exactly touching popular culture, it's at least that chance to get into the conversation."

Quotations adapted from the book Sayles on Sayles, edited by Gavin Smith, Faber and Faber, 1998. John Sayles.

MAGGIE RENZI (Producer/"Noreen")

Maggie Renzi has been John Sayles' creative partner for almost twenty-five years. She has produced, co-produced, or worked as a unit manager on nearly all of his movies, and she has also acted in many of them. Renzi and Sayles were students together at Williams College in the early 1970s, and had even acted in some of the same undergraduate theater productions. But they didn't meet face to face until 1973, when they were introduced by mutual friends.

Renzi played a leading role in The Return of the Secaucus Seven and also worked as Unit Manager and Assistant Editor on the film, which was produced by Jeffry Nelson, the manager of the North Conway theater.

Renzi has continued to work as the producer, and at times as the instigator, of Sayles' film projects, partnered with Jeffrey Nelson on Lianna, with Peggy Rajski on The Brother from Another Planet and Matewan, with Sarah Green on City of Hope , Passion Fish , and The Secret of Roan Inish, and with R. Paul Miller on Lone Star, Men With Guns, and as the sole producer on Limbo and the new Sunshine State.

In addition to mastering the highly specialized craft of producing thematically ambitious films on small budgets, under often adverse conditions, Renzi has made key creative contributions to many of Sayles' films-suggesting that Louisiana was the perfect location for Passion Fish, for example, and discovering the novel by Rosalie K. Fry that Sayles adapted as The Secret of Roan Inish.

Since her linchpin performance as Kate, who hosts the weekend gathering in The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Maggie Renzi has also played featured roles in many of the movies she has produced. She is especially memorable as Sheila the friendly neighbor in Lianna, as the social worker Noreen in The Brother From Another Planet , as the Italian immigrant leader Rosaria in Matewan, and as the American tourist glued to her guidebook in Men With Guns . She also appeared in Jonathan Demme's film Swing Shift (1984) and in Key Exchange (1985).

In 2000 Renzi produced, in partnership with Sarah Green and Martha Griffin, Karyn Kusama's acclaimed debut feature Girlfight. The film went on to win several international festival awards (including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance) and the Independent Spirit award as Best First Feature. The film's star, Michelle Rodriguez, also won critical acclaim and several awards for her performance as a young Latina pursuing a boxing career. Co-Executive Produced by Sayles and Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films, Girlfight featured Jaime Tirelli (Hector in The Brother From Another Planet ) as the heroine's show-me trainer.

ERNEST DICKERSON (Director of Photography)

Until he became a director in the early 1990s, Ernest Dickerson was one of America's most respected cinematographers. He made his feature debut as a Director of Photography on John Sayles The Brother From Another Planet in 1984, but the director with whom he has be most closely associated is Spike Lee, shooting six of the director's ground-breaking early films.

A native of Newark, New Jersey, and a graduate of Howard University, Dickerson met Lee when they were classmates together at NYU Film School. Dickerson shot Lee's award-winning student production Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, a one-hour "mini-feature," in 1983, and went on to contribute indelible images to She's Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo' Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), and Malcolm X (1992).

In this period Dickerson also shot several films for other directors, including Robert Townsend's Eddie Murphy Raws (1987), Peter Wang's The Lasermans (1990), John McNaughton's Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (1991), and Jonathan Demme's Cousin Bobby (1992).

Since launching his second career as a director with the innovative urban action thriller Juice in 1992, Dickerson has exhibited a special flair for fast-paced genre projects with a vein of subversive humor. Ice T and Rutger Hauer starred in Surviving the Games (1994), a thriller about racist blood sports, and Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler made strong impressions in the buddy crime comedy Bulletproofs (1996).

Ernest Dickerson's most recent release as a director was the rap-themed horror picture Bones (2001), an affectionate homage to the low-budget blaxploitation pictures of the 1970s, with rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg appearing as the vengeful ghost of a murdered pimp, who returns to stalk the hood twenty years after his demise.

MASON DARING (Composer)

Born in Philadelphia and a graduate of Amherst College, Mason Daring worked his way through law school as one half of a successful folk duo with singer Jeannie Stahl. Daring was pursuing his day job as an attorney when he volunteered to provide the score for Return of the Secaucus Seven, which had an overall music budget of just $700.00. This proved to be a wise investment, as Daring has since composed the scores for all but one of John Sayles' thirteen movies. (Baby, It's You, a high school romance set in the 1960s, used period source music exclusively.)

Daring has proved especially adept at creating themes that evoke the setting or the community in which a story takes place, writing soulful torch songs for Dee Dee Bridgewater in The Brother From Another Planet, weaving plaintive mountain ballads into the music for Matewan , evoking the dawn of the Jazz Age for Eight Men Out, drawing upon the Cajun sounds of Louisiana for Passion Fish and Irish Celtic music for The Secret of Roan Inish, for which he won the Chicago Film Critics' Award for Best Musical Score in 1994.

Increasingly in demand as a film composer, Daring's long list of feature credits (twenty-seven to date) also includes Key Exchange (1985), Little Vegas (1990), Dogfight (1991), Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken (1991), Prefontaine (1997), The Opposite of Sex (1998), A Walk on the Moon (1999), Music of the Heart (1999), and Say It Isn't So (2001).

Mason Daring's best-known compositions are probably the themes he created for the PBS non-fiction series Frontline and Nova. But he has also written full scores for many other important television productions, including Murder in Mississippi (1990), Hidden in America, (1996), Letter to my Killer (1995), The Old Curiosity Shop (1994), Dead by Midnight (1997), and From the Earth to the Moon (1998). He was nominated for an Emmy last year for his work on the TV drama Bailey's Mistake.

From his studio Marblehead, Mass, the composer produces several albums a year for Daring Records, distributed by Rounder. Formed initially to issue recordings of his own sound tracks, the label has expanded over the years to include solo albums by other musicians, including Butch Thompson and Doc Cheatham. The Daring Records catalog now includes more than forty titles.