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 PRODUCTION

As Sayles wrote in his book Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan, "In 1977 I wrote a novel called Union Dues that begins in West Virginia coal country and moves to Boston. Before I wrote it I did a lot of reading in labor history, especially about the coal fields, and that was when I came across the story of the Matewan Massacre. In a book about the Hatfield and McCoy feud in Mongo County, there was a mention of a distant cousin of the Hatfields named Sid, chief of police of the town of Matewan, who was involved in a bloody shoot out in 1920, during the mine wars of the era. It got me interested, but accounts of the incident were few and highly prejudiced. The rhetoric of both the company-controlled newspapers of the day and their counterparts on the political left was rich in lurid metaphor but short on eyewitness testimony. But a few characters stuck in my head - Sid Hatfield; the mayor, Cabell Testerman, who wouldn't be bought at a time when the coal companies routinely paid the salaries of public officials and expected their strike-breakers to be deputized and aid in busting the union; a man known only as Few Clothes, a giant black miner who joined the strikers and was rumored to have fought in the Spanish-American War; and C.E. Lively, a company spy so skilled he was once elected president of a UMW local. Aspects and details of other union showdowns in the area also began to accumulate - the transportations of blacks from Alabama and European immigrants just off the boat to scab against the strikers; the life of the coal camp and company store; the feudal system of mine guards and "Baldwin thugs" that enforced the near slavery the miners and their families lived in. All the elements and principles involved seemed basic to the idea of what America has become and what it should be. Individualism versus collectivism, the personal and political legacy of racism, the immigrant dream and the reality that greeted it, monopoly capitalism at its most extreme versus American populism at its most violent, plus a lawman with two guns strapped on walking to the center of town to face a bunch of armed enforcers - what more could you ask for in a story? And yet it was a story unknown to most Americans, untold on film but for a silent short financed by the UMW in the aftermath of the massacre. The movie was called Smilin' Sid and the only known print was stolen by coal company agents and never seen again."

Continues Sayles, "Though there were familiar Western elements to the story, it had a unique character because of its setting. The hills of West Virginia, the people and the music have a mood and rhythm to them that needs to be seen and heard to be felt completely. There is a cyclical sense of time there, a feeling of inescapable fate that in the story resists the optimism and progressive collectivism of the 1920's workers movement. Politics are always at the mercy of human nature and custom, and the coal wars of the twenties were so personal that they make ideology accessible in a story, make it immediate and emotional. It was this emotional immediacy that made me think of making a movie about the events in Matewan. If storytelling has a positive function, it's to put us in touch with other people's lives, to help us connect and draw strength or knowledge from people we'll never meet, to help us see beyond our own experience. The people I read about in the history books and the people I met in the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia had important stories to tell and I wanted to find a way to pass them on."

Matewan depicts the events surrounding the 1920 Matewan massacre, a precursor to the 1920-21 West Virginia Mine War. The real town of Matewan proved too remote and too modernized to serve as the actual location for the filming but Thurmond, West Virginia was the perfect location for the movie since even in its late-80's state, it closely resembled the 1919-1920 period needed for the movie. It was also close to the other major locations of the film - the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine and Grandview State Park, site of the miners' tent camp in the film.

As Sayles explains, "The cornerstone of our production design was finding a town to serve as own main set for the town of Matewan. Once a wild river town with big hotels, gambling and prostitution, the Thurmond we found in 1986 was a quiet handful of buildings along the New River in one of the state's best white-water rafting areas. The main street was really not a street but a series of railroad tracks, with a beautiful old train station and wheelhouse still standing and a huge cement coal dock straddling the track at the other end of town. The population was down to around sixty or seventy people. Hills rose up steeply just behind the single row of buildings on the main street and from the banks of the other side of the river, just as in the real Matewan. The buildings were almost all brick, most built before the First World War. It had the blend of natural beauty and industrial function we were looking for, far from the drone of airplanes and highway traffic."

"There was still an enormous amount for our production designer, Nora Chavooshian, to do, but there was an important number of things we wouldn't need to do - bury power lines, cover or dig up sidewalks, remove hundreds of TV antennae, reroute highway traffic, etc. Nora kept the idea of "functional" and "worn" throughout the production design. Nora and the director of photography, Haskell Wexler, worked together on controlling the texture and color of what went in front of the camera, establishing a period look with design rather than with filters or by treating the film stock."

Thurmond's history is every bit as colorful as, and in many ways parallels, that of Matewan. The town was built by Thomas G. McKell when his wife left him 12,500 acres of coal fields. After a ten mile branch was built to connect the town to the railway line in the 1890's, a 100-room hotel was built in 1901 to house the constant traffic of coal operators, businessmen, gamblers, adventurers, whores and others flocking to the town for a piece of the action. Thurmond hosted a 14-year continuous poker game and featured a bar that never closed. Dead men were no novelty, in the river or elsewhere in town. One historian wrote of Thurmond: "the only difference between hell and Thurmond was that a river ran through Thurmond."

Matewan was shot in seven weeks in the summer and fall of 1986. It was carefully selected to be Cinecom's first wholly financed production. The film was shot entirely on location in West Virginia and cost just under four million dollars. Considering than this was a period film shot on location, that was no small feat. The cast and crew were housed in the Econolodge in Mount Hope, West Virginia, a motel whose motto was "spend a night, not a fortune."

Avy Kaufman, the location casting director for the film, arrived in West Virginia six weeks before shooting began. She met hundreds of area residents in her search for the 31 speaking roles and hundreds of extras she was to cast from local talent. "The way John writes made it easy for these people, even those with little acting experience. He seemed to know them - their speech, their personalities." A great deal of the atmosphere of Matewan comes from the authenticity of the characters and the strong sense of place the period reconstruction evokes. The West Virginians involved with the filming - actors and crew members alike - were filled with stories about the time Sayles was trying to bring to life. Kaufman saw that the personalities of those she was auditioning mirrored the inner strength Sayles had written into the characters in his script. "These people would tell such sad stories," Kaufman remembers, "but they would always pull something positive out of it - they just had a special way of doing things, honest and straightforward." That honesty is an integral part of these people and their story. It came through clearly, even in the small roles many of the locals brought to life with only a line or two.