{"id":27577,"date":"2026-03-23T12:05:32","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T16:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/?post_type=story&p=27577"},"modified":"2026-03-24T08:30:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T12:30:57","slug":"director-writer-john-sayles-to-speak-at-clark-march-26","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2026\/03\/23\/director-writer-john-sayles-to-speak-at-clark-march-26\/","title":{"rendered":"Director-writer John Sayles to speak about career and creativity March 26"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Event celebrates 30th anniversary of \u201cLone Star\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

John Sayles chuckles when he\u2019s thanked for taking some time on a Saturday afternoon for a Zoom interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re self-employed, Saturday and Sunday don\u2019t mean a whole lot,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The director-screenwriter-novelist-and-sometimes actor knows plenty about the work of Work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of a nearly 50-year career in the movies, Sayles has forged a reputation as a true cinematic maverick, creating a series of personal and uncompromising films like \u201cCity of Hope,\u201d \u201cPassion Fish,\u201d and \u201cMatewan,\u201d which bore into subjects that have both shaped and haunted this country for generations: race, immigration, political corruption, labor strife, and just who gets to define what it means to \u201cbe\u201d an American.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"\u201cJohn
John Sayles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Sayles will be on campus on Thursday, March 26, for a screening of his sprawling 1996 neo-Western \u201cLone Star<\/a>\u201d followed by a Q&A. The event, co-sponsored by Screen Studies<\/a> and Media, Culture, and the Arts<\/a> with support from community partners Cinema Worcester<\/a> <\/a>and the Shawna Foundation<\/a>, begins at 7 p.m. in Razzo Hall and is open to all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLone Star\u201d begins with the discovery of human remains in the desert outside a small Texas border town. The bones are identified as belonging to Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), the local sheriff who decades earlier had terrorized the town\u2019s Mexican-American and Black communities before he mysteriously went missing, apparently murdered. Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) has a deeply personal reason for wanting to solve the crime: a prime suspect may be his late father, Buddy (played by a young Matthew McConaughey, shown above with Sayles), a lawman who feuded with Wade. That buried skeleton in the desert represents more secrets that Sam may want to uncover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sayles weaves together several plotlines that feel achingly relevant, including the controversial efforts of a Mexican-American teacher (Elizabeth Pe\u00f1a) to incorporate Mexican perspective into the traditional tale of the siege of the Alamo. Today\u2019s disputes over what\u2019s included in textbooks and lesson plans \u201care as much of a battlefield as they ever were, maybe even more so,\u201d he notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kernel for \u201cLone Star\u201d was planted in Sayles\u2019 childhood watching actor Fess Parker portray frontier legends Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett on television, and seeing John Wayne star as Crockett in the 1960 film \u201cThe Alamo.\u201d The legends they built were powerful and enduring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in the late \u201970s, Sayles was writing the script for the low-budget horror flick \u201cPiranha,\u201d which was filming in rural Texas, and he was struck by the infusion of Mexican culture and influence in the everyday life and operation of the local communities. On a day off, he took a bus to visit the Alamo in San Antonio and encountered a peaceful demonstration outside the fort led by Tejanos (Texans of Mexican descent) carrying signs that read \u201cTell the whole truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside the fort, he immediately encountered an oil painting depicting a scene from the John Wayne movie. \u201cI thought, \u2018This is interesting.\u2019 The first thing you saw was this preserving of the Hollywood version of the Alamo,\u201d he says. \u201cWe weren\u2019t talking about everything that happened here \u2014 and I got interested in the tension around that. I thought this was really fertile ground to tell a story.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"John
John Sayles and actress Elizabeth Pe\u00f1a during the filming of “Lone Star”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Storytelling is what has kept Sayles churning in his film and publishing careers. His first movie as writer-director, \u201cThe Return of the Secaucus 7\u201d (1979), chronicled seven former college friends reuniting at a summer house to reminisce about their glory days and provided the blueprint for the similarly themed \u201cThe Big Chill\u201d four years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sayles\u2019 films have chronicled the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal (\u201cEight Men Out\u201d), unraveled the messy political workings of an American city (\u201cCity of Hope\u201d), and exposed the encroachment of real estate development into coastal Florida (\u201cSunshine State\u201d). He\u2019s also written for numerous television series, most recently \u201cThe Gray House,\u201d about four women whose spying on behalf of the Union helped turn the tide of the Civil War. The series is now streaming on Prime Video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until fairly recently, television had been a haven for many writers, with streaming services offering more funnels for steady work. A glut of content has led to a course correction and dwindling opportunities, Sayles notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey were making good stuff, but too much of it,\u201d he says. \u201cMost of the young writers I know who were gainfully employed cranking out these episodes are now unemployed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hardest property to get made and distributed is a standalone feature film, Sayles acknowledges. With the old theatrical model now largely broken (theatrical films, he notes, are generally regarded as \u201closs leaders\u201d to build some buzz for their streaming debuts), few investors are willing to take a chance on an unproven property. If your film isn\u2019t the sequel to a popular film or a Marvel movie, there\u2019s little interest in backing you. \u201cYeah, we haven\u2019t gotten other people\u2019s money to make a movie in about 20 years,\u201d he says in response to a question about the current \u201clandscape\u201d of the film industry. \u201cI think you have to have land to have a landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sayles has been devoting himself to writing novels. His latest, \u201cCrucible,\u201d is an epic tale about Henry Ford\u2019s attempt to dominate the automotive industry and the city of Detroit from the 1920s through the Second World War. He\u2019s been promoting \u201cCrucible\u201d on a book tour, and already has completed his next novel, \u201cGods of Gotham,\u201d about political corruption and social and cultural upheaval in New York City in the early 1950s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His trip to Clark is the result of some serendipity. Sayles lives in Connecticut, and his neighbor is Simon Pinchbeck \u201925, who majored in screen studies. Pinchbeck mentioned Sayles to Professor Soren Sorensen, who invited him to speak at Clark to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of \u201cLone Star.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When told that the famed film-review duo of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert\u00a0gave \u201cLone Star\u201d an unqualified rave<\/a>\u00a0on their syndicated program 30 years ago, Sayles laughs and says the pair were especially supportive of independent filmmaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause they had a national audience, a review like that really helped quite a bit,\u201d he says. \u201cThe movie may not have been playing in a theater near you, but they let you know it was something worth seeking out. They encouraged people to widen their tastes a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ever-humble Sayles is quick to point out that Siskel and Ebert, years earlier, had introduced a \u201cDog of the Week\u201d segment showcasing the week\u2019s worst movie. The very first film earning \u201cDog of the Week\u201d status? \u201cPiranha.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Sayles will visit Clark March 26 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his sprawling 1996 neo-Western \u201cLone Star.\u201d A Q&A will follow the film screening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":27578,"template":"","meta":{"story_color":"var(--clarku-color-deeper-red)","story_headerImg":27578,"section_label":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[225,223],"displayed_author":[235],"featured":[493],"topic":[537,204,205,184],"class_list":["post-27577","story","type-story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-humanities","category-clark-community","displayed_author-jim-keogh","featured-primary","topic-events","topic-film-and-screen","topic-major-in-screen-studies","topic-visual-and-performing-arts"],"yoast_head":"\nDirector-writer John Sayles to speak about career and creativity March 26 | ClarkU News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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