John Sayles

John Sayleswinner of the John Steinbeck Award and othershas been called the "conscience of the independent film world" and the screenwriter's screenwriter. Silver City and Other Screenplays is a collection of Sayles's greatest work, something that will delight his legion of fans and also aspiring screenwriters and film students who will regard the book as a master class in the art of screenwriting. Silver City and Other Screenplays includes Sayles's most celebrated workincluding Matewan, Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lone Star, and Passion Fish (for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay), and his latest film Silver City, a spirited lampoon and a timely, toxic warning about the present state of American democracy.

What choices- creative, practical, and technical- make a movie what it is? Here a gifted writer and filmmaker takes us behind the camera and provides a full description of the movie-making process. When John Sayles turned from writing fiction to making movies, he did so with little help from Hollywood: Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles's first movie as director and writer, was produced with 60,000 of his own money. Many films later, he still works outside the studio system and guides every phase of his productions. Now Sayles has written an illuminating book about the complex choices that lie at the heart of every movie. Using the making of his film Matewan as an example, he offers chapters on screenwriting, directing, editing, sound, and more. Photographs, sketches, and the complete shooting script illustrate this engaging account of how Sayles's curiosity about a coal miners'strike in the town of Matewan, West Virginia, became a screenplay- and then a movie.