John Sayles launched the American independent film movement with his 1980 film “Return of the Secaucus 7.”
John Sayles made a film every year after that through the 1980s. “Baby It’s You,” “The Brother from Another Planet,” and “Matewan,” the fictional telling of the real-life bloody confrontation in Matewan, West Virginia, between coal miners and cruel company owners who hired Black and Italian workers as scabs.
There are so many John Sayles films” “Eight Men Out,” “Passion Fish,” which received an Academy Award nomination for Sayles’ screenplay, as did the 1996 gem, “Lone Star.”
Set in a South Texas border town, it’s a Western murder mystery, but it’s really about tensions between a majority Mexican community and the whites who control the town.
Sayles also writes novels. His latest, “Crucible,” is an epic telling of the historical tale of Henry Ford’s control over Detroit.
His fans packed the West Newton Cinema outside Boston where Sayles spoke with Robin Young.
6 questions with John Sayles
Part of the book focuses on Ford lieutenant Harry Bennett, who, you write, had lion cubs. Is that true?
“Yeah, he had this mansion that Henry Ford gave him fitted with these towers and had guys with machine guns and it had secret pathways. He was very hated by a lot of the workers and was sure there were somebody gunning for him. And there probably was. Whenever he was having a meeting, he’d have one of them come in and walk around and, you know, kind of rub up against the guy’s legs and purr very loudly.”
Reading the book, I kept feeling, ‘You can’t make this up.’
“No. You would not believe Harry Bennett or that Henry Ford just saw this little guy having a fistfight with a couple sailors on the street one day, and he gave him a little position, and he moved him up and moved him up until he was the most powerful man after Henry Ford at the company. And he became pretty much Henry Ford’s enforcer.
“For instance, if you went to the bathroom from the assembly line, there was somebody with a stopwatch timing how long you were gone and when you came back. There were no doors on the stalls. So, when you sat on the toilet, there was a guy with his arm folded and a broken nose staring at you the whole time from the service department to make sure that you didn’t talk to anybody while you were in there and maybe, you know, cook up a union or something.
“And then in the later years, he was really running the place. He could probably change a tire, but that was the limit of his knowledge of automobiles.”
The book is not really about, you know, Henry Ford.
“It’s kind of more about the effect of somebody like that on just working people and people in the city.”
Talk about Ford’s sociological department, which investigated the private lives of his workers.
“Yeah. And, you know, he was really brilliant at certain things when you started having some competition in the auto industry. He just said, ‘I want my workers to be able to afford the car they’re making. I’m going to double their salary.’ He, you know, to his credit, said ‘I’m going to pay African American workers the same as white workers.’ And he did.
“So, he was enormously popular, enormously successful. So, he decided, ‘I know how people should live. I’m going to make them live the way that they should.’ For instance, he said, ‘OK, you’re going to go from making $2.50, you know, a day to $5 a day,’ which was unbelievable in those days.
“‘But if you’re an immigrant, you don’t speak English, you have to go to my school.’ There was a big ceremony that you got once your English was good enough, but they also sent these people to your house and you had to hide your vodka, you know, and you had to put forks and knives on the table, even if all you had to eat were soup. Because that’s what civilized people did. And you had to have a marriage certificate on the wall. You couldn’t have relatives living with you. And it was very, very intrusive, but it was part of keeping your job.”
You mentioned the immigrant strand, which is fascinating to me.
“There was a point when it was illegal in New York City for more than three Irishmen to be on the same place. One thing that’s always happened is that employers have used one ethnic group against another, except that there was this idea of, well, there’s this kind of nasty union thing, and there are nobody else in Detroit or anywhere else in the country was paying industrial workers who are Black the same as they were with people were white. And then most of the unions up to that point had been very exclusive. They didn’t want Chinese people and they didn’t want Black people and whatever. So, he felt like they were kind of loyal and they’re going to be strike insurance. In the thirties, there was a wildcat strike at the River Rouge plant. They shut all the doors of the foundry where most of the Black workers worked and said, ‘Well, here’s the deal. We’re going to give you weapons and we want you to go out and fight for your jobs.’ And for a couple of hours, they did until they realized [they’re] outnumbered 20 to 1.”
You were born in Schenectady, New York. Did that shape you?
“Oh, absolutely. Schenectady, where I’m from, is where the General Electric plant was. And at one point, Schenectady was called the city that lights and hauls the world because American Locomotive was there as well. That left first as railroads got de-emphasized in this country.
“And then gradually, you know, after fighting with IUE, the electrical workers union, for years and years and years, and threatening to pull out, they secretly moved out kind of building by building mostly to Southeast Asia and anywhere that didn’t have a union, people’s parents all of a sudden had to say, ‘Well, my job just disappeared. Where do I go to find another one?’”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Robin Young produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Michael Scotto adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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