SOURCE: Isaacs, Neil D. “John Sayles and the Fictional Origin of Matewan.” Literature/Film Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1988): 269-71.

In the following essay, Isaacs disputes Sayles's account of the connections between his novel Union Dues and the film Matewan.

John Sayles's Thinking in Pictures is the kind of book Stirling Silliphant had in mind twenty years ago when he agreed to chronicle, for The University of Tennessee Press, the making of the movie A Walk in the Spring Rain from his own script. A crucial difference is that Sayles was writer/director on Matewan and Silliphant writer/producer on Walk. While Silliphant could describe his reconception of the Rachel Maddux novella for the screen (for Ingrid Bergman's return to Hollywood from her long exile) and trace its production, Sayles can analyze the whole process, the gestalt, the total (re-)conceiving of a story in cinematic terms. But both would be...