Great filmmaker, good novel

Originally printed June 1, 2011.

In films from "Brother from Another Planet" (1984) to "Eight Men Out" (1988) to "Lone Star" (1996), John Sayles has proven himself to be a powerful filmmaker -- a great indie writer-director auteur who manages to reveal compelling stories about all-too-human characters.

But as sweeping as Sayles' films can be, there is a big difference between writing a script for a two-hour film and writing a novel that spans nearly 1,000 pages. Let alone a novel such as "A Moment in the Sun" (McSweeney's Books, 2011) that involves dozens of characters, takes place in half-a-dozen countries and that tracks the "turn-of-the-20th-century" emergence of an American empire in the five years between U.S. interventions in Cuba and in the Philippines.

John Irving, an award-winning novelist who occasionally takes a break from novel writing to write award-winning screenplays, often says he views the collaborative nature of screenwriting as a welcome vacation from the solitude of novel writing.

"There is nothing collaborative about writing a novel; you're in it alone," Irving told fellow Iowa Writers' Workshop graduates Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer in their new book, "We Wanted to be Writers."

Filmmaker Sayles similarly must enjoy his vacations in the solitude of novel writing because "Moment in the Sun" required years of research and writing. Through both fast paced and lyrical character sketches, Sayles provides readers with a literary experience somewhere between John Dos Passos's "U.S.A." trilogy and David Milch's HBO series "Deadwood."

The storyline is filled with recognizable historic characters -- from writers Mark Twain and Damon Runyon, to film director Edwin Porter, to Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist assassin of President William McKinley. But Sayles also includes the fictional everyday, non-heroic characters through whom he can show -- rather than tell -- his historic story: the sad saps who fail to have any luck in the Yukon gold rush, black soldiers who see the U.S. Army at work both at home and abroad, reluctant Filipino revolutionaries and a hosts of other characters who run the gamut of race, national origin and socio-economic status.

The larger canvas of "A Moment in the Sun" provides Sayles with an opportunity to flesh out some of the political and historical arguments that have been at the center of many of his films over the past decade -- especially "Silver City" (2004). Where those films sometimes come across as more didactic sermons than compelling cinematic tales, "A Moment in the Sun" gives Sayles the space he needs to show how this period of U.S. history helps set the stage for the world we know today.

Now we'll just have to wait to see how well Sayles revisits the same period in his newest film project, "Amigo," which is scheduled to be released this August.

Sayles will be reading from "A Moment in the Sun" at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Books.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.