An Interview With John Sayles

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume IV (1989).

With his 1988 film adaptation of Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out, novelist-filmmaker John Sayles has crafted the most authentic baseball film released to date. His respect for Asinof’s work, and for the look, language, and rhythm of dead ball era baseball is evidence in every frame of the film. Unlike any other baseball movie, “Eight Men Out” is nearly devoid of saccharine sentimentality, distracting extra-curricular nonsense or embarrassing errors in its depiction of baseball and its surroundings.

I met with John Sayles on the morning following the Boston premiere of “Eight Men Out” to discuss the movie, the Black Sox scandal, and baseball in general. An avowed Pirate fan, Sayles answered my questions for nearly an hour over breakfast in the genteel confines of the cafe of the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

 

Q. Describe your fascination with the book “Eight Men Out.” Did the screenplay emerge from your being a baseball fan or from being a fan of the story ?

A. I think the initial interest was hearing the story and wondering how eight men could throw the World Series. I had read a couple of other books that alluded to the scandal but didn’t have many details. In 1976 I discovered E1iot’s book, read it, and felt that it described the scandal in great detail. I found that my feelings toward the story changed after reading this book; it wasn’t simply that these were bad guys and this was how they did it; it was why they did it. And they’re not all necessarily bad. It was a very complex human situation. I also felt, and this happens when you read certain books, that this would be a great movie story. There were lots of great characters and a page-turning plot. At this point in my career I was turning from writing fiction to writing screenplays, and had just finished “Union Dues” and parts of “Pride of the Bimbos.” Interestingly the literary agency I got to sell “Union Dues” had a deal with an agency on the west coast who called them to represent my books as screen properties. I didn’t really write them for the screen but told them I did want to become a screenwriter. In turn they asked me to send them something I had written at which point I got off the phone and decided maybe I would adapt “Eight Men Out.” I think I was under the mistaken impression that maybe because I was a novelist my entry into films would be adapting books. I was wrong. They don’t really care if you’re a novelist out there in Hollywood. They think novelists are people who write books that they buy, and then overcharge them to write bad screenplays, and then grouse about the movie once its released. In Hollywood you almost have to whisper that you’ve written novels.

So I adapted “Eight Men Out” and sent it out. It so happens that the head of the agency had been Asinof’s agent back in 1963 and was familiar with the material. He said I had done a fine job but to forget about doing the picture; the rights were in litigation.

---

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

---

Q. How involved was Eliot with you in writing the screenplay?

A. I didn’t meet Eliot or talk to him until he came to the set while we were shooting and he played a part. I felt that with the screenplay the job was to take that book and somehow make a two-hour movie of it. I was definitely interested in telling the story of “Eight Men Out.” So I didn’t think Eliot would be too bent out of shape by it. I’m sure he had his trepidations because he had been through court and a lot of other troubles. And people had always wanted to romanticize the story, make it more of a vehicle for one or two stars where Eliot always wanted the story he had told to come out. I think he ended up being pretty happy with the screenplay because it tried to tell the story as he had depicted it. I’m sure, like everyone, he asked, “How is this going to work as a movie?” because the screenplay is very dense and complex. This is a movie that, until you see it with the music, crowd sound, and rhythm you really don’t know if it’s going to work or not. There’s a lot of moviemaking to it.

Q. What part did you think the 1920 White Sox team would play in your film adaptation of the story? After all, the team was better than the 1919 champs, yet played the season under a shroud of controversy.

A. If we had done a mini-series I could’ve covered that part of the story. It would’ve taken at least six hours. With only two hours to work with dramatically, I couldn’t take a side trip into the 1920 season. For one thing I would’ve had to introduce a couple of new characters. For one, Red Faber, a pitcher who had hurt his arm in 1919 and would’ve probably torpedoed the fix because the gamblers would have realized that bagging two of four starting pitchers wouldn’t fix a nine-game series (though it could alter an individual game or two), but not the whole series. It seems that during 1920 the gamblers were still into Cicotte and Williams, or they were into the gamblers, and games were thrown. It’s very unclear as to whether they were getting a lot of money or just a few bucks and a lot of threats. Eliot told me that a lot of the guys he talked to were still afraid of the gamblers, even though the gamblers were long in the grave. The idea was simply that you just didn’t mess with these people.

Q. What did you talk about with Edd Roush when he came to the set?

A. Well, some of the players were there, we were shooting the train interior scenes in Kentucky across the river from Cincinnati, and they mostly asked him questions about playing baseball in those days. “What was the ball like? Who was the toughest pitcher?” He was a crusty old guy, full of “Oh, these guys today can’t play.” He told of catching balls that were flat on one side because the dead ball really was dead and he never tried to hit home runs because his only hope was a couple of inside the park jobs per season … balls bouncing through the fence or whatnot. He played extremely shallow center field and had to stay on his toes to avoid giving up any such homers himself. If you had a good day in his era, you knew you’d end up on your ass the next. It was a much tougher game. Regarding the Black Sox he contended that he heard guys arguing in the hotel room next door and went to his manager who asked if he had been approached by gamblers. Roush hadn’t but Hod Eller apparently had been approached in an elevator and told the gambler to get the hell away from him or he’d punch him out. Roush’s contention was that the Sox only threw the first game. When I asked him why Lefty Williams got tossed out of baseball if they only threw the first game, he said, “Aw, I don’t know, maybe he was in on the meetings.” So he was still holding onto the notion that the Reds would’ve won anyway and the Sox only threw one game on purpose. He was on the way to the airport and didn’t have much time to talk with us, but a bunch of the guys who were playing ballplayers got a chance to meet and talk with him which was nice.

Q. What feelings do you have about the contention, held by some, that Joe Jackson belongs in the Hall of Fame?

A. Well, that is really up to the Hall of Fame to define themselves about what they’re about. If they’re about character, he was actually considered a very good guy when he went back home to Brandon Mills [in South Carolina], but he made a big mistake that had to do with baseball. If the Hall is just about stats then he’s in, but if the Hall is about character as related to baseball then you have to realize that he did sell out games and confessed to the act and therefore shouldn’t be selected. If he were enshrined there should be so many asterisks around his name that his plaque wouldn’t be included in the same room with the others.

Q. Have you ever contacted any of the relatives of the players?

A. Not really, although the granddaughter of Swede Risberg was an extra when we filmed a racing scene down in Kentucky. But she really didn’t know about it. She indicated that her father never talked about it. I also ran into a guy who had Swede Risberg’s son, the woman’s father, as a gym coach and he once asked him if Swede was his father. The coach, who was also a pretty hard guy, just clammed up. We did get a nice letter from a woman whose husband had just suffered a stroke and was one of the batboys for the Sox. The letter said that he didn’t know about the fix but that the players were screaming at each other on the field which wasn’t usual for that club. Even though many of the players disliked each other their normal behavior was to keep their ill feelings to themselves and ignore one another. She also mentioned that he didn’t attend a major league game for over thirty years following the scandal because he felt he was sold out by his buddies.

Q. Isn’t it true that Ring Lardner left the baseball beat in 1919 for much the same reasons?

A. Well, he had already kind of left before 1919 because in many ways he had outgrown baseball. He wasn’t a sports reporter anymore; he was writing short stories and musicals. He just returned to cover the Series and maybe an occasional boxing match. I think what soured him on baseball even more than the scandal was the rabbit ball. He didn’t think it was baseball.

Q. What, if anything, would you have done differently if you’d had more money or time to spend on the film?

A. Actually the only thing that I would change would be to make the coverage of baseball more three dimensional. Certainly if we had unlimited money and I felt like it was worth spending we could have paid extras enough that they wouldn’t have stayed away and therefore we could have shot beautiful vistas of full grandstands from the outfield in. We only had enough money to pay extras twenty dollars per day and we never got more than one thousand people in a day. Usually we had around two hundred people. That limits your shots towards the stands. Then we couldn’t take down all the light standards in Bush Stadium in Indianapolis; we could only take down the center ones. So we had to keep moving this stupid smokestack around to look like a factory in the background. If you really paid attention and stopped the movie on a video freeze frame, you could see that the stack was always moving around, in both ballparks. When we shot from the dugout there’s always a coach blocking another light standard we couldn’t take down. To top it off, the Pan Am Games used the park and a field across the street so that even more light standards were erected that we couldn’t touch. If we’d had the money we could’ve removed all the lights and had far more leeway in shooting towards the outfield. We couldn’t move the camera that much, so we had to be very, very careful. Otherwise we would reveal empty seats and modern lights. It all turned out fine because we had time to consider each shot, but would have preferred to use wider lenses instead of long lenses. I wanted to avoid the telephoto look you get in modern baseball. There are no shots from center field, with the pitcher stacked up against the catcher. That was just too modern for me.

Q. How closely did you and your staff work with historians and the people at the Hall of Fame ?

A. We had a researcher and I had been doing a bunch of research on the era since doing “Matewan.” We were already experts on subjects such as train interiors and things like that. Our researcher was in daily contact with the archivists at the Hall of Fame. They were able to send us information about the look of the uniforms if they didn’t already have a 1919 version. They sent us a rule book, programs, newspapers, and the names and numbers of collectors from across the country who had access to loads of great items. We ended up borrowing a score of gloves, bats, shoes, chest protectors and the like in order to shoot the film. We even hired a shoemaker especially to make spikes for the players. Much of the equipment used in the film was original stuff from 50, 50, 70 years ago. Needless to say, it was tough to keep everyone equipped all the time. We used a lot of safety pins and tape! Because of our research we also changed the script regarding topics such as mass communication. For example, the scene where the boys are using a crystal set depicts the kids picking a crude Morse code account of the games.

Q. In the final scene of “Eight Men Out” you show Joe Jackson playing in Hoboken; did he actually play there ?

A. I imagine he did play in Hoboken in a Jersey semipro league. In Eliot’s book he played for Bogota, New Jersey, which isn’t far from Hoboken. If we had put Bogota on his jersey, seeing the short scene in which this occurs, I was afraid that people would’ve thought that he was playing in South America. I didn’t want people to think … “Oh the poor guy … why isn’t he speaking Spanish?” or “Where are the palm trees?” Hoboken, better than anyplace else, puts his feet squarely in New Jersey.

Q. What are some of your other favorite baseball stories ? If you were ever to do another baseball film which story would you select?

A. I think somebody should take another crack at the Jim Thorpe story. He certainly found the beginning and end of his athletic career in baseball.

I think Christy Mathewson would also be another great subject. There was a book which got sort of esoteric about Mathewson called “The Celebrant” which includes some interesting material. The dynamics of his relationship with John McGraw are especially interesting. Of course McGraw knew about the 1919 fix. This reminds me of an anecdote about [Charles] Comiskey who was asked by a journalist after the second game of the Series if he had seen anything, to which the Old Roman replied “What do you mean by anything?” I don’t doubt that he had bets down on the Series too!