Bard of the Low-Budget : Prolific filmmaker and writer John Sayles is back with ‘City of Hope,’ his latest attempt to present substance on a shoestring

Walk into the place where John Sayles and Maggie Renzi live, in a brick row-house apartment across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and the first thing you see on a hot day is Renzi bent over an ironing board getting her clothes ready for a trip to Scotland.

When you produce movies in America that cost as little as theirs do, it means, among other things, that you still do your own laundry. “The sort of clothes John wears, it doesn’t really matter anyway,” she says, “but I thought at least I could press some of mine.”

Sayles, the writer and director, and Renzi, his live-in producer, will never be mistaken for the sort of couple who attract the paparazzi in Cannes, and for this a nation of independent-film fans are grateful, even reverent.

If you didn’t know his long, oak-jawed face and Spock-like ears from his movies, you might think Sayles was the guy who just showed up to paint the kitchen. When he comes back from the bank, where he has been collecting funds for the trip, he walks in wearing a threadbare short-sleeve shirt open to the navel and stuffed into some functional shorts. At the end of his big, white legs are some battered athletic shoes. He’s dressed for lunch in Hoboken, where there haven’t been many paparazzi since Frank Sinatra left town 50 years ago.

Sayles, 41, is one of the few triple threats working in MTV America--that is, he has written critically acclaimed movies, novels and plays, not to mention that he also directs and acts in his movies. Somehow, he squeezed in some music videos for Bruce Springsteen back in 1986 and also found time to create the NBC television series “Shannon’s Deal,” which aired last season.

You could say that he is an affront to ordinary writers everywhere. He cranked out his latest screenplay in just two weeks.

But what really sets Sayles apart is the kind of stories he feels compelled to tell and the way he has gone about it, distancing himself from Hollywood and not even using an agent to get his novel about Cuban exiles, “Los Gusanos,” published earlier this year. He has had few role models along the way, though he does mention the influence of the late independent-film pioneer John Cassavetes, “not so much in the style of his movies,” he says, “but certainly in his existence, in this feeling that there’s no rule that says you can’t make a good movie without studio money and somehow get it on a screen somewhere.”

Sayles’ films, including “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” “The Brother From Another Planet,” “Matewan” and “Eight Men Out,” have shown a rare preoccupation with the history and ideas that have shaped America, which may explain why he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant back in 1983. So few people in the movie business ever allow themselves near an idea more complicated than lust or revenge that it wasn’t hard to spot Sayles as a guy who had wandered way off course and deserved to stay there.

He has a new film out Friday called “City of Hope” (not to be confused with director Roland Joffe’s upcoming “City of Joy”), and it is his most ambitious yet, a big story that X-rays the inner life of a blue-collar American city. It’s got scores of characters, crosscutting plot lines and an epic scope. Where David Lynch was credited in “Blue Velvet” with exposing the grotesqueries below the surface of an American small town, in “City of Hope” Sayles is on to something much deeper: He shows us how varied and yet interconnected are the many paths of expediency that have led to the blight of urban America.

The movie is about greed, tribalism (or the breakdown of community), moral decay and the difficulty of doing the right thing. Avoiding melodrama, it verges on tragedy.

Which may not spell M-U-S-T S-E-E to many American filmgoers, if the past is any indication. None of Sayles’ films have been box-office hits by studio standards, but some, like “Secaucus Seven” and “Brother From Another Planet,” have made modest profits.

“You know, it’s tough,” Sayles says. “When you make something for so little, and it actually gets a theatrical release and it makes a profit, it actually seems like a hit to you.” “City of Hope” cost $3.1 million, at a time when Hollywood films typically cost $10 million to $20 million.

In general, Sayles’ films have not been blessed with luck where distribution is concerned.

His last movie, “Eight Men Out,” about the same 1919 “Black Sox” baseball scandal that fueled “Field of Dreams,” was released by Orion in 1988 at a time when the studio had a dearth of screens available because other films were holding up so well.

The film before that, “Matewan,” its title taken from the West Virginia coal town where the United Mine Workers clashed with the private coal company armies in 1920, was distributed by Cinecom in the fall of 1987, a season in which it had to compete with a flurry of other independent films, among them “Maurice” and “Hope and Glory,” Sayles recalls ruefully.

“We didn’t have time to get out word of mouth,” he says. “We were yanked from some theaters in the third week when we were still doing good business. It did great in West Virginia, but West Virginia is not a very big state.”

In that case, he holds himself responsible for not coming up with a better title. “I’m very bad at titles. ‘Matewan’ is not a great-selling title, but I never thought of anything better,” he says as we walk the streets of Hoboken on the way to a restaurant. “So that’s what we stayed with. Our joke about ‘City of Hope’ is that the working title was ‘Sex, Lies and Urban Renewal.’

“One of the problems that we have is that we’re asking more from moviegoers than most movies ask. We’re asking for them to pay attention for the whole movie. You know, I liked ‘Terminator 2’ fine, for what it was, but you can leave the theater and come back five minutes later, and you’re not lost. You know that the guy is still running after him. It’s like a ‘Roadrunner’ cartoon. But in our movies, if you miss five minutes, you’re lost.”

In “City of Hope” (being distributed by the Samuel Goldwyn Co.), the major characters include a crooked Italian-American contractor (Tony Lo Bianco), his disaffected son (Vincent Spano), a new black city councilman (Joe Morton) torn between personal ethics and political survival, a college professor (Bill Raymond) whose mugging ignites simmering racial antagonisms, and a cop’s ex-wife (Barbara Williams) who is trying to raise a disabled child as a single mother.

Sayles, as is his custom, plays a small role, that of a lowlife “fixer” who runs a garage as a front for illegal activities. Faces familiar from previous Sayles films--Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, Kevin Tighe, Josh Mostel and producer-actress Renzi--also show up on screen. Strathairn plays a homeless man possessed by the babble of television commercials, and Tighe plays another heavy, a political climber on the police force.

“I always feel like the actual shooting of a movie is like being on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ ” Sayles says, “and keeping all those plates in the air, you know. Anytime you can glue a plate on and cheat and have one less variable. . . .”

This is his stated reason for putting himself in front of the camera. He also favors actors like Morton (the brother from another planet) and Cooper (the pacifist hero of “Matewan”) who have played roles for him before. “It’s great for me to have like a third of the actors be actors I’ve worked with. So I know this guy can take care of himself, he’s good for the part, he doesn’t worry what size his room is, he knows that when I say, ‘That was great, next,’ I really mean, ‘That was great, next.’ ”

Another distinguishing feature of a Sayles production is that a good portion of the technical crew consists of women, which, as actor Tighe points out, is unusual.

“Usually on a film you see a couple ladies in the wardrobe department,” he says. “But this is a working crew that’s a merger of the sexes. And what you get, I find, is a very mature, caring, emotional set, and I think that it helps the pictures.

“I don’t know of anyone who’s more disciplined than he is,” the actor says of Sayles. “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he gets a decent night’s sleep. He likes honest fun. There’s just not much bull about John. He has an unusual degree of integrity, which you can tell just from the pictures themselves. He’s a unique person, a disciplined, hard-working man, along the lines of what our fathers hoped we would be when we grew up.”

Sayles actually likes to work on low budgets and has become accustomed to shooting movies in five weeks.

“I feel there’s an energy you get, and the actors can stay on and they don’t have to sit around for two weeks to do the reverse angle on a scene,” he says. “Which happens when you have too much money and too much logistics.”

Strathairn observes: “With John, you know that he knows what he wants, and that makes the film move along with that assurance, whereas with studio pictures the decisions are being made by producers and other people.”

Sayles made his first movie, “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” in 1978 for $60,000, drawn from the fees he was paid for writing the screenplays for “Piranha” and “The Lady in Red.” He wrote the script, about a reunion of idealistic 1960s college students, in Santa Barbara, where he was living at the time, shot it in New Hampshire, then did the sound editing in Boston on weekends (when he had the use of a free editing machine) while commuting back to New York, where he and Renzi had returned to live.

“It was during the gas crisis,” he remembers, “and I was always getting stuck in Yonkers (just north of New York City) and we’d have to stay overnight until we could score some gas to go on. It was kind of a mess.”

The movie eventually made $2 million, as well as Sayles’ reputation.

He went on to write more movies for other directors, including “Alligator,” “The Howling” and “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” but from his home office in downtown Hoboken he focused on writing and directing his own independently financed films. He and Renzi have raised the money for their films from friends, small investors and videocassette companies. “City of Hope” was financed by RCA-Columbia Home Video, now Columbia-TriStar Home Video.

Sayles and Renzi have been together for 17 years, though they have never married. Actor Spano, who has worked with the pair twice now, says about them: “They seem to have a secret; that’s why their relationship has been so strong for so many years. They seem to know something that I don’t know yet about that kind of stuff.”

The MacArthur grant in 1983 brought Sayles $32,000 a year tax-free for five years, not much in Hollywood terms but enough so that he could hang onto an editing machine and pay for office help.

“It was good when I made ‘Brother From Another Planet,’ ” he says, referring to his 1984 comedy about a black extraterrestrial who lands in Harlem. “That’s when I used most of it. It was a $400,000 movie, and $32,000 a year means that you don’t have to write another movie for somebody to pay the rent. But it didn’t finance the movie.”

Unlike the works of obscurantist Lynch or the campy Coen brothers, Sayles’ films are largely straightforward narratives and are much concerned with the fate of the “working class,” a term that has lost favor in the United States in recent years. Sayles does not shirk from it himself, making it clear that he went to “a working-class high school in a working-class city.” The city was Schenectady, N.Y. His parents, of Irish- and German-Catholic descent, were teachers--his father later a principal--but he points out that both his grandfathers were cops.

Though he attended exclusive Williams College in Massachusetts, where he and Renzi met, Sayles didn’t take on aristocratic airs after graduation. Instead he went to work as a hospital orderly, meatpacker and construction laborer before turning to writing to make a living. Today, his speech is plain, even truck-driverish. When he says, “You know,” as he often does, it tends to come out as a one-word slur, yeohhh. But he doesn’t underline the swagger in his voice. When he says to a waitress, “Could I get another Diet Coke?” as he does three times during his meal, it is with boyish respect, unfailingly polite.

“What you find is that to get power,” he says, discussing the history of political patronage in America, “people have to become tribal. So the Irish did it when they first got to New York; the Jews did it; the Italians did it. The blacks never really got a chance to do it because there were so many Jim Crow laws that pulled the rug out from under them. Yeohhh , they couldn’t get on the cops for years and years.”

Tribal warfare is at the heart of “City of Hope,” as it is at the heart of the strife ripping apart so many American cities at the moment. While it may be widely assumed by audiences outside of New York that the “Hudson City” of “City of Hope” is meant to be a stand-in for New York, Sayles says otherwise. The license plates on the cars, he points out, are from New Jersey. “It could be any big Eastern city,” he says.

The film was actually shot in Cincinnati, as was “Eight Men Out.”

“I’m not saying that patronage politics is totally bad,” Sayles explains. “I’m just saying there comes a point when the patrons no longer have anybody who is of their ethnic group to hand it out to anymore and they’re just holding power and stealing everything that’s not nailed down.”

Although “City of Hope” ends on a somber note, with Vincent Spano lying bleeding in his father’s arms, Sayles maintains that he doesn’t view the film as a tragedy: “There are tragic things in it, but I don’t mean the title ‘City of Hope’ to be totally ironic, although it is somewhat ironic because the guy who says the line is this corrupt mayor. I think what it’s about is that people still do have to try to do what’s possible. But that’s work. It’s not easy, and the natural thing is to become cynical.”

For the end-credits song, he and Renzi chose the Neville Brothers’ ballad “Fearless” (from the album “Brother’s Keeper”), which blows a warm breeze over the bleak cityscape the movie has painted. The song was suggested by the hair and makeup supervisor on the film, Rose Chatterton.

Sayles recalls: “She came up to us and said, ‘I’ve got a song that you’ve got to use somewhere in the movie,’ and she played it for us, and immediately Maggie said, ‘That’s got to be the end of the movie.’ And I listened to it once, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ because of the sound of it. After all that stuff, it’s a very healing song.”

The venality and moral slackness on view in “City of Hope” will not remind many of their first lessons in American history or civics. Does Sayles see his country as more corrupt than others or more corrupt than it used to be?

“It’s not peculiarly American,” he answers, “but something you find wherever you have diverse ethnic groups in a city situation--in Singapore or Hong Kong, where there are a lot of different people, more mouths than there are jobs. As far as this country, from the historical reading I’ve done, I think it’s always been bad, probably worse.”

In his recent novel, “Los Gusanos,” Sayles perused at great length the political disillusionments that have marked the history of Cuba in the 20th Century and its troubled relationship with the United States. Like “City of Hope” and “Matewan,” the book examines the dreams of ordinary men and shows how their hopes are crushed by governments of every stripe. The title--in Spanish, “The Worms”--is taken from the name Fidel Castro gave to Cubans who fled to Miami after he came to power in 1959.

“I became interested in the idea of exile and how different psychologically that is from immigration,” Sayles says. “My relatives are immigrants, and that’s a very different thing from coming here and thinking, ‘I may go back in two or three years.’ ”

Whereas “City of Hope” takes place during three days in the life of its characters, “Los Gusanos” covers decades, lifetimes, stretching from memories of the sugar-cane farms early in the century to the coming of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, his overthrow by Castro, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, as well as life in Castro’s prisons and among the exiles in Miami. It is a panoramic, heartbreaking story, told by multiple narrators, with hazy shifts forward and backward in time.

Which is why, Sayles says, he chose the form of a novel to tell it. He insists that it will never be a movie. “ ‘City of Hope’ has three points of view,” he says. “ ‘Los Gusanos’ has many. You can ask people to change points of view three times in a movie. But that’s all.”

The prose in “Los Gusanos,” which includes a fair amount of Spanish, is impressive, to say the least. But Sayles is already on to another movie. Next up for him is a story, set in Louisiana, that he says is about “a woman who’s paralyzed and her caretaker and the relationship between them.” The budget will be about the same as that for “City of Hope,” $3.1 million. “I think we’ll be able to get the money fairly easily without a long, long wait,” he says.

“There’s a freedom that comes with not having so much of an overhead. Yeohhh , I don’t have a divorce to pay for, I don’t have three houses to pay for, I don’t have a coke habit to pay for. But I try not to spend too much money anyway, because I know I might have to go back to financing my own movies.

“I can still make a movie for half a million dollars. I would have to pick it very carefully to do it well. But I could do it. I’d just as soon not invest in my own movies. I don’t really like gambling, even on myself. But if I have to, I’d like to be able to.”

In other words, whatever it takes to stay in Hoboken.