Excerpt: John Sayles, moviemaker and novelist, is about to embark on a do-it-yourself book tour in a rented Prius, in support of his brand-new novel, A Moment in the Sun.
The tour, which brings him to the Free Library of Philadelphia at 7:30 p.m. Monday, befits Sayles, a DIY kind of filmmaker.
With longtime partner Maggie Renzi, Sayles is going to drive across America. From his home in what's apparently the creative capital of the United States at the moment, Brooklyn, he says: "I'm looking forward to it. A reading is like theater, an immediate connection with people. And I love the idea of doing only libraries and independent bookstores. Maggie and I like to take long road trips. We'll have five to eight hours of driving a day, more in Texas."
Sayles, 60, has made a DIY indie career for three decades now, feeding the filmmaking habit by writing scripts for others. He started off writing for low-budget god Roger Corman, and wrote screenplays for deathless outings such as Piranha (Corman-produced) and Alligator. Sayles used savings from those gigs to make his first DIY movie, Return of the Secaucus 7, a 1980 film that spurred a genre of history-conscious, retrospective flicks. A MacArthur grant financed The Brother From Another Planet (1984), one of his best-known movies.
The rest of his career is studded with honored films such as Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), and Passion Fish (1992). Sayles is still very much at it, having finished his 17th film, Amigo, last year, and doing the script for the Spielberg project Jurassic Park IV.
But A Moment in the Sun's moment is now, a strapping 935 pages, a sprawling U.S.A.-style novel that, something like the John Dos Passos classic, follows a group of characters in parallel tracks as they traverse the America of 1897, taking in the Yukon gold rush, the Spanish-American War in the Philippines, and the advent of movies. Like all Sayles films and novels, it's drenched in a detailed, loving awareness of time and place.
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