At the Movies with Governor Tom: Honeydripper

Last night I got to see in person one of my favorite filmmakers ever: John Sayles. The event was part of a three-day retrospective of his career that showcased five of his films, including his 16th and most recent, Honeydripper. It officially came out the last week of December, but if you haven't heard of it, I wouldn't be surprised. John and his producing partner, Maggie Renzi, pretty much produced and distributed this sucker themselves. If you live in or near a big city, you might find it at your local arthouse. If not, I've got three letters for you: DVD. It's not the best film John's ever done. I'd give it, say, two and a half stars out of four. It's definitely worth seeing at least once for the terrific cast: Danny Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Stacy Keach, Sean Patrick Thomas, and Mary Steenburgen.

Have you seen any John Sayles stuff? If you haven't, a good way to start would be his 10th film, Lone Star. That was the first film of his that I saw, and it's still my favorite from his oeuvre. It's got Chris Cooper as Sheriff Sam Deeds investigating a cold case involving the murder of this Texas border county's previous sheriff. Besides Chris, it also stars Kris Kristofferson as well as a then unknown Matthew McConaughey playing Chris Cooper's dad in flashbacks. Speaking of Chris Cooper, it's pretty much because of John Sayles that he's got the career has has. His first film ever was in John's fifth film, Matewan, based on the true story of the miners strike in West Virginia in 1920. John also discovered David Strathairn, a nobody in 1980 when he starred in John's debut feature, Return of the Secaucus 7. He's starred in other stuff of John's, like Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Limbo. And of course, like Chris, Dave's now in just about every other film coming out these days.

Another thing you should know about John is that he's pretty much the writer, director, and even editor on all of his films. The producer is the woman he's been dating since his college days in the early seventies, gal called Renzi, Maggie Renzi. They've never officially tied the knot, but they've been a couple over thirty years now. And they're also creative partners. Maggie first wanted to be an actress. She played the lead in Return of the Secaucus 7. John's second film, 1983's Lianna, saw her begin a side stint as a producer. She continued playing the occasional supporting role for a while, but nowadays she's strictly the producer.

Here's the gist of Honeydripper. It takes place during a week in October 1950 in the town of Harmony, Butler County, Alabama. Our man Danny Glover plays Tyrone "Pinetop" Purvis, the owner and proprietor of this juke joint called the Honeydripper. He runs the joint with the help of his pal Maceo (Charles S. Dutton). His wife Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) does the cooking while his daughter China Doll (yes her name's China Doll, and the gal who plays her has an equally interesting name, YaYa DaCosta) waits tables. Unfortunately, none of them have anything to do. Times are tough for the Honeydripper, and that's putting it mildly. Why, you ask? Because no one goes there anymore. I mean yeah, they have a handful of loyal customers, but that's it, just a handful. Pinetop's in debt to just about everyone, including his landlord, who wants him out yesterday. Right down the road is the Honeydripper's competition, Touissants. The reason everyone goes there is because Touissants has a jukebox. Maceo wants desperately for Pinetop to get a jukebox as well, but Pinetop's like, "Nah. I'll stick with my live music." His live music is mainly provided by his own piano playing coupled with the singing talents of Bertha Mae, played by real-life singer Dr. Mable John. Besides Bertha Mae's husband Slick (Vondie Curtis-Hall), not too many people show up for Bertha Mae anymore because they prefer that jukebox down the road, which is playing a newer kind of music called rock 'n roll.

If you know Danny Glover, though, you know he's got a plan. In order to lure Touissants' customers his way, he's managed to book a legendary guitar player from New Orleans named Guitar Sam (based on the real-life Guitar Sonny). It's one night only, that Saturday, and the film basically works its way toward that performance. Meantime, he's got to promote the heck out of it while keeping his creditors at bay. And John Sayles, in typical John Sayles fashion, lets us get to know the oodles of interesting people who populate Harmony, and the kinds of conflicts they themselves are going through. One of those characters is a guy named Sonny (played by musician Gary Clark, Jr., who contributed quite a bit to the film's soundtrack). He shows up on a train early on with an electric guitar (a fairly new thing back then) and walks around Harmony looking for a place to play gigs. He offers himself to Pinetop, who brushes him off. In a place like Harmony, if you're not in the military, the only steady work for a young man like Sonny is to pick cotton, but he doesn't want to pick cotton. Sonny wants to pick guitar strings in front of an audience. His refusal to work the fields lands him in jail courtesy of the sheriff (Stacy Keach). As with fellow end-of-2007 release The Great Debaters, Honeydripper gives us a taste of the Jim Crow South, where blacks could be chucked in jail (or much worse) for absolutely no reason at all. Sonny's luck is in, though. Guitar Sam flakes out and doesn't show up. Pinetop is desperate to fulfill the promise of all the fliers he's been posting around town so he can rake in enough dough to pay off his debts. He bails Sonny out of jail and tells him he'll be playing Saturday night under the assumed name of Guitar Sam. Think Pinetop can pull it off? Well now, you'll just have to see this flick, now won't ya?

What was cool about the Q&A after the film was that John Sayles was joined by two unannounced guests: his main squeeze and producer Maggie Renzi as well as musician Keb' Mo'. The latter played one of my favorite characters in the film, a blind guitar player named Possum. The thing about Possum, right? He can only be seen by Pinetop and Sonny, the two musicians in the film. John Sayles said Possum was supposed to be a musical spirit or something. I'd never heard of Keb' Mo' in my life, but he was absolutely brilliant as Possum. Anyway, so he was there too, although he had to leave a few minutes early because his babysitter had to go home. Apparently Keb' had a baby boy not too long ago. Awwww.......

Before I go into the Q&A, let me preface by saying that John, while very well spoken, could also be a bit of a rambler. His answers tended to go on and on and sometimes deviated away from the question, so I'll do my best to recollect as much as I can. And one more thing about John: He's huge! No joke, dude's six foot four. I know his exact height because at one point during the Q&A he talked about how big Danny Glover is. At six foot three, Danny comes up all of an inch short of John. If you know John's films, though, you know that Danny's probably the biggest actor he's worked with. Chris Cooper and David Strathairn sure as heck aren't six-three, and besides them, John tends to work with a lot of female actresses, none of whom come within a light year of his physical stature. Well, except for maybe Daryl Hannah, who starred in his 2003 flick Casa de los babys. As a beer lover, I should also point out that John has the King of Beer Guts. He's not fat anywhere else on his body, but God damn, that gut protrudes like nothing else. Atta boy, John!

He kicked things off by saying that yes, they really did film the entire thing in Alabama, 'bout an hour's drive from Montgomery to be exact. The reason it took so long to film this sucker was that they took too long to get money. They wanted to start shooting in time for Alabama's 2005 cotton harvest, but by the time they had enough money, the harvest was over, the cotton was gone. So they had to sit on their duffs for a whole year before they could actually start shooting. When I say it took "so long," I mean three years. John's last film was 2004's Silver City. You see that? It's hilarious. Chris Cooper plays a grammatically challenged politician named Dickie Pilager, an obvious caricature of you-know-who. It came out in September 2004, two months before the real pillager was reelected.

Maggie piped in and said that even after 16 films, fundraising is as difficult and painstaking as ever. You never get used to it. When cameras start rolling, it means long days of shooting, but she said that's "bliss" compared to the financing part. And besides, shooting never lasts long on John's films. For Honeydripper they had all of 35 days to shoot. And Danny Glover was available for 25 of those days. Nah, no pressure. Apparently Stacy Keach was on an equally tight schedule. He came down to Alabama to do the film literally the day after finishing up King Lear in Chicago. Some of the money for this film, by the way, came from John himself. That's how it always works. When not working on his own films, John works as a ghostwriter on a lot of Hollywood stuff. This is also how Carrie Fisher keeps her coffers full. Ghostwriters, like studio screenwriters in general, tend to be paid generously for their services. John's no exception, so he uses some of that dough to keep his projects afloat. By his estimate, he's done ghostwriting duty on something like 70 flicks, most of which, like Carrie Fisher, he didn't get credit for. Recent stuff like Jurassic Park IV and The Spiderwick Chronicles are the exception.

Maggie went on about how no matter how much great stuff John churned out, no matter the caliber of acting talent he attracted, raising money and making films and achieving success in the U.S. was a perpetual struggle. She marveled that, while she was grateful for the Aero's doing a five-film John Sayles series, no theater in the U.S. has ever done a complete retrospective of all his films. It has happened outside the U.S., in November of 2007 at the 48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival in northern Greece. Apparently this was quite the shindig. It was the European premiere of Honeydripper. And not only did they show all 15 of John's previous films, but John as well as Maggie as well as Chris Cooper and David Strathairn were all there in person to talk about all the great stuff John's done. John also conducted a master class on filmmaking and was honored with a prize called the Golden Alexander. Cool, eh?

The first question from Grant, the Aero's resident moderator, was about what he called the "stillness" in the film, how the camera was usually stationary while actors came and went from the screen. John said the main reason for that was he could only afford a camera crane for one day. He did have an aesthetic reason too: Danny Glover's character. Pinetop Purvis wasn't a very mobile guy. Most of his scenes tended to see him sitting, whether at his piano or eating breakfast or what have you, inside the Honeydripper. John said he wanted to show how Pinetop rarely had to leave the Honeydripper while all of his problems made their way to him in the form of creditors, the sheriff, the news that Guitar Sam was a no-show at the train station, you name it. The way John balanced that was to have Pinetop's partner Maceo be very active, on his feet and moving all the time because he always had something to do. The character of Maceo was John's main way of compensating for not being able to afford a crane or a dolly.

The moderator, struck like the rest of us by how smart and knowledgeable John sounded, asked John if he always had everything figured out by the time he arrived on set so that shooting the scenes would just be going through the motions. John said no way because that would take away from the creativity of the actors. First of all, he never writes a script with actors in mind because, since he's so determinedly independent, it's no guarantee that he can get the actors he wants. And then when it's go time, he likes to let his actors do one or two takes without him saying anything. Only after he's seen how they've interpreted the material will he provide the necessary direction to nudge them in whatever direction they need to go in order to nail the scene. This is what got him raving about Lisa Gay Hamilton, who plays Danny Glover's wife Delilah. Apparently she's so good that John hardly had to direct her at all. The whole subplot with Delilah has to do with her religious beliefs and how she's trying to reconcile what she believes with the struggle her husband is going through. Whether or not she thinks her man should just give up on the Honeydripper and walk away all hinges on the faith Delilah subscribes to (or doesn't). This climaxes at a church tent meeting late in the film, on the Saturday night that will determine the Honeydripper's fate. It's a pretty powerful scene in the film, by far the most emotional for Delilah. Nonetheless Lisa Gay Hamilton showed up and nailed it in one take. John didn't have to help her at all. Have you heard of Lisa Gay Hamilton, by the way? She was a regular on that TV show The Practice for several years. Otherwise she works steadily in mostly supporting film roles and TV guest spots.

One thing John does to help his actors is to write little biographies of their characters and then give them those bios ahead of the shoot. Of course the length of the bio depends on the prominence of the character. For Danny Glover, John churned out an eight-page bio of Pinetop Purvis and gave that to Danny along with CDs of music from the twenties, thirties, and forties. Pinetop's in his fifties, and John wanted Danny to know the kind of musical world Pinetop came from. This helps explain Pinetop's befuddlement when faced with things like rock 'n roll and jukeboxes and someone like Sonny showing up with an electrical guitar and amplifier.

Since John's such a prominent figure in the indie film movement, Grant asked him about his thoughts on the indie film world. Was it in good shape or bad shape? John's answer was mostly positive, that indie films were doing okay. Maggie, however, was very unequivocal in her assessment that the studio system had pretty much gobbled up the independent film. That's why she was hell bent on going one step further with Honeydripper, that not only would it be entirely produced outside the studio system, but distributed sans studio help as well. She created a distribution company herself specifically to distribute Honeydripper, God bless her. She said that was really the one and only way to have true creative freedom as a filmmaker. John, for his part, agreed. As someone who makes a healthy living doctoring scripts in the studio system, he can attest that the storytelling of a studio film is usually second to the casting. One time, he said, he was working on a film wherein the lead female character was 45. But then the producers were able to cast a hot young actress...who was 25. John had just finished working on the script when this starlet was cast, and now he had to rewrite the friggin' thing because the main female character now had to be 25 instead of 45. Since she was such a prominent character, virtually everything about the story had to change. In the end it didn't bother him too much because it meant more dough for him, but he said if it had been a John Sayles film, he would've retained the 45-year-old female character even if it meant not getting a popular young actress. Older women aren't represented very well in film these days. If you've seen Passion Fish or Casa de los babys, you know John's very sincere about compensating for that fact.

Someone in the audience obviously shared my admiration for how John's films, while they may have mature actresses in common, seemed to go all over the map in terms of subject matter. This person was either still in or had just completed a writing workshop and was asking John about the write-what-you-know convention. Was John already familiar with 1950s Alabama when he came up with this story idea? Was he from Alabama? John said that first of all, he'd never taken a writing workshop in his life, so he didn't know anything about the write-what-you-know rule. That's probably why he's never written what he already knew. He was born in the fifties, yes, but up in New York, not Alabama. For Honeydripper, as with all of his films, he did a ton of research. He read books, talked to people and, for this movie more than any other, listened to tons of music. He reminisced about listening to the radio late into the night when he was eight or nine, discovering this great new thing called rock 'n roll. With Honeydripper, he wanted to show the impact such music would have on someone old school like Pinetop Purvis. As for writing in general, he works much harder ghostwriting other people's scripts than he does on his own work. Although he didn't elaborate on that, I'm guessing that's because studios are paying him handsomely for his services.

He clearly did his fair share of research on cotton season in the south. Prompted by a question about why he went into so much detail with the subplot about the cotton pickers, John and especially Maggie talked about how much they wanted to convey the kind of world a juke joint like the Honeydripper would've existed in. Unless you were in the military, picking cotton would be one of your main means of income if you lived in a town like Harmony. It was tough, thankless, gruelling work, and juke joints were the way the cotton pickers would unwind at the end of the day. John went on to say that what a lot of people don't talk about is the constant threat of violence that existed in juke joints. Cotton pickers could just as easily get drunk and ventilate their rage just as well as they could get drunk and get happy. That, in turn, tied into Pinetop's back story of having stabbed to death someone in a juke joint brawl several decades earlier, when he was Sonny's age. Now as a juke joint runner himself, he wants to be sure no such violence erupts in his place. Folks can take that nonsense down to Touissants if they want. Two cotton pickers we follow all movie finally come to blows at the Honeydripper during the Saturday night concert. One of those pickers is from Mississippi, the other from Memphis (i.e. a big city boy). That difference right there foments friction between them toward the start of the film, when the Memphis boy shows up looking for work. He feels that picking cotton side by side with country bumpkins is beneath him.

When asked about his involvement in the film, Keb' Mo' said he had a mortgage to pay and what did you expect. Of course he was kidding, not about having a mortgage but that this film would help him pay it. No actor makes very much doing a John Sayles film. As with Woodie Allen, it's not about the money but the prestige. When they offered him the part, John and Maggie treated him to lunch at Fritto Misto, an Italian cafe about a mile and a half from this very movie theater. It wasn't a very big part and didn't require too much of his time, and it meant being in a John Sayles flick, so why not? And as I mentioned above, his character Possum is perhaps the most memorable. Keb' Mo' is a musician by trade, but I hope he continues pursuing acting because he seems like a natural. Danny Glover's tight schedule meant some of his scenes with Keb' Mo' had to be filmed in two parts. You'd see Pinetop and Possum talking to each other or something, and because of the way it was edited, it would never occur to you that Danny and Keb' Mo' filmed that scene separately. John shot Danny saying all of his lines, then on another day shot Keb' Mo' with his lines, then strung it together so it looks like they're having a conversation in the same room.

Speaking of Danny's dialogue, someone asked Maggie and John if they had a problem with Danny's wearing braces. I actually didn't know Danny Glover wore braces, but it makes sense after hearing the way he spoke in this film. If you compare Honeydripper to, say, Lethal Weapon, clearly his voice is different. But anyway no, John and Maggie didn't care about the braces, they were just thrilled to have Danny Glover in their movie. "What are we going to do, tell him to take them out?" Maggie said. She added that if this guy in the audience was really concerned, he'd be happy to know that Danny was about to have his braces taken out.

Someone asked John how much he was influenced by August Wilson. He said he'd seen a couple plays and had read a few others, but when he thought of Honeydripper, he was thinking more about the music of this very specific time and place as opposed to the African-American experience of the 20th century, which was August's big thing. That said, though, John pointed out that maybe half of the people in Honeydripper had performed in at least one August Wilson play in their lives. For my part, I got to see Fences at the Pasadena Playhouse back in August 2006. It didn't have anyone from Honeydripper, but it did star Laurence Fishburne, Angela Bassett, and Orlando Jones. That's not a bad cast at all. Now if I could just catch Danny Glover on stage...