A Sayles pitch.

In an era when the content of many Hollywood films has been stripped to the bone, writer and director John Sayles stands as a bulwark for thick plots and intricate characters. A maverick filmmaker, Sayles prides himself on novelistic movies, not special effects, because a picture isn't always worth a thousand words.

Smiling Jack Valenti was on the Today show this morning, telling about the wondrous new television rating system--the one that's going to let concerned parents know if a program is suitable for the toddlers, preteens or adolescents under their roof. It's a nice idea, letting folks know about the age-appropriateness of a program, though it's hard to have a lot of confidence in an industry that thought those dark sexual fantasies in Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" were okay for kids.

Still, if Hollywood really wants to help us screen out bad shows (unlikely, since that would cut our viewing and consumption of advertising way down), perhaps the warning labels could let us know if the program has a plot; any kind of a story line worth remembering; witty, realistic or clever dialogue; characters who haven't been pressed from a cookie sheet; or an ending we couldn't see coming from the opening credits. After all, the biggest reason there's so much senseless violence, graphic sex, and rough language on television and at the local cineplex is because most of the time there isn't any writing. So I suggest using two letters: V for vapid, or W for writer, and let folks choose what they want.

One place you might go if you're shopping for a couple of videos with a well-deserved W-rating would be an outlet renting any of John Sayles' ten films. A prize-winning author and novelist, Sayles is an independent filmmaker who for the last two decades has been crafting the sort of critically acclaimed and thoughtful pieces that usually only come with subtitles. Along with people like David Mamet, Woody Allen, Nora Ephron, and Sam Shepard, Sayles is one of a small cluster of American directors who are accomplished writers--and that sensibility shows up in his work. From 1980's "The Return of the Secaucus Seven" to last year's "Lone Star" Sayles has consistently produced the sort of stories and characters that are still pinging around inside us long after the lights have come back up.

In an age when most American movies are two-hour theme park rides engineered for a global market of 14-year-olds, stumbling into one of Sayles' films is like being promoted to the grown-ups' table at Thanksgiving dinner. Our food hasn't been precut, and the conversation has gotten much more interesting.

And one of the best reasons for savoring a Sayles' film is that the experience is like relaxing around a crowded dinner table as a lengthy but fascinating conversation unfolds. Seated there in the dark, we listen as a patchwork of intriguing and occasionally mismatched characters manage somehow to fashion a riveting narrative quilt out of their differing stories and points of view. It is as if the art of conversation were being put on film. Or, as Richard Corliss said of Sayles in a 1993 Time review, "his movies look as if they were made by a fly on the wall that had an advanced degree in psychology." Nor is this conversational style limited to his talkative films like "The Return of the Secaucus Seven," a film about the weekend reunion of a group of '60s radicals struggling with the trials and tribulations of the 30-something crowd. Even in "Matewan," a brooding piece about a violent West Virginia coal miners' strike, or "Lone Star," Sayles' 1996 murder mystery set in a Tex-Mex border town, the action of the plot advances primarily through the voices of the various characters, with each one telling their small, interlocking, piece of the story.

Sayles has occasionally explained the conversational tone of his films by noting that dialogue is cheaper than special effects, and that an independent filmmaker needs to paint as many of his pictures with words as possible. Perhaps. But one hardly gets the sense of being shortchanged by Sayles' dialogue. If the ambling pace of his films fails to provide the roller coaster thrills of a "Jurassic Park" or "Mission Impossible," their gritty conversational style brings us face to face with a host of sharply drawn characters, often with unsettling quandaries and points of view. And whether it's the lilting tones of Irish fishermen in "The Secret of Roan Innish," a magical fairy tale about a family of sea creatures who are half-human and half-seal, or the outfield patter of ball players in "Eight Men Out" (Sayles' 1988 baseball film about Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal), the voices we hear from the screen ring clear and true. With a writer's ear that is dead on, Sayles brings us much more than just the right accent or turn of phrase. He brings us real people, men and women ready to lean across the dining-room table and tug on our sleeves. Even in the shortest of scenes Sayles sketches out characters who seem to be speaking in their own voices, not his.

As a rule these characters tend to be a fairly rough hewn-group, poor or working-class folks fighting to find a place at the table. And Sayles' films are often populated by the same sort of underprivileged or blue-collar characters we might find in a Woody Guthrie ballad, a Carl Sandburg poem, or a Zora Neale Hurston novel. Whether they're striking miners, out-of-work fishermen, or illegal immigrants, Sayles portrays these men and women with an unflinching sympathy that rarely descends to sentiment, giving them ample time to tell their stories and air their griefs. Not too surprisingly, the conversation in a number of his films ends up revolving around matters of social justice. Slavery and racism are the background themes haunting "The Brother from Another Planet," his 1984 sci-fi satire about a black alien who crash lands in Harlem and turns out to be a runaway slave traveling an interplanetary version of the underground railway. Race, class, and jobs are prominent issues in both "Matewan" and "City of Hope," 1991's dark epic tale of urban graft and decay at the end of the American dream. And Sayles' most recent film "Lone Star" adds immigration and prison reform to the mix. Again and again, Sayles' stories take a long steady look at the issues and structures that shape and sometimes eat away at the human spirit. As reported in a 1991 Time article by Janice Simpson, the director said, "Basically, I'm for whatever makes people's lives better and against whatever doesn't."

But it would be a mistake to think that Sayles' films are all about social issues. Like a good Graham Greene novel, the central focus in a Sayles story is always on the very human and often surprising characters. The characters, not some abstract ideas, hold center stage. As he notes in an interview in The Progressive, Sayles is a filmmaker who is primarily interested in making movies about people and what makes them tick. He wants to know how his characters will react to a crisis or come to grips with a difficult situation. In "The Return of the Secaucus Seven" and "City of Hope" Sayles wonders how and why people manage to hold on to their ideals and commitments in the face of life's changes and disappointments; while in "The Secret of Roan Inish" and "Passion Fish," (the story of a crippled soap opera star and her nurse), Sayles probes the ways in which people try to make sense of the failures and setbacks of life.

One of the situations that intrigues Sayles the most involves the different boundaries that we construct, the borders and fences separating people from one another. He is fascinated with all the diverse lines of demarcation human beings draw, and by all our attempts to fashion some order by chopping our communities into a neat patchwork of tribes and ghettos. This is a central theme in "Lone Star," where a sleepy border town has been divided into separate and decidedly unequal sections of black, brown, and white, each with their own watering hole. But it is also a concern in "Passion Fish," where a wealthy white patient and her black nurse try to forge some human bonds across the divides of race, class, and handicap. And it is an issue in both "Matewan" and "City of Hope," where racial and ethnic perspectives repeatedly threaten to degenerate into tribalism. But it's not just the borders of race and class that fascinate Sayles. He is also interested in the lines we draw between men and women, parents and children, and ultimately, good and evil.

Sayles is suspicious of these boundaries. Like Robert Frost, he is not convinced that "good fences make good neighbors," or that what divides us is nearly as important as what holds us together: our shared humanity. As an elderly Mexican asks the sheriff in "Lone Star," "A bird flying south, a rattlesnake, you think he sees this line? You think halfway across that line they start thinking different? Why should a man?"

And so, like the parable of the Good Samaritan, Sayles' films end up exploring characters living along the fault lines of these borders, men and women inhabiting the demilitarized zones between warring camps. Like Pilar, the Hispanic history teacher in "Lone Star" who gets into trouble with Anglo-Saxon parents for not preaching the company line about the Alamo, these are people who can see both sides of the picture, people who know that every slogan and sound bite is only half true. Or like Otis, the owner of the only black bar in town, they are people who've been around long enough to know that the difference between good and evil isn't nearly as sharp as his rigid Army colonel son wants to believe.

One of Sayles' real gifts as a writer and filmmaker is that he is one of these characters, a storyteller who knows that no single version can reveal the whole truth, that what we need more than anything else to understand what is going on around us is empathy and compassion. As Richard Alleva commented in a recent Commonweal piece, "Like the best novelists, he aspires to ex tend the reach of his understanding by trying to get under the skin of those different from himself: Latinos, blacks, homosexuals, the very young, the very old, the poor, the rich, all kinds of men and women." By introducing his audiences to characters who are different--and yet not so different--from ourselves, Sayles helps us to expand our own sympathetic imagination, to walk around inside the shoes, sandals, or moccasins of people we've thought of as strangers or enemies and see the world from their point of view. Afterwards, of course, it's hard to get the world back into a two-dimensional focus. And the truth always seems more complex, more ambiguous, maybe even more forgiving.

In a world where more and more of our stories are being produced by a shrinking number of media conglomerates, and where the majority of those stories are formulaic and predictable, chock-full of violence, sex, and happy endings, an independent and original storyteller seems like an endangered species. Better yet, you could say that our species is endangered every time we lose one of these storytellers, and enriched every time one finds a new audience. The ultimate gift of a really good storyteller like Sayles is not just that he entertains us, which he often does quite well, but that he invites us to reexamine the mainstream stories and myths by which we live. In his often quirky tales he helps us to confront the complexity of life. He reminds us that stories are often the ways we hold our lives together, and that we need to be careful to tell stories that enhance, not endanger, our shared humanity. As Sayles has Pilar say in "Lone Star," "We're presenting a more complete picture." No small service indeed.

RELATED ARTICLE: John Sayles' Films

* "The Return of the Secaucus Seven" (1980)

* "Baby It's you" (1982)

* "Lianna" (1983)

* "The Brother from Another Planet" (1984)

* "Matewan" (1987)

* "Eight Men Out" (1988)

* "City of Hope" (1991)

* "Passion Fish" (1993)

* "The Secret of Roan Inish" (1995)

* "Lone Star" (1995)