The storyteller

In his films, John Sayles has often found stories where others would not think to look.

Think of how he created 1987's "Matewan" from the ashes of a long-forgotten West Virginia coal miner's strike, or how, in 1988's "Eight Men Out," he peeled back a layer of the familiar tale of the scandal-tarnished Chicago Black Sox.

What some fans of his movies may not know is that Sayles did the very same thing in fiction before moving on to become a pioneer of the independent film movement.

Especially with his 1977 novel "Union Dues" (inspired by his experiences while living in East Boston), Sayles emerged as a kind of young Steinbeck who could locate the essential themes of the American experience in the lives of struggling everyday people.

Now, at age 54, Sayles is offering a reminder of his literary beginnings with "Dillinger in Hollywood," a short-story collection that hits bookstores today. It is Sayles's first collection of short fiction since "The Anarchists' Convention," which was published in 1979. "When I wrote my first story collection I'd never been on a movie set," notes Sayles in an interview. "Now I've been on lots of them."

Nonetheless, the title of his new collection is paradoxical in a way. While Sayles has indeed concentrated primarily on moviemaking for more than two decades, his career has been notable for his refusal to adhere to conventional Hollywood formulas, from "Return of the Secaucus 7" (made largely with friends for $40,000 in 1980) to "The Brother From Another Planet" (1984) to "Lone Star" (1996).

"Dillinger in Hollywood" includes stories from 1980 to the present, and proves that Sayles has not lost his gift for stories and dialogue that capture, without a trace of condescension, how average people think, talk, and act. One story, "The Halfway Diner," illuminates the bonds -- soon to be dramatically tested -- among a group of women who ride a bus together each week to visit their husbands in prison. One confesses that her dream is to one day own a dishwasher: "I want something in my life I just get it started and then it takes care of itself." The title story is set in a nursing home loaded with former movie stuntmen and bit players, none of whom could even qualify as a has-been. Suddenly, one of them announces that he is none other than famed gangster John Dillinger; it was a stand-in, he claims, who was shot to death by police outside the Biograph Theater. The story subtly subverts our concepts of fame, identity, and truth.

Sayles turned to short fiction when ideas suggested themselves to him that could not be realized on film. The stories all stemmed from his observation of human behavior, or what he calls, in his introduction to the book, "My constant question: If they act that way, what can possibly be going through their heads?"

Sayles has found that even the power to yell "Cut!" and to tell actors what to do pales next to the power to bring an entire world to life on the page. "When I'm writing fiction, I can have the entire US Marine Corps in boots and field packs," he says. "I can just say they're dressed up; I don't have to tell the costume department. If I want the sun to shine, the sun shines."

There is another kind of freedom attached to wordsmithery that filmmaking does not afford. "In movies, you've only got what people do and what they say," observes Sayles. "There are a couple of points of view that are hard to do in film. One is the first person. One thing about first person is you can create this interesting tension, that the reader can know more than the first person does. You the reader can figure out a mystery that the teller of the story hasn't figured out.

"You can also write from an emotional point of view, in that you write in the rhythm of the person who is the protagonist and kind of see the world the way that the protagonist does," he adds.

"Short stories tend to have a much tighter arc than my movies do," says Sayles. "Certainly the stories in 'Dillinger in Hollywood'; you're dropped into a certain world. Half of them take place in a workplace; every workplace has its own rhythm. A bar has a different rhythm than a hospital, but each one of them is a very consuming world. My movies tend to expand a little more and be a little more of a mosaic."

Somewhat surprisingly for anyone who remembers how fast a literary track Sayles was on in the 1970s -- publishing two first-rate novels, "Pride of the Bimbos" and "Union Dues," plus "The Anarchists' Convention," before he was 30 -- it turns out that his writing was something of a detour from acting.

At Williams College, Sayles took no writing or literature courses, opting to major in psychology while eyeing an acting career and writing stories just for fun. Upon graduation from college, Sayles found acting jobs were scarce and money even scarcer, so he began to write more stories, this time for money. He found ready buyers in magazines such as the Atlantic, and his reputation steadily grew. "A lot of why I went to fiction first was I had the means to do it," he says.

"Storytelling is what I do," he adds. "If it gets impossible for me to make movies -- and I'm always on the verge; we're so marginal, I almost never know whether I'm going to get to make another movie -- maybe I'll go back to that."

The story collection comes on the heels of Sayles's most recent film, "Silver City." A thinly veiled satire of George W. Bush, it received mixed reviews and vanished quickly from theaters. "I'm not going to retire on the proceeds, " Sayles concedes with a rueful laugh. "But it's been good to get in on the conversation, which is why we made it. We made it when the conversation was so one-sided that it was the right thing to do. A lot of what's in it is a critique of mainstream news. I do feel they've been co-opted. It's been a combination of intimidation and money lust."

As that remark suggests, Sayles is an unapologetic lefty whose political views have flavored some of his films. As Election Day looms, it seems safe to place him in the anybody-but-Bush camp. "I'm not a huge John Kerry fan, but I think he's somebody who will stop the bleeding," he says. "He's a tourniquet."

He is somewhat ambivalent about the indie film movement he helped launch with "Return of the Secaucus 7." On the one hand, he says, "it has made filmaking so much more democratic. Filmmaking is getting close to what writing a story and sending it off to a publisher used to be like.

"On the other hand," he adds with a laugh, "way too many people tell me, 'My nephew wants to be a filmmaker.' "

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.