Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 14, 1990 TAG: 9004140428
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES ENDRST THE HARTFORD COURANT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But "Shannon's Deal," the creation of writer-director John Sayles ("Matewan," "Eight Men Out") is no gamble. It's ace-high television.
Like Sayles - a 39-year-old novelist, screenwriter, director and actor - the hour-long drama series, which will make its debut Monday (at 10 p.m. on Channel 10 in the Roanoke viewing area), is more than unusual. It is exceptional.
Jamey Sheridan ("All My Sons") plays Jack Shannon, a one-time hotshot Philadelphia lawyer who, after 15 years, finally realizes his success has been "built on garbage" - namely his work as a legal hit man for a chemical corporation.
Disillusioned, Shannon folds, leaves the firm and begins a streak of bad luck, gambling himself into a deep hole and a divorce. On the way back from the brink, Shannon starts from scratch with scratch, opening a hole-in-the-wall general practice.
"He has a lot of problems a lot of people have," said Sayles in a recent telephone interview from his home in Hoboken, N.J. "Like how to get through the day financially, ethically."
"Shannon's Deal," he explained, is not a cop show. It's not a show about office politics and romance. It's just a guy and his secretary (played by Elizabeth Pena) trying to make it through life.
But they're no losers. "Shannon's Deal" walked away with Top 10 ratings and a pile of praise when it made its debut as a TV movie last June.
Laced with Sayles' characteristically offbeat sense of humor and casting (rockers Iggy Pop and David Crosby co-star in Monday's episode, and Sayles will show up in the series as well), "Shannon's Deal" also manages to work in the more complicated pressures of life, such as Shannon's relationship with his young daughter Neala (Jenny Lewis).
Like many of Sayles' previous works in film ("The Return of the Secaucus Seven," "Brother From Another Planet" and "Lianna") and TV ("Unnatural Causes"), "Shannon's Deal" resists convention.
The only conventional (read big money) film Sayles ever worked on, in fact, was his first, the 1979 Roger Corman creature-feature "Piranha" (others, including "Battle Beyond the Stars," "The Lady in Red" and "Alligator" followed).
Jack Shannon is hardly the flawless hero we've come to expect of television.
"Are you a lawyer?" asks a potential client.
"Only in the loosest sense of the word," he replies.
That kind of attitude is consistent with Sayles' own view and work.
"The way I see the world is not in a black-and-white way," Sayles said. "It's only black and white if I'm writing an exploitation movie for Roger Corman and when that's appropriate to that world.
"Small carnivorous fish that eat people are bad. Let's face it," he said, letting go a gentle laugh.
More often, Sayles said, his film world is based on "what I see around me. An awful lot of my friends . . . are in these situations where there are choices that have to be made that are often ones where either choice you make is not going to be a total victory. And either choice you make is not necessarily going to be one where you can say, `Well, I did the right thing.' It's going to be, `Well, I did this, and this was the trade-off. You know: I provided for my family really well, but I didn't get to spend much time with them. I was a good lawyer, but the law I was good at ended up in the final reckoning destroying half the marshlands in New Jersey.' That's the world we live in."
Sayles hopes Jack Shannon will remain in that world as well.
Now working on a new novel about the Cuban immigrants of the early 1980s (his published works include "Union Dues" and "Pride of the Bimbos"), Sayles wrote the pilot movie and the first two episodes and will stay on as creative consultant through the first season.
"I felt like I should at least stay on for the first season," he said. "Like actors talk about staying in character, I wanted the show to stay in character."
What Sayles would like to avoid is the kind of show "you can set your watch by," where dramatic ebbs and flows come at quarter-past and 10 minutes to the hour.
Whether life has dealt Jack Shannon a bad hand or he has merely been bluffing himself seems to be a central question in the show and clearly one that fascinates its creator.
"It's always been interesting to look at somebody who has to make those hard decisions," Sayles said. "For instance, one movie I'd love to see that I don't think I'll end up making is what it's like to be a black cop in Harlem. Think of the pressures. If you grew up in a community like that . . . the way you must feel walking down a street and to a certain extent feeling, `I have an important job to do here' and on the other hand feeling like, `Well, a lot of these people think I'm a traitor.'"
Sayles' next feature project, "City of Hope," is another study in quasi-morality, with the focus on small-city politics.
But it's not the way the politicians (who have a lot in common with network executives) would have it.
"It's about the way that politics on a city level aren't ideological," Sayles said. "They're practical."
by CNB