I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.'

He used the money to partially fund the fantasy The Brother from Another Planet a film about a black three-toed slave who escapes from another planet and finds himself at home among the people of Harlem. [citation needed] Sayles gets the rest of his funding by working as a script doctor; he did rewrites for Apollo 13 and Mimic. In 1983 after the films Baby It's You (starring Rosanna Arquette) and Lianna (a story in which a married woman becomes discontented with her marriage and falls in love with another woman) Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship.

John Thomas Sayles (born September 28 1950) is an American independent film director screenwriter and author.