End credits include the disclaimer: “Although the motion picture was suggested by historical events, certain persons and occurrences depicted in it are fictitious. All real persons depicted have been fictionalized and are no longer living.”
       The film begins with the following voice-over narration: “It were in nineteen and twenty in the Southwest field and times was tough. The miners was trying to bring the unions to West Virginia, coal operator and their gun thugs was set on keeping ‘em out. Them was hand-loading days, they paid you by the ton. They didn’t care no more for a man than they done for a draft mule. Them was hard people, the coal miners, there wasn’t nobody they wanted to cross. So push come to shove and pretty soon we had us a war down there in Mingo County, which in them days was known as ‘Bloody Mingo’ and that’s where it all come to a head. There on Tug Fork in a town of Matewan.” Narration continues throughout the film, and ends with: “There was a trial, but there wasn’t nobody gonna pass guilty on Sid Hatfield in Mingo County. Sid got married to Mayor Testerman’s widow, and then the Balwins, they caught him unarmed, walking up the steps of the McDowell County courthouse. They shot fifteen bullets into him, right in broad daylight. Then C. E. Lively stepped in and put one right through his skull. Wasn’t even a trial on that one. That were the start of the great Coalfield War and us miners took the worst of it like Joe said we would. 'It’s just one big union the whole world over,' Joe Kenehan use to say, and from the day of the Matewan Massacre that’s what I preached, that was my religion. We buried Joe Kenehan with our own. My mama, she thought he wouldn’t never stay. But now he’s with us for always, layin’ up here in these West Virginia hills.” By the end of the film, it is revealed that the narrator is an elderly “Danny Radnor,” reflecting on his youth as a coal miner and preacher during the Matewan strike.
       As noted in a 23 Aug 1987 NYT article, writer-director John Sayles was first exposed to stories about the 19 May 1920 Battle of Matewan while hitchhiking through the back country of West Virginia in 1970. At the time, he was taking a vacation from a factory job on summer break from Williams College, where he studied Psychology. Sayles told NYT that the fairly recent murder of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) leader Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, along with his wife and daughter, had stirred up “a lot of turmoil” among miners in the region. Since the killings were arranged by Yablonski’s political opponent in a corrupt union election, the event resulted in upheaval in nearby PA, as well as in WV, where approximately 20,000 miners orchestrated a spontaneous strike and walked off the job for one day. Many people who drove Sayles through the Appalachian Mountains recalled stories about the 1920 Matewan Massacre in which the coal company’s Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency security guards were ordered to evict union members who lived in the town’s company-owned houses. A stand-off between twelve guards, Police Chief Sid Hatfield, and Mayor Cabell Testerman resulted in the killing of Mayor Testerman, several coal minors, and seven Baldwin-Felts agents, including brothers Albert and Lee Felts. Neither the union, the coal company, nor Baldwin-Felts were convicted for participation in the murders.
       Although NYT reported that Sayles began to compile an informal oral history of the Matewan Massacre in the summer of 1970, a Dec 1986 edition of Box stated that Sayles did not finish writing Matewan until 1979. While waiting for producers Peggy Rajski and Maggie Renzi to raise the $4 million budget, Sayles completed his first four films as writer-director, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980, see entry), Lianna, (1983, see entry), Baby It’s You (1983, see entry), and The Brother from Another Planet (1984, see entry), which was met with critical acclaim at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival and picked up for domestic distribution by Cinecom International Films. Box noted that The Brother from Another Planet shared the same production company as Matewan, Red Dog Films, but producers Rajski and Renzi financed The Brother from Another Planet under the company name A-Train Films. Studio production notes in AMPAS library files stated that Matewan marked the first motion picture financed entirely by Cinecom International Films’s Cinecom Entertainment Group, but Film Gallery, Goldcrest, and Red Dog Films are all credited onscreen. In addition, the 23 Aug 1987 NYT reported that Sayles invested his own money into his films, particularly after winning a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1983, giving him an annual gift of $34,000 for five years.
       Principal photography began 3 Sep 1986 in Thurmond, WV, as stated in 16 Sep 1986 HR production charts. Sayles told Box that film commissions in various states solicited the production for location work, including Sayles’s home state of NJ, which offered to build a coal mine set, but the writer-director insisted on filming in WV because the hillside landscape was impossible to replicate.
       As noted in various contemporary sources, the town of Matewan was unsuitable for the production because it had become too modernized, and was reconstructed after a destructive flood. With the assistance of the WV Department of Commerce, the filmmakers discovered the mining town of Thurmond, which had a population of approximately seventy inhabitants at that time and remained relatively untouched since the 1920s. In addition, Thurmond was near to the film’s other locations, including Grandview State Park in Grandview, WV, and the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine in Beckley, WV, where filming took place inside the four-foot seam tunnels for three days. Locals were cast in thirty-one speaking roles, and hundreds performed as background actors. The base camp for the crew and top-billed actors was at the Mount Hope, WV, Econo Lodge budget hotel. According to production notes, filming took place over seven weeks, with an estimated end date during the week of 20 Oct 1986.
       Sayles complimented the picture’s release with a companion book, Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan, which was first published in Aug 1987 by Houghton Mifflin.
       The film was nominated for one Academy Award in the category of Cinematography (Haskell Wexler).
      End credits include the acknowledgement: “We would like to thank the following companies for their support: AAA American Flag Decorating; Anheuser-Busch; Bedlinens by Wamsutta Home Products; Benjamin Moore & Company; BIC Corporation; Celestial Seasonings; Clabbergirl Baking Powder; Colgate-Palmolive Company; Cook-Hayman Museum, WV University; Coty; Dover Publications; E. E. Dickinson Company; F & F Laboratories, Inc.; Fleercorp; The Hagley Museum; Henry Thayer Company; The Hoover Company; Hohner, Inc.; James B. Thompson; John Henry Company; Levi Strauss and Company; Miles Laboratories, Inc.; Nabisco Brands, Inc., National Distillers and Chemical Corp.; PepsiCo; R. E. Dietz Company; Sears Monument Company; Red Wing Shoe Company; Sheaffer Eaton Textron; Stafford County Flour Mills Co.; Sur-On Eyeglasses; Timberland; Unique Product Placement; Universal Cigar Corp.; the Upjohn Company; U.S. Borax; Williamson Dickie Apparel MFG. Co.; Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company.” Also stated are “Special thanks to: Billy Aliff; Ashby Berkeley; City of Beckley, WV; Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV; Bernard Drewery, U.S. Air; Herman Hendrix & Rob Hottle, Econolodge, Mount Hope, WV; Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society; Cecil Francis; Helen Freeman, the Huntington Community Players; James L. Hardimaan; Historian’s Office, U.S. Postal Service; Susan Jones, the Aracoma Story; Labor Archives, Wayne State University; Carolyn Ketchum, WV Dept. of Commerce, Marketing/Tourism Division; National Mine Health and Safety Academy, Beckley, WV; New River Gorge National Park; Don Page, Beckley Exhibition Mine; Kathy Peacock; Perrine Ranch North; Mr. & Mrs. Erskine Pugh; Clark Ridgway; Joel Shores, Avis/Roanoke; Ken Sullivan, “Golden Seal”; Telephone Pioneers of America; Town of Thurman, WV; Town of Thurmond, WV; UMWA Local 29, Beckley, WV; Dick Fauss & Fred Armstrong, WV Dept. of Culture & History; the Youth Museum of Southern West Virginia; and the people of West Virginia.”