Special Report: By Hook or By Crook (2001)

Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Turn it off. Hey, can we have some tequila and tap? Tequila and tap. Tequila and tap. I don't have any tap.

Oh. Oh. So how it all started was a guy in my town had just got this new car. We were driving around Hanna County, jamming out to some Sabbath. Talking about what we'd do with the dough if one of us hit the lottery.

And what happened was we went over to the J & L for gas down on Ritchie. I think you should go home before the cops come, all right? You should go home now. Okay, thank you. You're here.

I couldn't find you. I had to borrow some money from you, but I'll pay you back this afternoon. Shy. Robert Plant. Robert Plant.

Shy. Why don't you shoot all the dogs just because one of them's got fleas? She's very. Lovely. I think she likes you.

I think you like her. Help! I'm hungry enough to eat erasers. It's not a good idea to fall in love with a brokenhearted. It'll break your heart.

I look good to you now, but when I was a kid, I was really off my cake. Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with directors Harry Dodge and Silas Howard all about their film from 2001, By Hook or By Crook. It is getting restored and is out there now from Altered Innocence, one of my favorite companies.

Remarkable film, really groundbreaking, really fantastic talking with Harry and Silas. And I hope you have as much fun as I did talking with them. Thank you. I am so excited to talk to you all about By Hook or By Crook. And before we even talk about the movie, though, I want to know a little bit more about you guys and just like, how do you know each other?

And you've known each other for so long, right? We really have. So long. You know, we met in the late 80s in San Francisco. And we were fast friends.

And we did it. We've done a bunch of big projects together. We dropped into an amazing underground world. In San Francisco, it was the middle of the AIDS epidemic. But also there was just massive mutual aid communities, anarchists, just a bunch of bands.

There was just all kinds of people that had been forsaken. by the system and we all found each other. So it was a really amazing time and place. It was not easy, but there was something vital and electric that we met and we dropped into and started making things. Yeah, it was not entirely unlike now where people are reaching across different groups to come together against a common evil. Yeah, we started a cafe.

Eventually, we started this cafe coffee house, which really was just everybody was welcome. And it was a really amazing gathering place, basically. It was a performance space. We had all kinds of events there. Silas was in a band for a long time.

I started doing solo performance. And then we eventually decided to try to make this movie. We decided to make it. It took some time and it took a whole community effort. And some of our friends who, you know, had just got, it was the first dot-com boom.

So we had about five friends who got computer jobs. The rest of us were being evicted, but these five friends were making it rich, right? And they gave us a little money to make the movie. God bless. Where'd the idea come from and how'd you actually gather those troops and say, all right, let's do it?

We wrote a couple of ad scripts first where we wanted to have a concept that was, I think, because Bound had come out not long before this and they did such an amazing job of putting a lesbian couple at the center of the story that had nothing to do with that and just this really exciting genre. But that wasn't our skill set at the time, especially. And the noir thriller, it was tough. Yeah, it was tough. And so then we ended up doing this thing about our friendship.

And I think actually the genesis of the idea came from when Harry got a ticket for throwing a cigarette out a van window on tour up in Portland and had to drive from San Francisco to Portland. So whenever the bad luck became good luck, he was on that drive, he got the sort of, rolling. On this new approach to history. And yeah, that's the one that worked. You got a ticket for throwing a cigarette out of a window of a car.

This was, yeah, Oregon. So, you know, I had to drive 13 hours to go to court about throwing a cigarette butt out of the window. And I shouldn't have done that. And I admit it to you and to God and to everybody who's listening, don't throw cigarette butts out of windows. But I did, and then I had to drive up.

I had to borrow like $ 200 in gas to get up there and back. And then they had, of course, dropped the charges. But in those days, you couldn't do anything online or show up on Zoom or anything. I had to borrow a car and drive up there, yeah. But you know what?

I think really well in the car. I don't know if there's anyone else out there who thinks really well in the car. I get some thoughts, I'll tell you. It was a good thing, it turns out. Tell me about your crew.

How did you find the folks that you ended up working with? When I watched the movie not that long ago, I was really struck because of the time that's passed with how everybody in the movie, every cameo is an amazing artist, musician, like their own rock star. And same with our crew. The crew was just filled with artists. Chloe Sherman, Sabrina Halperin, all of the production design and art department now are famous artists.

Samara Halperin. Samara, yeah. Sorry, I just had a moment of brain freeze. And then also Bill Baskin was our gaffer, who's an award-winning filmmaker. And so everybody, it was like, we were an embarrassment of riches and everybody worked.

We had, we did 30 days. I don't know that until I did a studio movie, I ever had that many days to shoot again for a feature. So that was a lot of commitment that people gave. And yeah, we were just in it. We were like, as soon as we opened the cafe, It was the weirdest thing.

As soon as we signed the lease, like we did a bunch of scams, just like the people in our movie. We did a bunch of scams, got a few hundred dollars, signed this lease, and our only thought up to that point was we wanted to have a wrestling mat and a coffee machine. That was our big idea for a gathering space. And as soon as we signed the lease, we were like, holy shit, we need 700 more dollars in 30 days. So we started to have events and fix the place up.

But you know what? On day one of that, about nine people we didn't even know piled in and started helping us scrape the floors and paint the walls and stuff. Word got out, these cool people are opening a night cafe, let's go down there. And everyone started, it was just word of mouth in those days. And so that was going for five or six years by the time we started to make the movie.

So of course, all of that sort of that tornado of goodwill and smarts and skills that everyone was bringing to the table happened. was, yes, redeployed when it came time to make the movie, for sure. Now, I've been to a cat cafe. Is a dyke cafe similar? Do you pay to pet the dykes? Probably get in trouble for that, but if you want to get your arm broken.

But no, that would be good. That's an idea. It was, yeah, we were like just the outcasts. We were the outsiders of the outsiders. So we really, I didn't feel fit in the gay stream or lesbian scene necessarily just because we were a different breed.

We were this different generation and we had some There's always an intergenerational conversation that usually is different around the music to start with. We were a punk as opposed to a more folky sound. But those are generalizations. It still was, yeah, we had all kinds of people come to the cafe and it was kind of cool. It was like every kind of person would come there and it was just tiny little hole in the wall.

But yeah, Joan Jack came there. It was like a real variety pack of people, but also there were so many gay people in San Francisco at that moment. that we would forget for days on end that we were gay, or that we were homosexuals, or priests even. Everyone was just fucking weirder than the last person. And there were hundreds of us, or so it felt. And so I think when it came time to make By Hook or By Crook, and in a movie, scene by scene, you put your characters under pressure, and you watch the decisions that they make.

Ostensibly, any script writing book is going to tell you that's how we learn about the characters. So when we went when it came time to put these characters under pressure it didn't have it was it had nothing to do with gender at that moment it had to do with very emotional very tender places that we really care about that that sort of happened to people we had been watching midnight cowboy for example when There was Dustin Hoffman's character, Ratso Rizzo, in that. His famous kind of outsider character. And we were really moved by that. We don't know anything about Ratso Rizzo.

No one's explaining why he acts like he acts. There's no big backstory. There's no big gender explanation. There's no, is he gay? We don't know.

We have no idea what's going on. But he seems to be a little bit in love with Joe Buck. But a friendship buds. And we were like, okay, let's see if we can... Make a movie where there's a beautiful friendship, a sort of portrayal of radical tenderness, something that moves people, and also where the little weirdo doesn't die at the end.

And what would happen if we could do that? How are you splitting up the duties and just being both in front of and behind the camera and working together? It's got to be a lot of stuff to balance. And that's where, again, our... fabulous collaborators. Cindy Anderson and Stania Khan in particular worked with us.

But also, it was going to be what it was going to be. In a way, there was only so many adjustments we could give each other. We were very new. And this was our. It was basically off of the chemistry of the friendship we had been performing this movie to ourselves.

We took a City College acting class. We took another acting class. We'd be out. We'd run lines of dialogue. It was in our bodies.

And certainly the help and brilliance of our crew and our collaborators, our consultants that were Specifically looking. At performance work. At the moment when there was a two-shot and one of us could not be behind the camera, we would call these people in. What else are you doing over these last, gosh, 25 years now since the film came out? He's an art star and author.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I went to art school and I became a visual artist. I started making video art right away with Stania Khan, who's My partner in the movie helped make By Hook or By Crook. But we were making art videos together. So it was like right post By Hook or By Crook.

And I picked up a camera and I was like, let's just go to the park. No crew. And just make something up and make something happen today. Just with all of these chops, these film chops that had come to us by way of creating this really difficult, big, complex project. And so we redeployed some of these cinema skills into these, like, little weird art comedy videos.

Beautiful. Like, the handling of edit and the way that you, like, beautiful video art. Like, they're rock stars in the video scene. And it's really interesting to watch. That stuff got really popular.

And then I was also doing sculpture and stuff. And then in the last few years, I've started writing books. And so in 2020, I had a sort of nonfiction, a literary nonfiction book come out called My Meteorite. And then right now I'm working on a novel called Bonkers. So I've been writing.

And that's where my pleasures are right now. And then Silas, once the movie's done, this Hollywood producer just pulls up and writes a huge check to you and says, keep making movies? No, my second feature was almost 10 years after By Hook or By Crook. Same budget. It was made possible because the 5D and the 7D camera came out with the high definition video clip.

And then my third feature was a little less time, but that was like a big, big cast, a $ 3 million budget. And then I did my first studio feature, which was like a $ 23 million budget, a teen genre movie. And yeah, and then I'm going to go back to doing an indie project. The next one that's loosely based on my dad and my last six months, but, but I'm doing, I've been doing some TV shows that are interesting and have cool, interesting characters. So right now that's very, I feel very fortunate because it's not, it's not easy out there.

It's kind of, Even on the best of times, it's not the easiest industry to navigate, so I'm feeling really lucky. How does it feel looking back at this after all of these years? I'm sure you've gotten that question a ton of times, but I need to hear it. The fact is that both Silas and I have been getting emails from people for the last 25 years, at least two a week, if not more than that, of people who somehow were just shown the movie or came upon the movie or found the movie. Or they're thinking about the movie because it changed their life 10 years ago or whatever.

So in some ways, the movie's never gone to sleep. It's never fully disappeared. And so this idea of the restoration is just fantastic. It was looking kind of shabby, I have to say. Some of the cine look we had done and the transfers, some of it was very nasty looking by the end.

Steakhouse, our great producer who's been working with us for 25 years, And it's just awesome. And helped make by, it's a huge part of making by hooker by crow cap and steak had to go in and re put the movie together from the raw footage and make a whole new timeline. It took a year. Yeah. It took a year.

So we're very excited about the restoration. No, it's really amazing. And, You know, I do feel like Harry said this the other day, but I feel like a lot of my stories revolve around the same thing that By Hook or By Crypt did. I love stories about friendships. That's often a common theme.

And also trying to find, you know, the gifts of trauma or the powers, you know, the transformative power of loss. Those are things that I like to think about. So it's fun to talk about it now and see that those are still active. And yeah, it's just what a gift. Yeah, feeling just really great.

I mean, the more we hold up, We're proud of that. You can watch it 25 years later and you're like, this is good. It's not dated. It's not a movie of yesteryear, particularly. It's still fun to watch.

Yeah, it's totally weird enough to just not date itself. Silas, Harry, thank you so much for your time. It was such a pleasure talking with you. And good luck with this. And I'm so glad more people will be able to see By Hook or By Crook again.

Thank you so much, Mike. Nice to talk to you. Them. Them, bitch. Them.

Bitch. Them. When you're on your knees looking up at her, you know she looks so magnificent. She looks down at. You, you know she don't give a damn about you.

You're insignificant, you. Don't have a drug. You've been around the room through the days and numbers. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am.

Femme bitch time. Don't bother to give her a ring or a dinger. Move like that will only certainly make her meaner. She don't need a big rubber dick or ballet tricks. A buttered whip and a handful of lipstick.

Go on, have some shit, give her some lips. Put a boot in your face until you can lift it. So get your deck on the ground Nails are long and you're looking around The skin on your back is already long gone With a black suit stocking to frighten your sight Be polite, don't put up a fight Roll on the floor for the love of night Smile real nicely, sacrifice Sacrifice, sacrifice your race You won't have to beg or put the fence on tight Unless Wait for her to call you In a state of constant crash There's still never again Will you look twice And the push boy I know is too damn nice She's the one who extracts The highest price Of your body and your mind But you know how to find