Twenty-five years ago, two queer punk poets arrived on the festival scene with a movie B. Ruby Rich described as a passing of the torch for trans cinema “from outsider to insider.” By Hook or by Crook, Harry Dodge and Silas Howard’s shaggy, badass love letter to queer friendship and the resilience of DIY community spirit on the margins, embodies the defiance of New Hollywood rebels-without-a-cause by way of spoken word poetry, bluegrass, and gas station minimarts. Blending the principles of Dogme 95 with splashes of Harmony Korine and John Waters thrown in, it’s a grungy-sweet caper with a bad-boy twinkle in its eye. BHoBC follows a good looking, smooth-operating trans grifter named Shy (Silas Howard) to San Francisco after his father’s death. Pretty soon, he finds himself kicking a yuppy in the balls to save Valentine (Harry Dodge), a motor-mouthed freaky butch with a wide grin and an unpredictable streak a mile wide. The rest is a delirious blend of Tom Robbins-style, off-the-wall buddy comedy, scruffy criminal antics, and punk rock spirit; it’s a laid-back, defiantly queer companion to films of the fugitive kind like Out of the Blue (1980) or Times Square (1980) that remains electric to this day.
In anticipation of its return to theaters this month, BW/DR invited Dodge and Howard, the film’s co-directors and stars, for a conversation that, true to the film itself, ranged from Tennessee Williams to Fugazi.
Payton McCarty-Simas: How does it feel to be doing this right now, to be going through this process and celebrating By Hook or by Crook twenty-five years later?
Silas Howard: Pretty awesome. Harry and I just had our birthdays, so it’s kind of a nice birthday gift to be reminiscing about this project that’s had a slow and steady amount of attention over the years—a very slow burn, but a lovely, wonderful audience that’s embraced the film. It’s a real gift, that’s how it feels to me.
Harry Dodge: Totally. We worked really hard on the movie, and we really wanted to make something great. We weren’t fucking around! [Laughs] But on the same hand, the fact that people still care about it and that it’s been twenty-five years, but each week, Silas and I get at least a few emails from new viewers. I think for us there’s a way it’s never gone completely out of style, which is just a godsend and a blessing. Then the fact that it did come around, that we were able to get the funding to get this restoration done and get a whole new splash… it’s just fucking amazing!
The staying power is crazy. We tried to make the feel of it kind of timeless—we were shooting in 1999 or 2000 and we were all wearing ‘70s leather jackets, finding the last three phone booths, using very few contemporary cars—we hated ugly cars—and we had that rotary phone, so maybe that created a little bit of an aesthetic, a sort of lost-in-time feeling that probably doesn’t hurt either.
PM: Totally. There’s what I think was a Wild at Heart (1990) reference somewhere in there? Where you’re talking about the snakeskin leather jacket and independence…
SH: That’s a Tennessee Williams reference [from Orpheus Descending (1957): “What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at what you can with both your hands until your fingers are broken?”].
HD: Maybe [Lynch] borrowed it from Tennessee Williams. Weirdly, I saw that quotation in a show Vivian Bond was performing in San Francisco in the mid ‘90s. She did a monologue and that was part of it and I just got shivers. I was like, “That is the best fucking piece of writing I’ve ever heard.” Then I went and watched [Wild at Heart], and I was really glad it was a kind of like an—
SH: Homage.
HD: Tennessee Williams was a big gay. It was a sort of generational borrowing—
SH: [Chuckling] did you just say Tennessee Williams was a “big gay”?
HD: Yeah.
SH: I got a line from his one act called “The Case of the Strange Petunias,” [gesturing to a chest tattoo] and it says, “live, live, live”—it’s what the dead say to the living. When I got it tattooed, I went home and looked at it in the mirror, and I realized it says “evil, evil, evil” backwards [laughing]. I got a total twofer!
PM: Speaking of writing, can we talk about the language of this movie? You have your origins in spoken word poetry, Harry, and you have your origins in music, Silas. This is such a rich film in terms of its references, and the dialogue is just so free form. What was the flow like as you were developing these characters and getting the writing going?
SH: There was very little improv. Harry’s work—and I’ll let you speak for yourself on it, but—Harry was doing these plays, and people were reading the skits that were supportive, but they were like, “You can’t have a character talk like this.” We were just like, “Well, we want to, and we’re going to just do it.” I knew Harry could pull it off. Not many people could!
HD: Both of us had been reading a lot and appreciating things a lot. I’ve really enjoyed Tennessee Williams, like I said, or Virginia Woolf. I really, really enjoy a book where people are taking liberties with language. I don’t necessarily enjoy a plainspoken text at all, whether it’s philosophy or fiction or whatever. I’m like, “Just kind of make me confused” you know? Straight up. I want to be like, “Well now, what?” and go to read it again. That’s my favorite thing. Language can be beautiful and blow you out of the water, so the fact that a lot of film language is kind of these grunts and squeaks, while mainly they’re doing everything visually, is wonderful, and that’s what all the script books told us to do, but there was another thing that we were curious about, and that was like, how much of this more literary language can we fit into the movie?
I had been doing these evening length solo shows in San Francisco, and so we wrote a script. It was kind of no good, so we wrote another script, and it was kind of no good. Then when we went to the third script, for Shy’s character, I borrowed some from Muddy Little River, my first show, which was more of a down-home, walking-around-going-to-the-gas-station character. For the second script, I borrowed from a show I did called From Where I’m Sitting, I Can Only Reach Your Ass that was a little nuttier. The two different characterizations came from some of these other monologues.
PM: I was rewatching it recently, and there’s that moment where there’s a joke about a chicken, right? I was thinking a lot about Jim Jarmusch—Permanent Vacation, that great joke in there about the Doppler effect that’s pretty morbid. Part of why I think BHoBC remains so timeless is that it feels very of that scene and that era of scene where things are a little more free-flowing than they’re often allowed to be now.
SH: Totally.
PM: But speaking of the scene and the moment, for younger readers who weren’t around at the time, can you set the scene a little bit? Paint a portrait of what was going on with you guys and what was going on in the world that came together to make this movie.
SH: It was a really rarefied time for us. We were coming out in the middle of the AIDS pandemic, and so it was a very high-stakes time. People were dying, but there was also a fierce humor that came out of that dying, sort of as a survival tool. People were forging a strong bond. We were kind of the in-betweeners—we weren’t really gay or lesbian. We were queer, we were maybe a little too much, we were a little too loud. We were that next generation, and I always say because success was nowhere in sight, we kind of couldn’t fail. There were no expectations; nobody was going to do anything for us. We could complain, but who would listen? You just had to make something. So we did! We made our own cafés, our own bands, our own record labels, our own movies, and it was great.
HD: We were busy. There were so many of us, straight people, gay people—so many gay people—just so many underground people. No one was tracking what anyone was anymore. We were like fish swimming in water that don’t know that water’s a thing, you know? You weren’t thinking about your sexuality, so here was this saturated world building, which isn’t what we called it then, we just called it “doing stuff” or “making stuff happen,” or whatever. There was no internet to steal our hours, there was definitely no scrolling, so there was definitely a lot of time in each day, and people were just busy making stuff.
Silas and I met in the mid-to-late ‘80s, and right away we started to try to make a space. We tried to make a woman-only place for a second, sort of a traveling space where we tried to raise money for a real brick and mortar, and that was great. It was kind of like a revolving door. You didn’t have to come to every event, but we had a bunch of events, and then we suddenly started. We just signed the lease. We did some scams [cackling], we did some crime, and we got the lease for the Bearded Lady.
PM: I gotta hear about the scams.
HD: Off camera [laughing].
SH: No, no, we’ll tell you! They can be on camera! Most of them don’t work anymore [laughing], but all of the ones in the movie are real, including the water guns.
HD: But anyway, we had this café. As soon as we signed the lease, the word got out, like, “Oh, these people are opening a dyke cafe, we gotta go down there!” People started to pile in and start painting—people we didn’t even know! Like eight of them would show up every day like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m so-and-so, so-and-so told me to come help.” So people were scraping the floor. It was an amazing scene all across the city, there were performance spaces, bands playing… The higher-ups weren’t paying any attention to us, but we were all paying attention to each other. That was the trick. We could feel it: This was for each other. There was no ladder to climb.
SH: There was also a brief moment where we were so few. This is a sort of sad thing to say, but after so many lives were lost, and we were witnessing that happen, all of us outsiders—trans, non-conforming, whatever—we were in it together. The café was a safe space for people to go and be okay. Then, I think as that went away, it started to divide again. I think things got more segregated again as we got more numbers. But that moment was really special, where my band, which could not be more queer and punk, would play anywhere, straight, gay… it was an interesting time, and art was a passport for a lot of that going between different worlds.
HD: There was a moment when we decided to try to make a movie, you know. We had both wanted to be movie stars when we were little [laughing], but there were no tomboy parts, really. So we decided to try and make one, and we didn’t quite realize how hard it would be. I mean, you go out and you see movies, and like 5% move you, and the other 95% you’re like, “What happened?” And then I was thinking—hubris—“How hard can it be?” Well, it turns out it is actually hard to juggle everything that you have to juggle in order to get a movie to hang together. After making a movie, I have respect for any movie that works at all on any level, because it’s a really, really challenging task.
PM: What was the most challenging moment you had during the process?
SH: 1999 was still a very, very reductive time around anything queer, trans, or gender non-conforming. We wrote this whole thing about gender for Sundance? The press didn’t care. That’s changed now, and it’s really nice to see that evolution happen, but at that time, Entertainment Weekly wrote about us by saying two films at Sundance had women with facial hair: Michel Gondry’s Human Nature and By Hook or by Crook.
PM: [Laughing incredulously] Oh no…
SH: We went to the director’s brunch and they said, “Catering’s in the back.” I was like, we have the same puffy coat that every other person has, but… So Sundance was a great asset for us, but it was a stressful thing because we were little fish in a big pond.
PM: The Human Nature comparison, I mean… that’s an insane movie on its own, but wow.
HD: [Laughing] Patricia Arquette, with the beard!
PM: I mean, she’s great in that movie, but damn…
SH: We almost didn’t get programmed at South by Southwest where we won Best Feature because they were like, “Well, we have a movie that’s kind of similar. It was a documentary about Phranc, the folk singer, selling Tupperware” [Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc’s Adventure in Plastic]. I was like, “They’re the same in that they both have people?” There’s nothing else that’s the same about them, but it was that reductive.
PM: Yeah, wow, the Tupperware Lady… a little tonally different, maybe…
SH: Phranc’s awesome, though. Phranc’s a singer and used to be in a punk band. It’s a great documentary, but our film has nothing in common except they’re all butch.
PM: That’s just wild. It seems like, as we’re talking, though, the thing that keeps coming up over and over is that element of community. It’s that feeling that we all crave so much—of queer spaces where people come together. There are two moments that struck me as being in interesting conversation with each other: In the first, Shy’s in a car and there’s this older cowboy-looking dude passing some judgment on him, and there’s a moment of connection. Shy [Silas’ character] just smiles and everyone relaxes. In contrast, there’s that wonderful series of portraits you do in the dyke bar that’s great at showcasing a particular kind of insider space for outsiders. How did you want to frame these two characters’ relationships on those two registers?
HD: First of all, I gotta say that Silas is extremely charming and extremely social and I have a kind of fear of people. Silas is like a bridge. So in that scene, there was just something about that bridge with Shy, his character. This sense of “You know what, I’m okay, and if I smile at you, you’re gonna realize that everything’s okay.” You’re right, it’s an important moment in the movie, the tiniest little bit of positive connection to the outside world. That moment of all the portraits was an homage to this Fugazi documentary, Instrument (1999) by Jem Cohen. It’s in black and white, so beautiful, so poetic and lovely. We had seen it just before that, and there’s this series of these kids standing in line. Time slows down: You can kind of see the vulnerability on someone’s face, like, “They’re fronting, they’re fronting, they’re fronting…” and then there’s a little flicker. That’s what cinema can do: It can go in and capture things, it shows us the interiority of people. That was the idea there: Humanizing.
SH: I love that you brought up the cowboy guy. We were changing the narrative a bit because I think my experience in the world has been that the more comfortable I got with myself, the more comfortable others get. Having a mohawk and piercings back in that era—you were un-hirable, basically [laughing]. You were a freak. I went to see The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and I remember people staring at me like maybe I’m a serial killer. But really the world was much friendlier when I was comfortable with myself, and I just love that we weren’t showing the same trauma over and over again. What I love about the bar scene is that people in that series of shots don’t hold the [camera’s] look, so there’s a performativity that falls. It gets a little self-conscious, which I think is a dyke bar in a nutshell [laughs].
By Hook or by Crook plays in New York City from June 12th-18th, June 16th in Los Angeles, and in various other cities throughout the summer.