Cool media.
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and once again it does continue to be happening here as a massive wave of police repression is levied against students protesting the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Since it's been so busy and hectic, I thought to end this week on a
bit of a lighter note. Last week I did an episode on a new movie titled The People's Joker, an unauthorized Batman parody through the lens of a surprisingly genuine queer coming of age story by transgender filmmaker Vera Drew. If you want to hear me geek out about that movie and gay Batman stuff, you can listen to that
episode from last week. But this episode is going to delve more into the diy nature of this movie, some behind the scenes, and how you go from an idea to a piece of wacky queer art playing in a movie theater or a TV show on your local cable access TV station. So I talked to two trans women who are currently making independent queer media. The aforementioned Vera Drew, as well as Ella Yeerman, host of the late night comedy show Late Stage Live. Transgender and a comedian, the
two most persecuted classes. So I've been keeping up with Ella's indie transgender gen Z comedy project since it first got announced earlier this year. I have kind of a love hate relationship with the late night comedy news format, and I myself have thrown around the idea of playing with that format. So when I first heard about Ella's new show, Late Stage Live, my first thought was, damn it. That's such a good title for a show, and now
I can't use it. Just this immense sense of jealousy washed over me, and I've had to watch everything She's put out since then.
Hi.
I'm Ella Yeerman. My pronouns are she Her. I am a comedian, journalist, writer living in Brooklyn. I host Late Stage Live, which is a queer gen Z public access late night show on Brooklyn Public Access and YouTube. And I also host T for T Comedy, which is Brooklyn's premiere all trans stand.
Up comedy show. We film in a Brooklyn.
Public Access studio called brick Bric in front of a live studio audience, and the vaguest pitch I give to people who have no idea what the show is is that it's what if the Daily Show was hosted by a transgender woman, and we draw a lot of comparisons to The Daily Show by virtue of sort of similar formats. But myself and my writers are really interested in sort of, for lack of a better term, queering the late night format and sort of exploring what late night can do
for a younger, more radical political audience. The Daily Show was like a really big radicalizing force, I think for a certain generation of people. Really, John Stewart took that show and turned it into a really powerful tool for getting people engaged and aware of things that they might not have otherwise been aware of. But the culture has really shifted in terms of politics, in terms of media consumption since John started The Daily Show in the nineties.
We have shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. We have shows like My Coworkers and Bosses at some More News and when we have like all of the alternative media sphere ranging from like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones to the Young Turks to everybody and their mom on YouTube.
Now, kids these days don't really watch the news. I don't know anyone my age who's tuning into MSNBC A twenty twenty two statistica survey of gen Z reported sixty percent of respondents never go to local or national papers for news, and only a respect of five percent checked their local or national papers for news daily, weekly, or once a month, but fifty percent of gen Z check social media daily for news, with seventy five percent reporting they check at least once a week. TikTok reigns supreme
for information dissemination. Over one third of adults under the age of thirty regularly scroll the app for news, often treating it like a search engine, with the rest of the youths and young adults going to YouTube as well as other social media apps to fill in the information gaps, as well as podcasts such as this.
My writers and I especially read Pope. My headwriter and I talk a lot about just like where our generation is getting its information from and where it's consuming media, and how ideas and political ideas are being disseminated, especially in the age of short form content. With TikTok and the democratization of information. We did a whole episode about sort of misinformation and the democratization of information a few months ago, where there's like, obviously all of these benefits
to the lack of centralization of media consumption. We're seeing a lot of that with the Palasine stuff right now. People don't have to rely on the New York Times, people don't have to rely on these big media institutions with their obvious biases to get information. But it also sort of engenders this, I think, this very specific attitude
towards intellectually engaging with information. The platforms and the systems that we use really encourage very quick opinions and fast reactions and picking up your phone and talking immediately about something as quickly as possible hot take political environments, and we were really interested in looking at a format that has historically been more about a team of people with multiple perspectives coming together to create one piece of analysis
and taking longer to look at those pieces of analysis and being able to really dig into data. And then what putting that into a late night format means. We have a live audience, which a lot of like stuff on YouTube doesn't have, and we have a lot of
the trappings of like og late night. We have like sketches, and we have correspondents, and we have a theme song, and a lot of that has sort of gone away as we've moved more into like a YouTube media sphere, so it's been exciting to both bring that back for like esthetic and nostalgia's sake, and then also to sort of see what and I think the shows in early stages. So I am excited to keep playing with this but finding out like what exactly the package does for the content.
We talk a lot about like form follows function and vice versa, but I think there's like intentionality behind presenting it as a late night show. It's not just like for aesthetic value.
Speaking of late night televised comedy, The People's Joker follows an aspiring comedian who goes by Joker the Harlequin as she attempts to host a Lauren Michael's TV show legally distinct from snl Oh, and on her way, she transits her gender and fights Batman. The project started a few years ago because a friend of filmmaker Vera Drew jokingly commissioned her for twelve dollars to make a re edit
of Todd Phillips's Joker movie. Phillips had been in the news cycle complaining that quote unquote, woke culture was making it too hard to make comedy, which is interesting coming from a guy who's continually made some of the most successful comedies in the past twenty years. But I digress. Here's Vera Drew talking about how The People's Joker ballooned from an ironic re edit of the in Cell Joker movie into a whole new piece of queer cinema.
Yeah. I started doing it, like in earnest. I started like actually re editing the movie. And I had worked at Absolutely Productions for years as an editor and had kind of come up as an alternative comedy editor, So you know, at that point it was probably just going to be like a lot of bart sound effects and
woosh noises and slips and slide whistles. But as I was working on it and kind of just making this like big piece of like bound footage video art, like a narrative kind of just like fell into place, and I it kind of just came in an instant and I was just like, oh, okay, I think I actually want to make like a coming of age film, but I want to make like a parody of The Joker, like in that process and kind of just like tell like a really earnest and super personal autobiographical story about
my life and growing up in the Midwest and coming out as trans and comedy and you know, my relationship with my mom and toxic relationship I was in and stuff, but kind of process and mythologize all of that through Batman characters. So that's kind of the origin of the movie.
I guess I had also kind of been kicking around an idea for like a body horror, like a transpot horror movie before that that was basically like about a drag queen who was physically addicted to irony and like couldn't like survive without it, but it was also like destroying her from the inside out, and the two ideas kind of like merged together into this sort of I guess, like ver Drew, I watched a lot of Batman growing up, but from a weirdly young age, I was also always
weirdly fascinated by late night TV. My parents never watched the news, but they watched late night. They got their news from Stephen Colbert, they got their news from, at least at a certain point, Jimmy Fallon, although that fell off quite quickly. But I've just always been incredibly fascinated by the whole late night format as a cultural source
for news. At a certain point around twenty seventeen, YouTube started pushing late night clips into everyone's feeds, and everyone just got so inundated with this style of political comedy.
I also grew up on The Daily Show and Colbert. My parents are both journalists, so I probably am a little biased towards being someone who did read the paper growing up, who did like watch CNN growing up. But I recognized there's this huge chunk of America who gets their news from yeah, Colbert's monologue, from Letterman's monologue, from the Colbert Report, which is such a.
Crazy, very very scary.
I had so many like conservative family members who did not realize the Colbert Rapport was satire, took it as a legitimate news source.
Well.
I mean when Trevor Noah took over The Daily Show, they tried to do like their version of the Colbert Rapport with Jordan Klepper's The Opposition, And I think there are a number of reasons that didn't work out, but one of them being that the like the Colbert Rapport was parodying the other Fox News guy. Yeah, I was pairting that whole realm of people and the Opposition was
partying info wars, which is almost an unparitable thing. So like the like the right wing media ecosystem has shifted so far that that you can't really get a Colbert Report now, it just doesn't work. But yeah, like there's so many people who get their information directly from that. And I think a lot about like the creator responsibility, like which is a word that gets start or a
lot around in social media spaces. But it's interesting to think that Colbert now and Stuart and even like Seth Meyers have this responsibility as like informants to their audience in some sorts of the sole source of news for those people. When we were writing our misinformation piece, we did talk about how in twenty fifteen, there was a poll that came out that said that like the majority of liberals, like the highest percentage of rules got their news from The.
Daily Show with John Stewart.
And I think a lot about the excuse John used to give to conservatives at the time who would criticize him for not doing his due diligence on any given subject.
He would often say, well, we're a comedy show.
The show that comes on after us is Pupp's making prank phone calls, and he would sort of like deflect that responsibility by saying, I'm an entertainer first. And I think that one of the big things that has changed in the last twenty years or however long, is that
the line between entertainer and journalist has totally blurred. With like the rise of like video essays on YouTube, and just like again like the democratization of information and content creation, everyone is sort of an entertainer, everyone is sort of
a journalist. There is like a responsibility that comes with having a platform, and so obviously, like our show takes a great deal of care to make sure that the information we're presenting is is accurate and correct, and that the analysis we're doing is as empathetic and thoughtful as we can.
I do think there is real value in going after late night as a specific culturally impactful mode that isn't just comedy, isn'to just to the news, and in its quest to be a little bit of both, it becomes
its own thing. I've always been interested to see what a late night show with my politics would look like, and I think to some degree, you can look at John Stewart in the twoth and I've been watching Stuart's new stuff on the Daily Show every Monday, mostly just to see how he's going to handle this landscape, which is very different from when he left in twenty fifteen. Nowadays, I think you can look to John Oliver as being probably slightly more radical, but even still there's a decent gap.
Certainly some YouTube shows try to fill in that gap, but I've really enjoyed watching the Late Stage team apply classic late night stylings to a more radical queer form of politics, including like Ella mentioned, correspondence segments as well as actual reporting. Late Stage Live did a recent piece
on the effects of Libs of TikTok. It was a really good look at something that I oddly hadn't seen anyone else really interrogate before, actually looking at the people that Libs of TikTok has targeted and how that has literally affected their lives.
Obviously, we are still like growing and trying new things. I was really proud of the Libs of TikTok piece. It was the first time we'd done like firsthand recording on the show, and it's like something I want to keep exploring. One of my favorite parts of the Daily Show is the more serious like field pieces they end up doing that obviously also have comedic games applied to.
Them, but also are like real journalism that.
Maybe mainstream news institutions don't cover, and that's really exciting and obviously coming from like a specifically queer perspective. There's not a ton of specifically queer news. There's a few magazines, but there's nothing huge.
It could happen here, will return after these messages we now returned to. It could happen here. Something I noticed about both Late Stage Lives and The People's Joker is that they're not just made by queer people, but the work itself feels queer. I think part of the reason why is that both carry this spirit of patchwork and collect aberration, proudly featuring a sense of punkish outside noess that's uninterested in being tamed for a sis straight audience.
The end result is one holy reflective of the community that has fostered the arts creation. To extrapolate on this, let's return to my interview with Vera Drew. I know for a while you were getting people to send in to like send in stuff to get put in the film. There was kind of it was like a very collaborative start to this project, and I am I am interested in that aspect of like how this is like both like a collage multimedia piece, but also it's not like
the work of like one singular artist. It's like a very like queer community made thing. And it definitely feels that way, especially with all of like all like the sets, all of like the art. It's so many different styles mashed together into like this beautiful mosaic. And I'm interested in like your decision to have it be that collaborative thing and how that kind of came together.
Thank you for asking, because yeah, I don't really get to talk about that that much. And it's it's definitely like a part of this that really, I think is why the movie just feels inherently queer. You know, we had just this incredible team of people working on it because you know, like I said, like I did cash in like every favor I had, you know, to cash in. But you know, the movie started as this like video remix thing, and then I think as we were writing
the script and it became more narrative driven. It was just like we were always writing this script that was very impossible to film. Uh, you know, just a very like there's Batmobile and like, yeah, you know, fuck are you gonna do that? But we weren't really thinking about that as much. We were just like, let's just write this movie, and let's just write it as like a comic book movie, like let's have the tropes of a comic book movie and a queer coming of age film
and and just fully execute those. And you know, I think the idea of it becoming sort of this mixed media piece was was very gradual. I think like it was one of the many things about this This movie was very intuitively like I never had a budget. Really, I would never make a movie like this again. It was it was very like kind of figuring it out as you go in a lot of ways, especially just on the like business side of things.
Yeah, it has that kind of Inland Empire uncanniness a little bit totally.
There's definitely that. It's definitely I'm working backwards this, this is my Inland Empire and you know, like twenty years I'll have my eraser head finally. Yes, yes, But it really just kind of followed that like sort of intuitive path. And I kind of announced what I was doing and I said, you know, my friend and I are making this queer joker parody and anybody who wants to help us, like you know right here, and I kind of at that point it still was in this kind of like
loose space of what is this really? But just so many artists came forward, and most of them artists who had never worked on film or TV. So it was a lot of just like fine artists and painters and illustrators and visual artists. And then like a lot of people too, just that I had seen for years on trans Twitter or like like featured in like very like
fringe like zines and shit like that. So it's just like, holy shit, like we could really make this movie that looks like nothing you've ever seen before, and and we can do it too in a way that like we're creating original art, you know, like all the art in it is original. I mean, like we recreate a lot of sets and stuff from famous comic book movies, but like it was painstakingly created, and every character had its
own character design, you know, original character design. Like we couldn't just take mister mix auplick and put them in the movie, Like we had to go, okay, like how can we clear mister mix alepla like, Okay, we'll make a mix mixy and they'll be like a weird like floating like Hanna Barbera cartoon type, but it's kind of more hr puff and stuff. Was the vibe we went for there, very sit in marty Croft, even with a
community of queer artists. How does one go from the idea stage of say, hey, let's make a more queer and radically oriented late night comedy show to having it actually be filmed and then broadcast. So I asked Ella what allowed her to get this project off the ground and what her process was like going from an idea to something that's now on air.
So, like I said, I've been writing for Some More News for three years and I love that job and I love my coworkers there, but they are doing one thing, and I, over the last year or so, sort of started to realize that I also wanted to be doing this other thing. I wanted the live studio audience. I wanted a very queer focused show. I wanted an in person writer's room ultimately, or like a local writer's room.
Because everyone else had Some More News is La based as far as I'm aware, and I'm the only East Coaster out here, and I just wanted the whole bunch of things that Somewhere News wasn't doing. So I was like, Okay, I guess I have to do that myself because there's
no one else doing it that hire me. But I grateful that I had my experience with Somewhere News and continue to have my experience with them, because I structured our writer's room very similarly to them, and I took a lot of inspiration from their early stages in terms of like the creative side of things and then in terms of like finding people and making it happen. Something I've learned my whole life as a creative is that you just sort of have to fucking do it. I've
been like self producing work since I was eighteen. When I was eighteen, my community theater in my hometown had a big all hands meeting where they were like, hey, we're out of money.
What do we do?
And I said, you should do a Shakespeare play because you don't have to pay for the royalties for that, and they were like, well, we don't have anyone who wants to direct a Shakespeare play. And I said, okay, then I'll do it, and they were like, okay, then you do it, and I sort of had to just do it. And I did it, and it was messy and pretty amateurish, and then I did it again the next year, and I got better, and I did it
again the next year. It got better after that, and then after I graduated college, I started doing stand up again. I just stand up a little bit pre transition, and it was terrible, and so I started to become a girl and I started doing stand up again, and I realized there wasn't a ton of spaces in the stand up scene for trans people, and I.
Said, okay, so let's host a trans show.
And I found a bar and I got in touch with the bar, and then I just started dming comics and I said, hey, I don't really know any of you because I'm not really integrated into this comedy scene, but please, and the show solely grew and I started to meet more people, and then by the time I had the idea to do late stage, I had been doing my show for about a year and a half and I was pretty integrated into the comedy scene, so I was never worried about finding writers in terms of quantity.
I reached out to my headwriter Read Pope last April after seeing a similarly live show by my friend Kay Loggins called Knight Live that she does every so often, and I helped her with the production day on that It was a thirteen hour production day, and I just remember having so much fun realizing that you could find people in the artistic community like enough people who were
willing to do it. So yeah, I reached out to Read in April and I said, Hey, I have this idea, and they said, cool, here's a list of people I think would be fun to work with. And we reached out to a small handful of writers and some of them got back to us and some of them didn't, and we slowly found our team of people who were able to commit to a first monthly and now weekly writers meeting.
After the writing team was assembled, they still needed to find a place to record the show. The director and executive producer Octavia helped find the public access station in Brooklyn that Late Stage now shoots at, which is open to the public.
Do you have to take a five week course there where you get certified in all of the equipment and then you just get to sort of reserve their space and do whatever you want there, and over the course of those five weeks, Read, Octavia and I would take this like bi weekly class and afterwards we'd go and get food and we would just talk about what the
show needed and where it was. Every time a roll popped up in discussion that we didn't have yet, Octavia or Read or I would say, oh, I know someone, and we'd pick up the phone and call them immediately. And so it was a very organic growth in terms of production team at first, and that just comes from like working within your own community and like finding an
artistic community. I don't think I could be doing this two years ago, Like I'm really grateful for having hosted a stand up show for many years first to integrate myself into that community and knowing a lot of like hardworking, multifaceted artists.
Once again, the ability to make friends both in your local community and even online remains one of the best ways to get shit done. The collaborative multi media collage aspect not only in views a project with a sense of DIY queerness, it also makes tackling a project as gargantuan as The People's Joker a bit more feasible.
We'd have these like artists with like you know, like Matty Forrest makes beautiful puppets and just beautiful arts. So it's like, okay, like obviously we're an ad. Maddie asked Maddie to make the mixele Plick puppet and like it'll
be like a Sid Mardi Kroft puppet. And like one of the other artists that came through was Salem Hughes, who makes these like three D like Low Holly three D models, And at that point it was like, okay, well that obviously has to be like our bat cave, Like we'll make it look like a like a Doom like N sixty four video game or something, and the
batmobile too. So it's just kind of like figuring, like breaking up everybody's role into these individual pieces and like kind of going by like both physical locations, like reserving one artist for each physical location that we'd see pop
up in things. You know, like Paul McBride did all of the Joker Apartment shots and we recreated Woking Phoenix's Joker apartment, but you know, change the color and the wallpaper and blah blah blah, and Paul again like another person who just like Paul, just makes three D models just to like relax. I guess, like he just makes these beautiful interiors, and it was like, okay, cool, we'll make like a beautiful, like hyper realistic interior. I never
really forced my aesthetic on anybody. I really just allowed people to just kind of like lean into they're aesthetic and just do what they wanted and kind of like just run wild and be like, okay, so you make low polyart, like we'll do just do that in this case, and our amusement park set was made by this artist at GRAT and he just makes beautiful DMT like psychedelic imagery.
So it was like we got this you know, hyper crazy like weird perspective amusement park from him, and we turned that into a three D model, you know, rather than going like.
How are we going to make this work?
You know, like this is a this is a flat painting, you know, like it's a location we keep seeing in the movie, like how are we going to make it work? But it was just like just kind of saying yes and to everything and really allowing everybody to just play to their best strengths. And I knew that like my voice and my vision were always going to be there, like my face was going to be on screen for
most of the movie, and like it's my story. Like I was never really worried about losing myself or disappearing in the art at all, and instinctually, I just kind of knew it would make the movie feel very clear, and that's really just what it was.
Like.
It was really just this big kind of DIY community art project, and it was a big task for me to kind of like find the unified aesthetic. But thankfully, you know, like I've done VFX, I had a lot of other VFX artists helping me work on the film, and we were able to kind of find a through
line in the way like all filmmakers have to. You know, you just stick to a color scheme, you stick to a very certain type of pacing, and you know, and musically too, like I think we really like were able to like bridge a lot of the things together just by like having constant music playing. And you know, I think I was really influenced by Natural Born Killers and Pink Floyd's The Wall and also Headwig in The Angry Inch. I think we're like kind of the Big Three, and
also returned to Oz. Those are the Big four and just to round it out to five then Batman forever, of course. But I think like a movie's never really
been made. I think plenty of movies are made like this all the time, like where these like little communities of people get together, but like this was like an intercontinental kind of community project and it was beautiful, Like I'm so glad we did it, and it was it was an opportunity to really hopefully like get a lot of artists visibility in spaces that they normally wouldn't be visible, and an opportunity to to like work with a lot of really talented people and allow them and make them
feel valued.
You know.
I just worked on so many things where it's like you get art back from somebody and then you're like we got to send this back or you're fired or you know whatever, And this is like I never wanted to be that. It was very much like this is kind of all of our movie in a way. And now that the movie's out there too, I really think of it. It's like it's just it's got its own life, like it's kind of no longer mine, and it kind
of never really was. It was always like ours. It was always mine and my friends and you know, all the people that worked on it with me, And I think that is just really cool, And thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about it, because I think it's one of the things that kind of gets lost about this project a lot, just because of how personal it is and because of our legal stuff. But like I would have never been able to make this if it wasn't for the team we will return to.
It could happen here after these messages we now return to. It could happen here. What I find most inspiring about projects like The People's Joker and some of the other indie no budget transfilms by filmmakers like Alice Mayo, Mackay and Mia Moore, as well as projects like Late Stage Live, is that they demonstrate that we don't need to rely on big studios or big production companies to green light things in order to make our own stuff.
You can just make it.
Which is not to say that it's easy, but the biggest drive to getting something done is literally just getting it done. Is just doing it. And if people see you doing a cool thing, oddly enough, some of them will want to help you, which is kind of a bizarre notion, but it does end up being true.
The core thing I've learned about producing work over the last many years is people are willing to do stuff if you do it first. If you prove to them that you're committed to something and have a cool idea, people will jump on board. Yeah, And I think that's been proven by how excited our audience has been for the show, how willing people have been to jump on
and our entire crew and writing stuff is volunteer. Right now, We're making a little bit of money on Patreon, but certainly not enough to pay the twenty plus person team that ends up working with us every month, although that is the goal down the line. But yeah, people are willing to do a cool thing and volunteer their time. Artists want to be making stuff, and so it's just
about doing it and then just doing it again. When I first started hosting my State up show, we did it the first time, and I spent months like came about it, and after the first month, I was like, oh my god, that was so hard. How am I going to find enough transcomics to you at a second time? How am I going to have the energy to do
a second time? And my boyfriend at the time said, if you want it to be a monthly show, you just have to do it every month for a while, even if it sucks, and then eventually it will suck less. And he's right. He's still right, and I'm still doing that show two years later. And we did late Stage the first time, and it was several months push to get the first script out, and we got the first episode out and we were like, oh my god, Okay, let's do this again in one month.
Can we do it?
And we did it a second time and it was also fun and good, and then you just like figure out how to make it easier each time. And I will not deny that it is hard work. We are all slowly killing ourselves to make this show. I work a forty hour food service day job that I came directly from to do this interview. Everyone else on my show is either working full time on top of the show, or unemployed and slowly losing money. At various stage people
would like to fire queer people. So every few weeks someone comes into a writer's meeting is.
Like, guys, I lost my job. Hah. So I will not deny that it's hard, and I don't want to.
I don't ever want someone to think of me saying just do it is like it's easy because it's a lot of work, and all of my team is like incredibly talented and has years of experience doing things. Everyone in the comedy scene in Brooklyn talks about like wanting to get staffed on a late night show, which is awesome, and I would love to get staffed on a late edge, Like though, that's the coveted job at the end of the line for the stand up community, but like, you
don't have to wait for that. You can just make the work you're doing. And I've had conversations with my writers where they've all been like, this has been a really cool opportunity because at the very least I've sort of found out if I would actually want to write on a late night show. We talk about that as a coveted job, but maybe I don't want to do that. It's a very different skill than stand up and that's been a fun learning curve as well as hiring a
bunch of stand ups. To write long form political analysis, you sort of have to herd cats to some degree.
Even with a supportive community, so work can be really grueling, and the road from a finished movie to being on the big screen can be a monumental challenge. The People's Joker is slightly unique in this way because of its peculiar copyright status of being a fair use superhero parody using some of our culture's most recognizable iconography to tell
a very personal story. Right before the movie was set to premiere at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival back in twenty twenty two, Warner Brothers sent a vaguely worded but threatening letter which resulted in the People's Joker of being pulled from the festival save for one late night screening. Yet throughout the legal chaos, Vera dru remained to steadfast to ensure the movie would be released the right way,
on the big screen where it belongs. This film has had, like a I guess, a troubled history, some might say, and how are you able to stick with this project after encountering like hurdles and problems, like because a certain point it's like, is this like a some cost fallacy or something like how did you decide to like actually stick with this and like really fight for this as a as a piece of like expressive art.
Gosh, you know, I mean I think I feel like I just didn't have like a choice really, Like I think when with the movie done and with how well just our first screening at Tiff went, like it was just like I was kind of at a point where I could shelve it, like cause that was really the other option, you know, put it just away for a few years and come back and maybe like you know, and public domain is a little bit more, you know, it's it falls under public domain because it will and
like I mean, at least uh Joker and Batman will be in public domain in ten or fifteen years. So like that was like an idea. I guess that was floated to me a few times. Whro It's just like I don't I didn't want to wait that long, and I just I really put all I had into this movie, you know, like I can in every favor I had ever accumulated in Hollywood financially, Like I took out a huge loan to finish it, and it was just this big, deeply personal thing that I had made that originally really
was just for me and my friends. Like it was just kind of a thing that I had just made, you know, maybe I would have shown it to like my Patreon or something. But like after a certain point, like it, you know, once we had that like premiere, it was just like like I can't just post this to YouTube. I can't like just dump it somewhere or like shelve it all my agents and stuff. I have way too many agents now, and they all were like telling me to that basically like it's it's it's okay
that it's not coming out. We can basically just use this to get the next project going. But I mean I quickly realized in that process, like this movie is like a fucking like you don't show this movie to a studio executive and then they immediately are like, yeah, let's let's hire this person. They just want to like have lunch with this crazy bitch who made the Joker movie,
you know. Like so it was like it just quickly became clear, like where like kind of just the people around me who had the best interest of the movie at heart, and also like just what felt bad and what felt right and what felt right really was like taking the movie out just to festivals and kind of doing like a secret screening tour, which is what we did, and that was really exciting and kind of like a jokerfied way of sort of getting this movie out there.
And that was really just on an emotional and like personal level, really what carried me through.
I was lucky enough to be in attendance at one of the Secret Festival screenings a few years back, and I was delighted to hear that nearly two years after it initially premiered at Tiff, the People's Joker was able to secure a distribution partner to put the movie in theaters nationwide. So once again I was fortunate enough to rewatch a piece of queer Batman art that otherwise would never been made under Warner Brothers Thumb and I think this is also the case with Late Stage Live and
many of these new independent queer projects. They most likely would not be produced by one of the massive media conglomerates that controls almost everything. You see. The small, independent nature of these productions actually gives them an opportunity to be much more queer and politically radical than what would be allowed under Disney, Universal, Sony, Paramount, Warner Media Incorporated.
We're like, obviously far more radical politically than any other late night show on the air right now. And it's something we've been thinking about as we attempt to scale and try to find people who are going to fund us, is that there are certainly people who could give us a lot of money who would also then really want to like limit the kind of speech we can make and the kind of opinions we can have, And so there's obviously a balance as we look for funding and
growth opportunities. But Brick the Public Access Network is their whole thing is free speech, and so part of working with them is their commit to free speech and radical programming.
I'm really interested in the choice to have it also be on cable access. I find that to be oddly compelling in an interesting way, and I wonder, like what led you to that decision.
So part of that is like rules and regulations at Brick the Studio. So you take one hundred dollars five week class with them to learn how to use their stuff, and they offer a lot of other classes too. You can take a podcasting class to use their podcasting studio, or a field class to be able to rent out equipment and go do stuff in the field. A lot of people make documentaries with their equipment. It's a very cool team if you're in Brooklyn, you should go work with Brick.
They're awesome.
But on one of the contingencies of working in their space is that when you film something with them, you do eventually owe them a product that they air on their network, and that for us is the show. We're not doing a ton of other stuff right now, although you know, with infinite money and time, we would love to be doing many other things. But Brick is awesome and really values like free speech and creator freedom, and so even though we owe them a product, we get
retain full ownership of our stuff. And so the way it is in this zany Internet landscape is that YouTube is the place to.
Get eyes on a project.
Like if I thought that public access TV was going to be the place to to like blow up, I maybe would be like focusing much harder on promoting that end of distribution. But I think for what we're making and what we're doing, YouTube and the Internet is like how to build an audience. But it's it does lend it like an interesting credibility to be on public access and esthetically we really like leaning into sort of like the nineties public access vibes. Part of that is the
equipment we're using. Our cameras are not the most modern, so you get a slightly grainy vibe. You get. The backdrop is like string and papers sprung together. We're filming in four to three, which is a really strong decision. Well, actually we film in sixty nine, we export in four three, whatever, but it gives us a very distinct visual look.
I think next episode we'll talk more about how so much queer video art feels like it's forced to be on YouTube and attempts to break out of that bubble. When The People's Joker was stuck in legal limbo, there was a lot of pressure just to put the film up online for free, and as much as Patients is painful, resisting that urge and waiting for the right distribution partner to come along really paid off in the long run.
I was just surrounded by other filmmakers in the genre community, and you know who would see the movie at this festival and be like, you need to just wait, like the person who's going to help you is gonna come, and if that doesn't happen, like you can self distribute, which I did not want to do. Like at a certain point, it was just like I had spent so much money finishing it. I just I would have ruined my life. I think if I self distributed it, like
I just couldn't. I didn't have the bandwidth. And I want to make films. I don't want to distribute them at this point, like maybe someday, but like right now, I just like want to tell as many stories as I can. I had a lot of support around me, and there was just so much enthusiasm from you know, people like you who saw it at festivals last year, who like we're basically like holy shit, and just all the kind of responses we're seeing now to it.
Like it was.
I got little like micronoses of that last year, which literally was I mean, I it's probably fucking tacky to say, but it was just the darkest year of my life. I was really just an anxious mess the entire time.
But I really did make this movie to like not only understand myself and sort of mythologize my life and my friends' lives and stuff like that, but like I made it to like get better, Like I made it to kind of heal not only my relationship with like my gender, but my family and my art and like how I want to make stuff, and I think, what's really beautiful what happened in that like dark period and up up until now and even right now, this movie
does really require me to take care of myself emotionally and mentally in ways that are or what I've always needed. So it's been it's been a cool kind of just like really expensive therapy. Ultimately, even though a lot of it's been really grueling.
That does it for this week at It Could Happen Here. In the next episode after the weekend, I'll conclude my conversation with Vera Drew and Ella Yerman talking about the pitfalls of representation, moving beyond the YouTube bubble, and the future of queer filmmaking. You can go to the Peoplesjoker dot com for information on tickets and showtimes, and you can find Late Stage Live by that name on all platforms, and to support the show, you can get behind the
scenes content on Patreon at Late Stage Live. Solidarity to everyone out there this week, see you on the other side.
It Could Happen Here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening.