25 years since Silas Howard and Harry Dodge’s enchanting trans-butch buddy movie By Hook or By Crook was first screened at Outfest in Los Angeles—beginning its award-winning festival run—the groundbreaking and enduring indie classic returns to select North American theaters this month. Distributed by Altered Innocence, the film will be screened in a new 4K restoration by the Academy Film Archive and the UCLA Film and Television Archive in conjunction with Frameline, Outfest, Steakhaus Productions and the Sundance Institute, with digital and physical releases to follow later this summer.
After meeting in San Francisco in the mid-1980s, Howard and Dodge opened a beloved queer coffee shop and performance space together, Red Dora’s Bearded Lady, which quickly became a touchstone for the city’s pioneering queer DIY literary and arts scene, attracting the likes of Kathy Acker, Justin Vivian Bond and Kris Kovick. Driven by an urge to reflect their experience as outsiders in San Francisco’s queer community of the 90s, Howard and Dodge went on to write, direct, produce and star in By Hook or By Crook, collaborating with producer Steak House.
Drawing from their own lives, the film chronicles three weeks in the life of Shy (Howard), a handsome, gender-bending, small town dreamer with a nagging messiah complex. Emotionally defeated after the death of his father, Shy heads to the big city to sink himself into a “life of crime.” He is quickly distracted by Valentine (Dodge), a deliriously expressive, wise-acre adoptee on a misguided search for her birthmother. The two freaky grifters join forces and learn the true meaning of “poise under pressure” in a captivating, funny, and moving anti-authoritarian tale of friendship, trust and redemption.
Howard was a founding member of the seminal queercore band, Tribe 8, and has gone on to be one of the most prolific and in-demand directors in television, working on series such as Boots, High Maintenance, Tales of the City, the Peabody-winning Dickinson, and the Emmy-winning Pose and Transparent, as well as directing the features A Kid Like Jake and Darby and the Dead. After By Hook or By Crook, Dodge went on to focus on his work as a writer and visual artist, with his sculpture, drawing, and video works exhibited by institutions including MOMA, The Hammer, and MOCA. His 2020 book of literary nonfiction, My Meteorite: or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, was a The New York Times Editor’s Choice.
With By Hook or By Crook back in theaters, Silas Howard and Harry Dodge speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s James Kleinmann about its inception and inspirations, drawing on their own friendship for the dynamic of the protagonists, how Joan Jett became involved, and what the new 4K version brings out in the look of the film. With new photography shot by Jen Rosenstein shot at Vidiots in Los Angeles.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: how did you became friends and how did that lead to you making By Hook by Crook?
Harry Dodge: “I moved to San Francisco in 1985. In those days there was no internet, so you needed to have a queer guide book to find all the spots. I discovered this café owned by dykes and started working there. Not too far into that, Silas started working there too and we became fast friends. We had a lot of of the same friends in bands and then Silas was in Tribe 8 and started touring. Silas and I eventually started our own dyke café, Red Dora’s Bearded Lady. Many years into that venture we decided to try our hand at making a film.”
Silas Howard: “I think of almost my entire generation as in-betweeners. We were in between the pre-internet and post-internet world and we were in the midst of the AIDS pandemic prior to the good meds coming out. So we were the lost children of this time in some ways. When we arrived in San Francisco there were lesbian bars, though we weren’t even of drinking age yet. The music we liked was punk and independent rock, so we would go to all these straight shows with our straight buddies and then go on to lesbian bars afterwards. We were Goldilocksing around trying to find a space that was our own. Eventually, that led to us creating a lot of spaces that we found home in; my band; Harry’s performances in theatre; our cafe; and making our movie.“
What was the impetus to make the film? I know there was a lot of community involvement from the people who were around you at the time.
Silas: “We were having some success carving out space for ourselves, though we were doing it off the grid because it was a very homophobic time, unfortunately, not unlike what’s happening again today. Nobody was paying attention to us, so we had free rein to do whatever we wanted; good art; bad art; good music; whatever. So we wanted to see ourselves reflected on screen. It’s powerful to have yourself seen, as opposed to being looked at. It’s a very different thing.”
Harry: “When we were opening the Bearded Lady, word got out that these people were opening a dyke coffee house. People who we didn’t even know started to pour in. It must have been ten people a day. Strangers ready to scrape the floor and paint the walls. It really looked like a movie scene of a community coming together to make something happen. We were both feeling in the glow of this super smart, super funny, massive community that was saturated with a can-do spirit and defiance in spite of the brutality that was directed at us by the outside world.”
“We were also insulating each other. There were so many of us and we didn’t really touch the outside world that often. Part of deciding to make the movie was in the context of world building. We were making what we wanted to see. We had this attitude of, let’s produce it, let’s make it happen. We made the café, now we need to make a movie. There were tons of performance spaces, tons of bands, tons of community spaces, things happening in warehouses, and on the street. So it was in that matrix that our idea germinated and we had a lot of help once we decided to do it.”
How did writing the screenplay work practically with it being two of you?
Silas: “Harry drove a lot of the captain of the ship turning in terms of being at the keyboard. We drew a lot from Harry’s theatre shows and performances, in particular the character of Valentine, but also for Shy. Then we brought in fictionalized elements of our own real lives. I always remember me eating food behind Harry while he was typing away and I’d be making loud noises, going, ‘Oh, let’s add this and add that!’ That was our writing combo. I don’t know if it’s common to all, but that was the one that worked for us.”
Following its initial festival run, this film has never gone away over the last 25 years, but this is the first time that audiences will be able to watch it in this 4K restored version. What were your thoughts seeing it in this really beautiful new state?
Silas: “Thank you for saying that it’s never gone away because we weren’t a film that made it on to these big lists right away, but the lists that we have been on have been such a beautiful thing. It’s just grown over time in the most slow and magical way. It’s intergenerational now too. There are kids who weren’t even born when we made this film who feel so connected to it. That’s a big deal. In terms of restoring it, having all these institutions care is a big deal too. It puts a spotlight on the film and makes it important and stand out. We were able to pull out the qualities of some of the scenes where previously, if it was projected with not the strongest projector, you might not see our faces. Like in the motel scene towards the end. Sometimes you’d only see the whites of our eyes.”
Harry: “Since the film was first released, Silas and I have received several emails a week from people, young and old, who have just discovered it. So we’re aware, maybe more than most, that in a weird way the film never completely went away. The 4K restoration is awesome. We struggled trying to get money for film. We were definitely aspirational and wanted to make something extremely beautiful, like Dog Day Afternoon or Midnight Cowboy. These 70s movies where the lighting is just so and the poetics of the cinematography are on display. That was the goal. But everyone was suggesting that we use video. We were initially resistant and bummed out by the idea, but it’s not like we had a lot of choice.”
“Then Julien Donkey-Boy came out and Harmony Korine had printed it on film after it was shot on video which was a way to save money. He added a beautiful grain. Then all these Dogme 95 films were coming out where the filmmakers were using video in an interesting, poetic way. So eventually we were won over to shooting on video, but we weren’t won over by the resolution and look that we got day-to-day.”
“We went to great lengths to figure out a way to create this cine look by adding fake grain. It worked okay, but then there were all these transfers that happened in those days where we lost resolution. So even on the DVD we had a crappy transfer. So this 4K is so great and it looks really beautiful. Steak House, one of the producers, had to work with a bunch of people to try and find an old computer because we did the post on the first version of Final Cut Pro. So we had to find a way to reopen the original files.”
Silas: “They had to go in a time machine back to the 90s!”
Harry: “It was a challenge to find all the raw footage and put it back on a timeline. That was a nine-month project on its own. So this has been an epic process, but it’s super awesome to see it looking so beautiful.”
It sounds great too and the music is a really important part of the film. How did that aspect come together?
Harry: “We edited to music with whatever songs we found. Then Carla Bozulich from The Geraldine Fibbers and Ethyl Meatplow said that she would be our music supervisor. After we were done editing, she came in and got the vibe from what was on the timeline and then replaced a lot of the music. She knew tons of people in bands and tons of good music. She’d come to us and say, ‘How about this?’ It was always something amazing that she’d come up with. She also did the soundtrack in that kind of Star Wars, orchestra playing along sort of way, which was so cool too. She was amazing.”
Joan Jett’s gorgeous cover of “Androgynous” is on the end credits and she also makes a cameo early on in the film. How did that come about?
Silas: “Harry and I both love that song and it was super generous of her to let us use it. I knew Joan from my band, Tribe 8, and we had played shows with her. One night, Lynn Breedlove was getting Joan’s number and she wrote it on Lynn’s stomach. Then Joan was like, ‘Give Flipper my number, I want to hang out with him.’ Flipper was my nickname back then. I was like, ‘Oh my God, Joan Jett wants to hang out with me!’ So I was just full-on flexing on that one. She was awesome. Her and Kenny Laguna have been together forever and he co-wrote some of her songs. They were so supportive.”
“Harry was there when we filmed Joan. Her head was shaved at the time and when we were getting her ready for this cameo we gave her this black wig and she was like, ‘You’re not trying to make me look like myself from The Runaways are you?’ We’re like, ‘No’, but we were totally going back to that era.”
Harry: “Yeah, she said, ‘I don’t care what costume you give me, as long as you’re not trying to make me look like the old Runaways Joan’.”
Silas: “She wasn’t only acting in it, she was also watching security for us because Harry was shooting it in this Costco parking lot on the East Coast and the security kept coming around.”
Harry: “Yeah, they kept telling us to get out.”
That was one benefit of the new tech, it allowed you to blend in a bit more with smaller cameras and a small crew.
Silas: “Absolutely, you could say that you were a student shoot and they would believe you.”
Harry: “It was literally just the two of us that day.”
By Hook or By Crook is a platonic love story in some ways, a buddy movie between the two of you. How much of your own friendship did you bring to it?
Harry: “A lot. When we decided to make the movie, we read a bunch of screenwriting books. We wrote a script over a year, but it wasn’t any good. It was a crime thriller where we take out the men and put in the butches. Then we wrote our next script over another year, which wasn’t very good either, but by that time we were really in it. Finally, we decided to rewatch Midnight Cowboy and a few other similar quieter movies about friendship. We realized that we could also take out the man characters and put in the butches in that genre too. The idea was to use the conventions of a genre, like the buddy movie, the road movie, and give people a sense of familiarity by using a conventional structure.”
Silas: “Keep in mind, this is our version of conventional because we really had no background in film at all. So our version of conventional was so unconventional, which was maybe a helpful thing in this situation.”
Harry: “Totally, but that was the idea. Eventually we decided to write a movie that was closer to the vest, it was closer to our experiences. We’d already been best friends for about 15 years by that point, so we both thought we’d be able to bring in some of our rapport and our love to the film.”
Silas: “I do think it was radical at the time. In the movie, Shy wants to have this nihilistic grand gesture of being a thief; the Clyde part of Bonnie and Clyde. Instead, he realizes that being a hero to the person next to him is the grand gesture. Keep in mind, Boys Don’t Cry was maybe the only thing that had a transmasculine character at that time. We both auditioned for that role and it was actually Eva Kolodner from the Killer Films who suggested that we shoot on video.”
“To be an outside character at that point and to live was radical, but to have a friend was incredibly radical and that’s really how we all survive. We don’t survive in our coming out narratives, we don’t survive in our bubble of talking about ourselves incessantly. We survive by the way we show up for each other. I think it worked for us to do it that way and it was much more honest.”
One of the things that I love about the movie is that these characters don’t explain their identity. They’re not having a crisis over it. They are messy and flawed, but it’s not anything to do with their gender identity or expression. How far was that decision a reflection of the way that you were living at the time in terms of not wanting to or having to label yourselves?
Silas: “It’s so true of any marginalized community when you go into the narrative format. In order to earn your spot in the middle of that story, if you’re not the cis straight white guy, you have to have a lot of trauma, have no sense of humour about your trauma, and maybe die. It basically has to make the audience be like, ‘Oh my God, those poor people. I’m glad that I’m not them.’ Whereas, out of the list of all the things that I am, transness is the least important. There are so many other things that have informed me.”
“Explaining is a power dynamic. It’s what you say to kids when they’ve done something wrong. ‘Explain yourself.’ The more we do that, the more we separate the audience, and audiences want to be let in. They want to be part of the story but they won’t find points of connection if we don’t let them.”
Harry: “Not explaining was twofold. Number one, we were in this community in San Francisco at that time and I would forget for years on end that we were super queer because there were so many of us. People were coming in and out of the café all day. All manner of freaks, and not freaks. It was a really diverse community and we were not explaining ourselves to each other at that point.”
“We were like, ‘Oh, I see you’, then we were getting on with other stuff. So we did try to put that in the movie in that moment when Silas looks at Valentine at the beginning when they’re both on the ground looking at each other sideways. They see each other, they have that moment of recognition, like, ‘Hey, I see you’, and then that’s it. Then they’re running alongside each other smiling.”
Silas: “Yeah, it’s like, ‘Hey, you look like me.’ We came out of a community where we were the outsiders of the outsiders. We weren’t gay or lesbian, we were very queer, we were very dyke, fag, and tranny. We were all of those things, but we weren’t part of this other narrative. We eventually became part of it. I think the older generation was exhausted from everything going on and we were the rowdy, loud generation that overwhelmed them at times. It’s interesting to think about that because in a way it helped to not fit in anywhere very easily.”
25 years since the release of the film, it has become a time capsule of late 90s San Francisco. Does that strike you when you revisit it?
Silas: “Definitely. We were part of this generation that formed our community and our craft during the early 90s. Even when we made the film in 1999 we were all getting evicted. The first tech boom was happening. There have been many gold rushes in San Francisco and that was one. The rents never came down. Ironically, as we were getting kicked out, everybody that could work in tech was being hired at triple their pay. So some people who we knew could give money to the movie.”
Harry: “A couple people who we knew went into computers and they were the ones that helped us make the movie!”
As I was rewatching the film, I couldn’t help but wonder where Shy and Valentine are in their lives now. Would you consider revisiting these characters for a sequel?
Silas: “I love it whenever that question comes up. My dad always wanted us to do that. He’s like, “Why don’t you do a second part to that By Hook or By Crook?”
Harry: “I would say, yes.”
Silas: “Yeah. Why not?!”
So watch this space! Talking about Bearded Lady makes me miss the queer community spaces I’d frequent in the 90s. I’d love to see queer coffee shops make a come back here in New York, I think multiple generations in our community would befit from that.
Silas: “I think about how right now correlates with the era that we came out of, not just specifically 1999, but prior to that. There are so many parallels and I feel really connected to the youth today. I think the kids are alright, but they’re up against so much. I do feel this hope that we are going to find more spaces in real time offline. Watching each other make stuff. Looking at each other instead of out at the constant crisis, which is not unreal, but it’s not doing anything for us to just look at those headlines. Knowledge is not experience, it’s totally different. One is predictable and one is not. I’m trying to create those spaces again with a group of filmmakers. To be physically in rooms together, showing work and talking about things is generative, and the other is not in my experience.”
Harry: “After By Hook or by Crook was done, I became a visual artist and a writer. I also work at California Institute of the Arts in the art program, so my experience is of young artists coming together in rooms and talking to each other. Right now, as there’s a rise of explicit authoritarianism and fascism, it seems more important than ever that we get into rooms together. The power of our bodies being in rooms together and not just scrolling separately is immense. We didn’t realize it that back then. We weren’t talking about IRL in 1990 because we didn’t have to.”
“Young people are still getting together. They’re creating bands, there’s a big literary scene, there’s a big art scene, there are openings, there’s a new theatre scene happening. All of that’s important. It may not be the queer coffee shop, and it may not be divided up directly with with gender and sexuality anymore, and maybe that’s okay, but there are definitely things going on.”
“It can be difficult with real estate. If everything gets too expensive, you don’t have the underground and then all of a sudden the cultural institutions calcify and die. There always needs to be people making shit that matters and that’s generally people without money. People making weird shit from the seat of their pants. That’s the stuff that enlivens people and there are still pockets of that going on in Los Angeles.”
Silas: “There needs to be more new formats. We came into a scene where there were 20 lesbian bars and 30 gay bars and those all shut down. We had to find a new way to express our generation and this new generation is doing that now. We have to pay attention to that.”
Lastly, what’s favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you?
Harry: “Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames instantaneously comes to mind because that’s a revolutionary movie, to say the least. It was made on a shoestring and it may or may not be explicitly and foremost an LGBTQIA+ movie, but it is revolutionary. Underground art that’s made by the seat of your pants has this vitality to it that keeps on giving. I rewatched it about a year ago and I fucking loved it. Also, everyone who knows me knows this about me: I love Bette Midler!”
Silas: “Those recordings of her at Continental Baths are amazing.”
Harry: “Oh, yeah. She taught me how to be a woman. When I was young, I looked at her and saw that you didn’t have to do it this way or that way. You could break all the rules, you could be horny and rude, but you could also be funny, talented, and fabulous.”
Silas: “I think of all of the queer people who have been left out of history. The community that we came out of taught us that we could all do it. I just went to the beautiful Yoko Ono exhibit at The Broad here in LA. It really showed the focus of her breakdown between the audience and the artist and that it is an interactive thing. A conversation. I think the queer community, out of necessity, had to find new ways to create. In fact, limitations became our creative strategies.”
By James Kleinmann
By Hook or By Crook will screen theatrically June 12th – 18th in New York and June 16th in Los Angeles, and expand to additional cities throughout the US. Digital and physical releases will follow later this summer. More details at alteredinnocence.net.
25th Anniversary 4K Theatrical Restoration Release Theatrical Dates
New York:
6/12-18 at Anthology Film Archives
*6/12 7:30pm screening – Q&A with Filmmakers. Moderated by Guinevere Turner
*6/13 8pm screening – Q&A with Filmmakers. Moderated by Lío Mehiel
Los Angeles:
6/16 7:30pm Screening at Vidiots – *Q&A with Filmmakers. Moderated by Vera Drew
Additional Dates:
6/18-21 Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, WA
6/19 River Oaks Theatre, Houston, TX
6/20 Webster Film Series, St. Louis, MO
6/21 The Frida Cinema, Santa Ana, CA
6/23 Nitehawk, Brooklyn, NY
6/24 & 28 Amherst Cinema, Amherst, MA
6/25 Metro Cinema, Edmonton, AB
6/26 – 7/2 Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL
6/30 The Beverly Theatre, Las Vegas, NV
7/15 The Belcourt, Nashville, TN
7/19 Roxie Theatre, San Francisco, CA – *Q&A with Filmmakers
8/5 Austin Film Society, Austin TX
