Special Report: By Hook or By Crook (2001)

0:00People 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 is boring. good enough. Hey, can we have some tequila and tap? Tequila and tea. Tequila and tea. Oh, oh. So how it all started was, the guy in my town had just got this new car. We were driving around Hanne County, jamming out to some savage, talking about what we do with the dough if one of us hit the lottery.

1:00And what happened was we went over to the J&L, yes, down in the risk of getting the car. I think you should go home before the cops come, 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 as well. Shai. Robert Plant. Robert Plant? Shai. Wow, she had all the dogs. Just because one of them's got fleas. She's her lovely. I think she likes her. I think she likes her. No! I'm hungry enough to eat a racer's. It's not a good idea to fall in love with the broken heart. I'll break your heart.

2:20I 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.

3:22And 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 as 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.

4:26Yeah, we started at Cafe. Eventually we started this site 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. So this 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 the idea come from and how do you actually gather those troops and say, all right, let's do it. We wrote a couple of bad scripts first where we wanted to have a concept that was, I think it's bounded. 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 nothing to do with that. And just this really exciting genre. And that wasn't our skills at the time, especially.

5:28And they're watching. And it was tough, really. 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, who is on that drive. He got the sort of rolling on this new approach to the story. And yeah, this one 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 out of the window. And I shouldn't have done that. And I admitted to you and to God and to everybody who's listening. Don't throw cigarettes out of windows. But I did. And then I had to drive up the, you know, I had to borrow like $200 in gas to like get up there and back. And then they had of course dropped the charges. But in those days, do anything online or show up on Zoom or anything. I had to borrow a car and drive up there. Yeah. But you know, where I think really well in the car.

6:31I 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 do you find the folks that you ended up working with? I want to watch the movie not that long ago. I was really struck because of the time that's faster. How everybody in the movie, every cameos and amazing artist musician. Like their own rock star and same with our crew. The crew was just filled with artists. Chloe Sherman. Supreme of help. All of the word production design in our department now are our famous artists. The Mara, the Mara Alpry. Some bar. Yeah. Sorry. I just had a moment brain. And then also. Bill Basquam was our gaffer who's an award winning filmmaker. And so everybody 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.

7:34It was the weirdest thing as soon as we signed the lease. Like we did a bunch of scams just like the people in the movie in our movie. We did a bunch of scams. Got a few hundred dollars signed this lease. And our only thought it up to that point was we wanted to have a wrestling mat and a coffee machine. That was a 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. Pile day and then started helping us scrape the floors of the paint the walls and stuff. Word got out. These cool people are opening in Dite Cafe. Let's go down there. And everyone started. It was just word of mouth in those days. So when it and so that was going for five or six years, but it definitely 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 was. Yes, redeployed when it came time to make the movie for sure.

8:36Now I've been to a cat cafe is a die cafe similar to you paid a pet the dikes try again trouble from that. But if you want to get your arm broken, but no, that would be it. That's that's an idea. It was yeah was we were like just the outcast. We were the outsiders of the outsiders. So we really I didn't feel that fit into the gave streamer lesbian scene. Not necessarily just because we were a different breed. We were this different generation. And we had some. There's always an intergenerational conversation. It usually is difference around the music to start with. We were a punk and as opposed to a more fokie song a 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. It was just tiny little home walk. But yeah, Jones that came there. It was like a real variety pack of people. But also there was so many gay people in San Francisco at that moment that we would forget for days on end that we were gay. We were homosexuals or frees even everyone was just fucking weirder than the last person.

9:40And there were hundreds of us are so it felt. And so I think when it came time to make by hook up by crook and in a movie seen 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 to 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 have been watching midnight cowboy for example when there was this there was Dustin Alpin's character Ratso Rizzo and 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 act there's no big backstory and there's no big gender explanation. There's no is a 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 Bucks.

10:41But the 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 what would happen if we could do that? How are you splitting up the duties and just being both in front of him 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 Stan Yukon 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 we was basically off of the chemistry of the friendship we had been performing this movie to ourselves. We took a city college acting class at another acting class movie out we run lines of dialogue. It was in our bodies and both certainly the help and brilliance of our crew and our collaborators are consultants that were specifically looking at performance work.

11:47Yeah, at the moment when there was a two shot and not one of us could not be behind the camera. Yeah, the other one is which and we would call these people in. What else are you doing at the over these last gosh 25 years now since the film came out? In art star and author anyway, that's my two cents. I went to art school and I became a visual artist so I was sort of making video art right away with Stan Yukon who's my partner in the movie and was helped make by hooker by crook. But we were making video art videos together. I was like right post by hooker by crook and I picked up a camera and I was like let's just go to the park no crew and just make some up and make some happen today just with all of these shops these film shops that had come to us by way of creating this really difficult big complex project. And so we re-deployed 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 be like their rock stars in the video scene and interesting watch that stuff got really popular.

12:57And then I was also doing sculpture and stuff and then in the last few years I started writing books and so I in 2020 I had a sort of nonfiction 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 what for 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 hooker by crook. And then the same budget was made possible because the 5d and the 70 camera came out with the high definition video clip and then my third feature was a little at 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 team genre movie and yeah, and then I'm going to go back to doing an indie project the next one now that's loosely based on my dad.

13:57But 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. So I just 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 movies 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 cinema look we had done and the transfers some of it was very nasty looking by the by the end.

15:01Stake House are great producer who's been working with us for 25 years and it's just awesome and help make by a huge part of making by a good by crocap and stay can 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 hookup I cooked it I love stories about friendships that's often a common theme and 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 a body gift yeah feeling just really good. I mean the movie hold up we're proud of that you can watch it 25 years later and you're like this good. It's not dated. It's not a movie for of yesterday or particularly it's still fun to watch.

16:04Yeah, it's totally weird enough to just not date itself. 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 hookup by Kirk again. Thank you so much Mike. Nice job too.

17:08So what you put to high school. Yes, man. Yes, man. Them this time. Don't bother to hear her rain fall big and move like that. A little more than something like a meaner. She don't need a big rubber. She don't need a brush. You have this understandable voice. She don't need a brush. She don't need a brush. You have this understandable voice. I'll get you down on the ground. Nail for long and you'll look it around. It's getting all back and all ready now now with a blast of stuck-in sheep and grind you to a site. Be flat, don't put up a fight. Run all of them all the night.

18:11Now we'll mask this sacrifice. Sacrifice, sacrifice your race. You won't have to beg it but let's not say. Un... Your walls get destroyed. Do you need to teach? She don't give a damn about my civil real life. I'm running a push-downs, I'm just trying to protect her love. I'm afraid she wants you to lose respect. You're all better keep her from being a lord. She don't have an interest in phone and I'll find out what you do with you. She'll show you the door you can sit by the phone. Wait for her to call you out. It keeps you in a state of toxic crisis. You'll never appear before you left behind. A spoiled, not known to me on the night. She's a one who attacks the highest rise. Looked by an old man. She know how fat.

19:13A blister of her. A little bit of her. In her bed. In her bed. In her bed. Darling, you're the only one. You're the only one. You're the only one. You're the only one.