It Could Happen Here - Making Independent Queer Art

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Gare talks with comedian Ella Yurman and filmmaker Vera Drew about the politics of late night comedy and the process of creating alternative queer media.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was,

should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners,

for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.

Calls on media. everything. 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 Uerman, host of the late night comedy show Late Stage Live. Transgender and a comedian, the two most persecuted classes. 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 Yerman. 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 T4T Comedy, which is Brooklyn's premier all trans stand up comedy show. We film in a Brooklyn Public Access studio called BRIC, B-R-I-C, in front of a live studio audience. And the like 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, Jon 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 Jon started The Daily Show in the 90s, we have shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. We have shows like My Coworkers and Bosses at Some More News.

And 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 2022 Statistica survey of Gen Z reported 60% of respondents never go to local or national papers for news, and only a respective 5% checked their local or national papers for news daily, weekly, or once a month. But 50% of Gen Z check social media daily for news, with 75% reporting they check at least once a week. TikTok reigns supreme for information dissemination. Over one-third of adults under the age of 30 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 Reid Pope, my head writer, 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 Palestine 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 stuff on YouTube doesn't have. And we have a lot of the trappings of OG late night format means. We have a live audience, which a lot of like stuff on YouTube doesn't have. And we, we have a lot of the trappings of like OG late night. We have like sketches and we have correspondence 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 aesthetic and nostalgia sake. And then also to sort of see what, and I think the show's in early stages. i i'm 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 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 Lorne Michaels 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 $12 to make a re-edit of Todd Phillips' 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 of the past 20 years. But I digress.

Here's Vera Drew talking about how The People's Joker ballooned from an ironic re-edit of the incel 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. In earnest, I started 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 at that point, it was probably just going to be a lot of fart sound effects and whoosh noises and slips and slide whistles. But as I was working on it,

and kind of just making this big piece of found footage video art, a narrative kind of just fell into place. And it kind of just came in an instant. And I was just like, Oh, okay. I think I actually want to make a coming of age film. But I want to make a parody of the Joker, like in,

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 and, 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 trans body horror movie before that that was um

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 and into this sort of, I guess. Like Veradru, 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 2017, 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 watch CNN growing up. But I recognize there's this huge chunk of America who gets their news from, yeah, Colbert's monologue,

from Letterman's monologue, from the colbert rapport which is such a a crazy very very scary i had so many like conservative family members who did not realize the colbert rapport was satire that's so frightening 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 were a number of reasons that didn't work out but one of them being that the like the colbert report was parodying um the other fox news guy yeah it was parodying all that whole like realm of people and and the opposition was parodying info wars which is almost an unparodiable thing so like So the right-wing media ecosystem has shifted so far

that you can't really get a Colbert report now. It just doesn't work. But yeah, there's so many people who get their information directly from that. And I think a lot about the creator responsibility, which is a word that gets thrown around a lot in social media spaces. But it's interesting to think that colbert now and stewart and even like seth meyers have this like responsibility as like informants to their audience uh in some the sole source of of news for those people when we were writing our misinformation piece we did

talk about how in 2015 there was a poll that came out that said that like the majority of liberals like the highest percentage of liberals got their news from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And I think a lot about the excuse Jon 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 puppets making prank phone calls. And he would sort of like deflect that responsibility by saying i'm an entertainer first and i think that um one of the big things that has changed in the last 20 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 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 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't just 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 Jon Stewart in the 2000s. and I've been watching Stewart'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 2015. Nowadays, I think you can look to Jon 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 reporting on the show. And it's definitely something I want to keep exploring. One of my favorite parts of the daily show is the like 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I

mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We now return to It Could Happen Here. Something I noticed about both Late Stage Live and The People's Joker is that they're not just made patchwork and collaboration, proudly featuring a sense of punkish outsideness that's uninterested in being tamed for a cis straight audience. The end result is one wholly 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 stuff to get put in the film. It was like a very collaborative start to this project. And 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 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 um 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 the 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 a comic book movie. Let's have the tropes of a comic book movie and a queer coming of age film and just fully execute those. And I think the idea of it becoming this mixed media piece was very gradual, I think. It was one of the many things about this. This movie was made 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,

uh, I'm, I'm working backwards. Um, this, this is my Inland Empire and, and, you know, like 20 years, I'll, I'll have my eraser head finally. Yes. Yes. But, um, it really just kind of followed that like sort of intuitive path. And I kind of announced what I was doing. And I said, my friend and I are making this queer Joker parody and anybody who wants to help us right here. And at that point, it still was in this 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 before. 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 was just like, holy shit. Like we can 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, um, from famous comic book movies, but like it was painstakingly created and,

and every character had its own character design you know original character design like we couldn't just take mr mix-up flick and put them in the movie like we had to go okay like how can we clear mr mix-up like okay we'll make a mix mixy and uh they'll be like a weird like floating like hannah barbara cartoon type uh it's kind of more hr puff and stuff uh was 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, 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 at 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 a whole bunch of things that Some More 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 will hire me. But I'm grateful that I had my experience with Summer 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 18. When I was 18, 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 it got better. And I did

it again the next year, it got better after that. And then after I graduated college, I started doing standup again. I did standup a little bit pre-transition and it was terrible. And so I stopped to become a girl. And I started doing standup again and I did stand-up a little bit pre-transition and it was terrible. And so I stopped 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 slowly 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. writers in terms of quantity. I reached out to my head writer, Reid Pope, last April after seeing a similarly live show by my friend Kay Loggins called Kay Night Live that she does every so often. And I helped her with the production day on that. And it was a 13-hour production day. And I just remember having so much fun realizing that you could find people in your artistic community, like enough people who are willing to do it. So yeah, I reached out to Reed in April and I said, hey, I have this idea.

And they said, cool, here's a list of like 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. 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, 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 reed octavia and i would take this like bi-weekly class and afterwards we'd go out and get food and we would just talk about what the show needed and where it was every time a role popped up in discussion that we didn't have yet octavia or reed 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 standup 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 multimedia collage aspect not only imbues 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 Maddie Forrest makes beautiful puppets and just beautiful art. So it's like, okay, like obviously we're gonna ask Maddie

to make the Mix-O-Plick puppet and like it'll be like a Sid and Marty Krofft puppet. And like one of the other artists that came through was Salem Hughes who makes these like 3D, like low poly 3D 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 n64 video game or something and the batmobile too so it's just kind of like figure 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 and things, you know, like Paul McBride did all of the Joker apartment shots. And we recreated Joaquin 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... Paul just makes 3D models just to relax, I guess. He just makes these beautiful interiors. It was like, okay, cool. We'll make a beautiful, hyper-realistic interior. I never really forced my aesthetic on anybody. I really just allowed people to just kind of like lean into their aesthetic and just do what they wanted and kind of like just run wild and be like,

okay, so you make low poly art. Like we'll do just do that in this case. And our amusement park set was made by this artist, AT Pratt, and he just makes beautiful DMT, like psychedelic imagery. So it was like,

we got this, you know this hyper crazy, weird perspective amusement park from him. And we turned that into a 3D model. Rather than going like, how are we going to make this work? This is a flat painting. It's a location we keep seeing in the movie. How are we going to make it work? 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 uh instinctually, I just kind of knew it would make the movie feel very clear. And,

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 we really like we're able to like bridge a lot of the things together just by having constant music playing. And I think I was really influenced by Natural Born Killers and Pink Floyd's The Wall, and also Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I think were kind of the big three. And also Return to Oz.

Those are the big four. And just to round it out to five, then Batman Forever, of course. But I think a movie's never really been made. I think plenty of movies are made like this all the time, where these little communities of people get together. But this was an intercontinental community project. And it was beautiful.

I'm so glad we did it. And it was an opportunity to really, hopefully, get a lot of artists' visibility in spaces that they normally wouldn't be visible. And an opportunity to work with a lot of really talented people and allow them and make them feel valued. 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 whatever. And this is like, I never wanted it to be that. It was very much like, this is 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. It's no longer mine. And it never really was. It was always ours. It was always mine and my friends and 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 gets lost about this project a lot just because of how personal it is and because of our legal stuff. But 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. to It Could Happen Here after these messages. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI

to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and

want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%.

I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We now return to It Could Happen Here. projects like The People's Joker and some of the other indie no-budget trans films by filmmakers like Alice Mayo McKay 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 greenlight 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 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 and our entire crew and writing staff is volunteer right now we're making a little bit of money on Patreon, but certainly not enough to pay the like 20 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 standup show, we did it the first time and and I spent months thinking about it. And after the first month, I was like, oh my God, that was so hard.

How am I going to find enough trans comics to do it a second time? How am I going to have the energy to do it 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 a second time and it was also fun and good and 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 40-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 stages. People like to fire queer people. So every few weeks someone comes into a writer's meeting is like, guys, I lost my job. Ha ha. So I will not deny that it's,

it's hard. And I don't, I don't want to, I don't ever want someone to think me saying just do it is like, it's easy. Cause 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 night show. Like that's the coveted job at the end of the line for the standup 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, the 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 2022, Warner Brothers sent a vaguely worded but threatening letter, which resulted

in The People's Joker being pulled from the festival, save for one late night screening. Yet throughout the legal chaos, Vera Drew remained 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 some might say. And how are you able to stick with this project after encountering like hurdles and problems? Like because like at a certain point, it's like is is this a sunk cost fallacy or something? How did you decide to actually stick with this and really fight for this as a piece of expressive art? Gosh, you know, I mean, I think I feel like I just didn't have a choice, really. 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 cause it will. And like, you know, in public domain is a little bit more, uh,

you know, it's, it falls under public domain cause it, it will. And like, I mean, at least, uh,

Joker and Batman will be in public domain in 10 or 15 years. So like, that was like an idea, I guess that was floated to me a few times, but I was just like, I don't, I didn't want to wait that long. And I had just,

I really put all I had into this movie, you know, like I cashed in every favor I had ever accumulated in Hollywood. Financially, 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. It was just 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,

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 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 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 joker-fied way of sort of getting this movie out there. And that was really just on an emotional and 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 have 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, WarnerMedia Incorporated. find like 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, for funding and, and growth opportunities, but BRIC, the, the public access network is, is their whole thing is free speech. And so part of, part of working with them is their commitment 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 what led you to that decision? So part of that is like rules and regulations at Brick, the studio. So you take a $100 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 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 retained 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.

If I thought that public access TV was going to be the place to blow up, I maybe would be 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 does lend it like an interesting credibility

to be on public access. And aesthetically, we really like leaning into sort of like the 90s 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,

is like string and papers strung together. We're filming in four, three, which is a really strong decision. Well, actually we film in 69. We export in four, three,

whatever. But it like 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 patience 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 going to 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 like, I had spent so much money finishing it. I would have ruined my life, I think, if I self-distributed it. I didn't have the bandwidth. And I want to make films. I don't want to distribute them at this point. Maybe someday. But right now, I just 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 micro doses of that last year, which literally was,

I mean, I, 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 not only understand myself and sort of mythologize my life and my friends' lives and stuff like that, but I made it to get better. I made it to kind of heal not only my relationship with my gender, but my family and my art and how I want to make stuff. And I think what's really beautiful,

what happened in that dark period and 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 what I've always needed. So 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 Ellie Uriman, talking about the pitfalls of representation

moving beyond the YouTube bubble and the future of queer filmmaking. You can go to thepeoplesjoker.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 is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.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.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the podcast for diving deep into the

rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.