It Could Happen Here - The People’s Joker: Transgender Supervillain Filmmaking

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Gare talks with director Vera Drew about her new movie, The People’s Joker, a trans coming of age story masquerading as an unauthorized Batman parody.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 Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jumae Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions.

So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls on media. Welcome to It Could Happen here, I'm Garrison Davis.

On this show, we end up talking a lot about the various ways politicians, media personalities, and lobbying groups are constantly trying to make life a living hell for trans people. Between restricting medical care, access to public spaces, as well as banning and literally burning queer art. Basically, a lot of depressing stuff that's designed to make us trans people go mad. We live in a transphobic society. All it takes is one bad day for an aspiring comedian to fall into a vat of estrogenizing chemicals and emerge a jokerfied harlequin. Filmmaker Vera Drew's new movie, a multimedia queer fever dream titled The People's Joker, takes this premise and depicts what it's like trying to make a living as an irony-poisoned trans person in a Gotham city where comedy has been made illegal.

This isn't just an unauthorized transgender parody of DC Comics, though it is that as well. an unauthorized transgender parody of DC Comics, though it is that as well. The film is a wholly unique collaboration of dozens of queer artists utilizing fair use to tell a trans coming-of-age story with the gothic queer-coded imagery of Batman. If you know anything about my tastes, you probably know that this is incredibly up my alley. So in a departure from this show's usual doom and gloom, I'm putting together a few episodes on what it means to be a queer artist in today's political climate. More episodes will come out next week, but I wanted to get this one out right now, in time for listeners to catch the theatrical run of The People's Joker, hopefully in a theater near you right now or in the near future.

Last week, I was lucky enough to chat with the clown princess of crime herself, Vera Drew, about the making of The People's Joker. My name is Vera Drew. I'm the writer, director, and I also star in The People's Joker. I also did some of the visual effects too. You can get tickets online at the peoplesjoker.com. I would like to just start with the origin of the People's Joker project. Why is there a transgender Joker and why does that make so much sense? I'm glad you feel like it makes sense. I mean, it kind of really started just because Todd Phillips was in the news talking about woke culture and how it was too hard to make comedy now and stuff, which is really funny coming from a director who's made millions and millions of dollars uh making comedy and like also like made joker like the year prior and that is a comedy like it's a dark comedy but it's totally a comedy and it made a billion

dollars but yeah he was complaining about woke culture as is his right um but uh and uh my co-writer the person who ended up becoming my co-writer, Brie LaRose, actually just kind of jokingly commissioned me on Twitter to re-edit Todd Phillips' Joker. And actually Venmo'd me $12. And yeah, I started doing it 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, you know, at that point, it was probably just going to be like 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

like big piece of found 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 and tell 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 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 trans body horror movie before that

that was basically like about a 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 the two ideas kind of like merged together and into this sort of i guess yeah that definitely, that definitely comes through. One of my favorite parts of this movie is that it gets to talk about so many intimate aspects of trans experience, like trans misogyny, the intersection of transphobia and misogyny

that gets targeted against trans femmes in particular, as well as trans for trans relationships, or T4T, and lots of other little things. It's using the visual language of Batman as a shorthand to contextualize parts of queerness that just don't often appear in mass media. I showed my co-host Mia the film last week to get her thoughts on the movie as a piece of queer art, since her and my own tastes often greatly differ. What did you think of The Trans clown it rips one of the things that was the most

interesting to me about it is like so i i'd read some reviews of it and because it's you know because it's sort of this is how the media works most of the reviews are by cis people and it's really fun to see a movie where you're reading it and you you you're looking at this and you're going oh these people didn't get it they have no idea what's happening they they they do not know about t-boy swag they do not know about like all of the stuff that's happening in this and yeah i mean i i think that's the thing about it that's really interesting because you know trans coming of age story is like one of the few kind of stories you're sort of allowed to tell if you're trans less so in film more so like in writing you're sort of allowed to do this specifically yeah yeah and it's really interesting the way that this movie starts with a you know for

the first maybe 10 minutes it's okay this is like a pretty standard coming of age story and then it hits the real shit in a way that doesn't ever show up on this stuff like i i first saw this movie a year ago and i was shocked at the depiction of like t4t relationships which you like never you never see yeah so being able to like look at like emotional abuse within a t4t relationship being depicted this way you're like oh my god it's like actually like showing something that is literally never talked about like openly like this is something that we like people have experiences of but it's it's never really like shown or discussed i found that to be incredibly resonant and very like tastefully done yeah i mean i was just like weeping watching parts of it absolutely there's a line in there that is i have never ever what like one of the sort of most real things that

like you as a trans woman experience is someone who's trans misogyny exempt saying they don't feel safe around you yeah and that being how they kick you like how you get ran out how you get abused that the fact that that's in that's in film and you can see all of the people like you can see cis people like not getting it like they just they don't they don't understand what's going on and that's really incredibly powerful in in a lot of ways all while in like jared letter joker makeup yeah it's it's amazing they're like getting into all of this like extremely intense stuff the gaslighting scene was fucking phenomenal but it all looks like this fucking like copy pasted comic art spliced in with like speed

racer and return from oz and it is with all of these like adult swim aesthetics because um vera drew has been an editor on a lot of like starting with like Tim and Eric stuff to like Nathan Fielder to Tim Robinson uh very entrenched in this like layered collage like adult swim style so that's present all throughout the movie it's extremely visually unique it's it's kind of like like it like it it really is like an internet meme like brought to life and like puppeteered by like an uncanny uh unseen hand uh i think it really embraces the aesthetics of like an ill-fitting halloween harley quinn cosplay costume it's like taking that and like deeply interrogating what that visually represents and looks like and why someone would wear an ill-fitting Harley Quinn costume.

It deeply understands all of the aesthetic sensibilities behind an image like that. Extremely, extremely fun. 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. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game.

If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.

Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted 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 Piece, 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. I think it's worth talking about, at least in brief, the trajectory of this movie's release, because it is a very comic book, joker-fied story, from the idea of this film to its premiere at a

film festival, to all of the uncertainty and legal chaos that came along the way. So, an earlier cut of this movie was originally set to premiere at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, back in 2022. Right before the first showing, 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 that got rave reviews. With its legal status uncertain, the movie kind of went into limbo. Here's Vera Drew on what happened after the first TIFF showing. I really put all I had into this movie. I cashed 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 it was... After a certain point, once we had that premiere, it was just like, I need to... I can't just post this to YouTube. I can't just dump it somewhere or shelve it. And what felt right really was taking the movie out just to festivals and doing 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 this movie out there and i was just surrounded by other filmmakers and the genre community and you know who would see the movie at this festival and be like you need to just wait the person who's going to help you is going to come. So for a while, the film was making surprise secret screenings at film festivals across the US and Canada. And now almost two years later, the queer distribution company Altered Innocence picked up the film and it's now in movie theaters nationwide. The thing that I think is really interesting about this is sort of the timing of it, because this originally comes out in 2022, right? Sure does. And then it came out

by pushed back into the closet by the corporate ghouls. This discovery pushes the people's joker back into the closet. Yeah. But what I think is really interesting about it is its position in this sort of arc of queer media, right? I mean, when I was a kid, there was nothing. It was like the first queer thing I ever saw in a show was the Korra-Sami kiss at the end of Legend of Korra. Like, there was nothing. And then suddenly— It's funny.

I just watched last night like three of the old law and order svu trans episodes oh god oh boy oh boy do they have some extremely extremely interesting moments i i will leave it up to the viewer's imagination yeah but what's interesting about the rice is you get this moment that i i kind of recognize from you have this sort of asian american too, where like there was this, you know, it was, if you go back and watch something from 2004 that has an Asian person in it, it is, it is like, like there are people right now in the US who will physically attack you for being Asian and who will say shit and whose level of verbal racism will be less than the racism that's just in this movie as a gag. Sure. And, you know, and so you get and eventually like throughout the 2010s, we sort of got like, oh, there's like Asian Americans in movies now. And that was kind of happening with in with with sort of, you know, in particularly in cartoons,

things like Owl House, that was kind of happening in media with queer people. And then there was the sort of the 2020s backlash. And that's in like, you can, you know, it's in the same way the Hunter S. Thompson has this line about like, you can see exactly where this is standing in Vegas. You can see the line where the 60s receded. Like you can see the line

where all of the queer stuff just is like gone. And this forces everyone, you know, you have two options, right? You can fucking go back into the closet like gone and this forces everyone you know you have you have two options right you can fucking go back into the closet and you can fucking work on whatever dog shit show that's just going to be completely cishet now or you can just you can make the people's joker just to say you can just make you just you can just go and do it and you can make something and I think there's something that's very different

than the sort of wave that had come before it is that like this is a piece of trans media that is made by trans people for trans people and there's some like trapping stuff for cis people to sort of like walk them along a little tiny bit but like it uses the language of DC comics

to handhold other audiences to understand what's going on yeah but but at its core you know and like obviously like yeah there's you know mix of plix like i'm butchering his name no no one knows how to say that's that's the whole bit is that no one knows how to say it yeah i mean like you know so like there's like there's like kind of deep cut like comic stuff in there too because you know this is by people who like unlike everyone who makes these fucking movies these days people who actually genuinely like deeply love the source material that they're pulling from yes and thus are willing to just go off the walls with it and have like jason todd t-boy swag emotional abuser joker who is many such cases like so much more interesting than any iteration of the joker i've seen absolutely well and it also it also

pulls on like the very long history of the joker being queer coded yeah i mean like if you go to like grant morrison's joker extremely queer the 60ss Batman show is all very queer. But the Joker has always been seen as having this queer, deviant element, despite really only having heterosexual pairings. But even still, in his relation to Batman, it's always been a very queer, heavy thing. And that's something that DC Comics has definitely shied away from intentionally. And having something that so blatantly embraces that well not not just like does it for like fun representation like actually interrogates like queer relationships through that through that extremely like troubling power

dynamic is really really fascinating there is no fucking cis man like there is no white cis dude who has gone through enough shit to make them turn into the joker like come on it's like oh damn i couldn't get on a comedy show after i became the joker i was like wait wait no no this is insufficient the jokerify mia all it takes is one bad day i you know i mean i guess i guess i guess that is like do you want to know how I got these emotional scars it's really like like every cis man is okay enough with violence that they think that they're one bad day for just murdering everyone around them and sometimes they snap and it's like true you know but also come on like you motherfuckers you ain't seen. We've had a very like in-cell embrace of the Joker ever since Heath Ledger, of course, with the Joaquin Phoenix movie, very in-cell coded, both in conversation with that, because

this piece was made as a direct reaction to Todd Phillips's The Joker movie. But this is always, it's in conversation with that while highlighting the actual like, very, very inherent queerness to this man who dresses up like a clown to play with another man who dresses up like a bat 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German,

and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes

that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 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. 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 González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was lucky enough to catch an earlier cut

of the People's Joker at a Canadian film festival last year, dressed in one of my many Harley Quinn costumes. Again, if you know anything about me, you know I love Batman and Gotham City. I do my yearly queer Batman Returns watch parties where I dress up like Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman. But the social groups I'm often in can sometimes be a little bit weird about Batman stuff, because he's like a fascist or whatever. But I've always thought that Gotham City is really queer as a concept. And I love that someone else appeared to share that opinion and decided to explore Gotham City as an aesthetic zone to operate in as a queer artist.

Here's Vera Drew talking about the connection between her queerness and Batman I really am like a lifelong Batman comic fan and I've been working on this movie for four years and I'm somehow still not sick of Batman which is crazy to me yeah I mean I I think like the the lore has just kind of always been there in my life and it it's always just felt very queer to me. I mean, I guess mostly in a subtext way. But you just think back to all the first times I realized I was trans was that moment, was just seeing Nicole Kidman. I wanted to look like her. I wanted to be perceived how she was being perceived. I wanted someone to look at me the way Batman looks at her. And that was all very confusing for a six-year-old, you know, who up until that point was pretty sure they were a boy. I grew up in the 90s, so I didn't really have like my representation was the Jerry Springer show and Howard Stern.

That's where I saw trans people. And I think like comics were just this space where I could. I don't know. It just feels very queer like and it's it's not just subtext i mean there is there's a lot of subtext obviously in like the schumacher batman's like his his gotham city just is a like gay neon nightmare of beauty um we're definitely like taking that aesthetic kind of in the people's joker like that was always kind of my vision for gotham but even the 60s batman despite how absolutely yeah yeah yeah you know it's it's super conservative but like it's it's so colorful and like it's very gay

it's extremely gay it's and it's like i did because somebody actually described it to me the other day as like you have like a character like riddler and like he's just surrounded by like hot women like it's just everybody feels like kind of like a queer poly annoying person you know like which is me and my friends so i feel like adam west is definitely playing like a closeted gay man in that show as well. Totally. Who's like surrounded by much more like flamboyant queers. And he like,

doesn't know how to deal with it. That's totally fair. I, I really appreciated, like there's so many Batman forever jokes in this, like you even use the Batman forever font, like constantly throughout the film. There's so many Batman Forever jokes in this. You even use the Batman Forever font constantly throughout the film. There's so many little bits.

I really appreciated all of the Alexander Knox jokes throughout the film. I feel like that's one of the most underrated characters from the Tim Burton movies. And then all of the Grant Morrison super sanity bits also I found incredibly funny. When I was watching it, I felt like, a big strong sense I felt was like, this is what a piece of art would look like if it was made within the DC universe. It feels like something that comes

from that point, and is somehow emanated into our world. Wow. Thank you. It was wonderful. There's definitely some Speed Racer elements, a little bit of David Lynch's Dune, especially like the Mr. Mixoplex scenes felt very much like all of like the weird Spice Visions.

It was great seeing this progress from the cut last year to this one. It flows a lot. When I was talking with my co-host Mia about the film, we both pointed out how this movie doesn't just feel like a movie with gay people in it. It itself feels like a piece of queer art. Like the art itself has a sense of inherent queerness. I think there's a lot of reasons for that.

The fact that it's a collaborative project from dozens of queer artists sending in background pieces characters voice acting music set design it all creates a very like diy queer zine kind of feel but in a moving picture so i wanted to talk a little bit more about this difference between just queer representation and queer art you kind of touched on something previously where like the difference between queer representation and like art that is that like is queer these are like two very different things and the movie actually is in conversation with this as well being like the difference between hiring a trans person to be on the snl cast versus a trans person doing their own comedy show right and how those are two very different things with very different politics.

And I think this movie is a large statement against that assimilationist drive that a lot of people kind of fall back on for like self-preservation reasons, self-coping reasons, and like financial reasons, sure. It is extremely critical of that notion and reifies like this like DIY approach towards queer people making our own art. Yeah, and that's something I've been thinking about a lot because Asian-Americans have like, we got there, right? Like cis-Asian-Americans, we got our representation. What is a representation? It's like, well, they found a way to make being East Asian the thing you can sell to white people by having it be about food

and selling a slightly different version of the traditional family. and selling the version of like a slightly different version of the traditional family and i you know and like and you can you can sort of ask what good has this done for asian american people and mostly what it's done is that asian american cinema there's it's a wasteland right like and you know and you you could you could see like there's there's a version of sort of of where the 2020s go that's different where the assimilationist drive kicks in and we don't and this happens to queer media where it's just this yeah nothing it's just this void of of sort of formless content that gets sold to the cis people i mean and i think you could even look at that from a lot of like 2016 to 2020 stylings of queer media that does come off as very assimilationist. And now I feel like we are entering this new age of trans cinema where we have a lot of people either working with more independent production houses.

I'm very excited for I Saw the TV Glow coming out next month. But we have a lot of other independent trans filmmakers starting out quite young young getting into filmmaking also not quite young like into their 30s who are working to actually produce films and media that don't just get thrown up on youtube that producing art that does not just become another transgender video essay that floods the site right it's it's finding other ways to actually engage artistically besides the very comfortable ways that we've gotten used to, whether that's like, you know, your average trans DJ, trans like electronic music

or a trans video essay, which feels like really the only two ways to make art as a trans person reliably are making YouTube videos, making music, both of which can be very good. Absolutely. There's some fantastic trans musicians. There's a lot of great video essays out there,

but the artistic landscape is so much bigger than that. And being able to watch people realize that this YouTube thing is so self-limiting and starting to grow past that is incredibly cool to see. I know there's stuff like Nebula, which is like this streaming service kind of built on YouTube, but trying to do more of its own things. That's been interesting to watch grow. But also a lot of people attempting just to actually like take movies to film festivals and actually like engage with this as like art and like having it be recognized as art like it would have been so easy to turn the people's joker into like a youtube fan film

right just fucking thousands of fucking batman fan films on youtube that would have been so easy but the insistence are like, no, I'm actually going to use fair use law, going to actually do a legal parody and push this through film festivals, get it in actual movie theaters. We are seeing a lot more trans films at film festivals. We are seeing this start happening.

And I'm very excited to watch this grow. Yeah, and I think what's ultimately happening here is that there's a combination of two things one is that we're getting spat out by the traditional media machine and two the traditional media machine is rotting from the inside right and it's not good that either of these things are really happening but simultaneously it also means that we're in this position where having been spat out we can go make the giant media monster. Yeah.

We can go stab it and force a bunch of these random cis critics to try to figure out a T for T relationship, but just blow it. Something like this would have never been made by Warner Brothers. That's just impossible. No. This art could have never been made under Warner Brothers. That's just impossible and being able to say no I'm going to use these cultural iconography that we keep being told endlessly

that this is our culture's version of mythology which is fucking people talking about superheroes like that all the fucking time this is our Greek gods, this is our blah blah blah yet it's just owned by like two companies who control everything about it and don't allow the public to actually engage with these as cultural figures and say no we actually are going to find a way to use these characters in relation to someone's own life as

an artist and using it to talk about queerness and comedy and working in the comedy industry as a queer person to create a very unique piece that yeah literally could have there's no way would ever be made so this is this is a piece of art that could have never happened any other way and now we have it playing in a local theater near you and i think that's very cool here's vira drew again talking about the theatrical run we're playing a lot of cities we keep adding more if you don't see city, bother the theater in your town and tell them you want them to play it and show them one of the many articles about this film and maybe they'll do it or reach out to us and let us know. ThePeoplesJoker.com and you can follow me at

VeraDrew22 on Twitter, Instagram, and now TikTok. Don't know how to use it, but we're going to figure it out together. for listening again you can check out the people's joker at the people's joker.com look for tickets and showtimes hopefully there'll be one in your area next week there'll be more episodes talking about the making of this movie as well as a few other trans comedian art projects that are currently ongoing 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. 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 Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jamee Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.