The People’s Joker and Her Army of Queer Rebels
For the past four years, I’ve been working with artists all around the world to make and release a feature-length Batman parody about an unfunny, transgender clown named Joker. Ostensibly, The People’s Joker (2024) is a film about DC Comics’ most famous villain. In truth, it’s heavily based on my life as a trans woman and comedian. The real villain turned out to be Warner Bros., who have tried to quash the release of the film. I’ve discussed what went down at length in interviews with the CBC, the LA Times, and The New York Times, among others. This isn’t a rehash of my film’s battle for survival, though of course I couldn’t leave that out — it’s a tale of the joy and community I found in the process.
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The morning of our theatrical premiere, there was an earthquake in New York City for the first time in 13 years.
I was staying with my friends Pet and Noelle (of the trans pop duo PET Wife) and woke up early, like I do every morning, to do my daily routine of yoga asanas, pranayama breathing, Transcendental Meditation, tarot, and journaling. I didn’t always do those things every day. Back before the world ended in March 2020, I used to describe myself as someone who “couldn’t meditate.” I had already been doing Tarot for years (they give girls a complimentary Crowley deck when they start hormone replacement therapy) but prior to the terrifying solitude of early COVID lockdowns, spirituality in general is something I used to find repulsive. It’s hard not to see faith as off-putting when you grow up in the American Midwest surrounded by Catholic perverts and Evangelical mall churches.
It becomes even more difficult to not become spiritual when, as I did over the course of making and releasing this film, you experience so many synchronistic, it-was-always-supposed-to-be-like-this moments in such a short amount of time. If the Before Times hadn’t come to their merciful end that violent spring, I would have never dived headfirst into chaos magick — and thus my first feature film wouldn’t exist. If successfully capturing the stupidly ambitious screenplay Bri LeRose and I wrote hadn’t been a gargantuan and pretty much impossible task, I would have never surrounded myself with a global community of artists who restored my hope in both modern queer life and free expression. If actually finishing the film hadn’t plunged me into financial debt, alienation from showbiz, and further confusion about who I was as a woman, would I ever have finally learned meditation and Eastern spirituality? Certainly, if Warner Bros. hadn’t sent me that angry letter after our film festival premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, I wouldn’t be writing this article right now.
So four years into my Jokerfied journey, the morning before my notorious film finally emerged from its legal purgatory, the world (or at least New York) literally shook. Look, I may be a director and someone who spells magick with a “k”, but my ego’s in check. And although the quake started right as I closed my eyes to meditate and began chanting my mantra, I’m not saying that mythologizing my coming out story inside a trans Joker (2019) parody with a bunch of my friends caused a 4.8 earthquake felt across New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
I’m only saying I wasn’t that surprised when it happened. My earth had been shaking since I got myself into this mess.
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Parents, don’t let your kids do improv. Sure, there are worse things a teen could get into besides comedy, but it’ll end up leading to those things anyway. I started doing comedy when I was 13. We’re all familiar with the theater fag archetype — now imagine how exhausting improv fags must be, and teenage ones, at that. I’d take a deeply closeted and cringey preteen singing Oklahoma over one that does constant “Copy Guy” impressions any day of the week. I’ve now had the chance to screen The People’s Joker with multiple childhood friends who also started doing sketch comedy at a young age. One of them said to me, “I can’t believe you made a movie about us. No one ever believes me or wants to hear about how I performed comedy for a decade as a literal child.”
We grew up on stage. For me, performance was a space where I could safely explore identity, especially my own queerness. By the time I was in college doing deeply confessional but ironically detached and annoyingly Andy Kaufman-esque stand-up routines, I was always performing in “drag.” When you’re a deeply closeted trans chick, wearing a dress in public is a lot easier if you’re acting like a clown at the same time. I wore femininity monstrously in self-deprecating comedy routines that were really just high-concept self-harm. When I finally came out as trans, I was so irony-poisoned that I no longer knew who I was.
This is why the original idea for The People’s Joker was a body-horror film about a drag queen who was physically addicted to irony and needed it to survive, but was also being destroyed by it from the inside out. It didn’t become a “Joker” movie — or more precisely, a movie about my relationship with the Joker, until Todd Phillips, the director of the 2019 Joker, said this in an interview with Indie Wire:
“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture. [I’ll tell you] why comedies don’t work anymore [… ] because all the fucking funny guys are like, ‘Fuck this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.’”
That’s a rather funny thing to say when you happen to be one of the most profitable comedy directors of all time, but whatever, go off queen. It was at this moment, in early 2020, that my screenwriter and producer friend Bri LeRose (Arrested Development (2003–2019) and Lady Dynamite (2016–2017)), Venmoed me 12 dollars to re-edit Todd Philip’s Joker. Now, this was technically my first solo film work, and it came during pre-vax COVID, so I had a lot of free time. Alternative comedy editing (my old bread and butter) wasn’t considered “essential work”, and since no one was paying me to add fart sound effects to Scott Aukerman’s eye blinking, I actually took it upon myself to start creating a collage-y remix of Joker (i.e. adding fart sound effects to Joaquin Phoenix's eyes blinking). I never really finished it but I would describe that version of the film as basically a feature-length Everything Is Terrible movie. I’d color-correct Arthur's bombing in a nightclub toward that wildly gay, 1960s Batman technicolor aesthetic. I’d rotoscope Jared Leto’s Joker into a rogue's gallery lineup of DeVito’s Penguin, animated Clayface, and Richard Pryor. But when I started replacing Phillips’s gritty Gotham with operatic Joel Schumacher matte paintings, a memory resurfaced.
The images from the scene above, as featured in The People’s Joker, where Young Joker realizes she’s trans after seeing Nicole Kidman in a Batman movie actually happened to me. Back in 1995, when my father took me to see Batman Forever, the moment Dr. Chase Meridian (Kidman) came on screen and started talking about rubber nipples and psychology, I felt… represented somehow as a six-year-old (I was told) boy. When I recalled this during my Joker remix days, a new idea burst like a glitter bomb in my brain: What if I make an autobiographical queer coming-of-age Batman parody about an unfunny transexual clown named Joker? I’d wanted to make a movie my whole life. My earliest memories were of wanting to make films. I knew I was a filmmaker before I knew I was a girl. And here, during the pandemic/apocalypse, what the hell else was I going to do?
So I went back to Bri and said, “You got me into this mess and you’re a lot funnier than me so we should write this script together.” And she agreed, which is kind of amazing because we barely knew each other at that point. We were basically just lunch table friends at Abso Lutely Productions, the source of some of mankind’s favorite alternative comedy television shows. It’s also where I cut my teeth as an editor. The first job I ever got there was season one of The Eric Andre Show (2012–). I was an intern, which, in the pre-Black Swan era of Hollywood, meant some days I’d be a camera operator, and other days it would be my job to wake Eric's co-host Hannibal Burress from a nap (so he could go sit on camera and fall asleep).
My second job at Abso was in the camera department on season one of Nathan For You (2013–2017). Imagine what it’s like just watching this quiet Canadian man utterly ruin people's lives on camera — none of us knew how brilliant that show was while we were making it. Then I became an editor on IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang! (2012–2016), then Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule (2010–2017), and I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (2019–). I’m sort of the transgender Forrest Gump of alternative comedy. My work as an unscripted/experimental comedy editor and visual effects artist led to me getting work as a director/writer/producer on shows like Beef House (2020), I Love David (2019–), and Scum (2019).
But even while I compiled an impressive résumé of work on other people’s shows, I struggled to get my own off the ground, which was something Bri and I bonded over while writing The People’s Joker. There’s nothing quite like the frustration of being unable to truly break into an industry that you’re already working in — held back from writers' room and showrunning positions in part because of people like Todd Phillips who think queers can’t take a joke.
Vera (left) and Bri (right).
The People’s Joker turned out to be a story of vulnerability because the writing process was just two friends — Bri and I — “yes and”-ing each other until we had a 150-page impossible-to-shoot and deeply personal screenplay. The script provided not only a humorous outlet to vent our frustrations with the corporate and patriarchal side of our art, but to explore our tribulations as queer Americans in a raw way. When Bri and I started working together, we quickly learned we had very similar backstories. Midwest girls who didn’t come out until their late 20s, with similar mothers and fathers, and a similar collection of former, toxic lovers. We allowed ourselves to trust-fall into total and complete honesty.
Making this film was always just therapy for me. I don’t make art to be understood. I make it to understand myself. I am so thankful I found a collaborator who encouraged me to be that honest about my life and how confused I was. But the script was much more than heartwarming, coming-of-age autofiction — we threw caution to the wind and wrote a big-budget comic book screenplay with absolutely no idea we would ever pull off making such a film. This was, after all, my first movie. How the fuck was I — a former junky and grunt-level TV gun-for-hire with 12 bucks in her bank account — supposed to construct a Batcave? When it came to telling a story with blockbuster-scale set pieces, we could never in a billion years afford to do it the way a studio with infinite resources would. That was never in the cards, just like it was never supposed to be a “Joker re-edit.” Our hero’s journey about a midwestern queer who finds love and fights fascism all while forming an illegal comedy theater in Gotham City was always destined to be a communal, DIY, live-action/animation mixed-media film. Necessity is the mother of invention — lo-fi, scrappy, punk invention.
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I had a web series called Hot Topics with Vera Drew (2020), a public access-style topic discussion series released on Highland Park TV’s YouTube channel. It was really just a thinly veiled attempt to become a sponsored brand ambassador for Hot Topic, all in an effort to finally have my high school emo girl phase as a 30-year-old (and on Hot Topic’s dime). It never worked. They didn’t sponsor me. I’m too edgy for Hot Topic anyway. But it was on that show that I announced my friend and I were writing a really gay Batman movie and that I was aiming to be the first trans woman to ever play both Harley Quinn and the Joker. I said I was looking for any artists, animators, musicians, actors, or filmmakers who wanted to help us make this film a reality.
Coming out as trans exposed me to so much phenomenal art. I couldn’t see myself or the things I was feeling in my favorite medium (genre movies). But the hunt for meaningful art made by trans people led to me finding musicians like The Blue Iris (whose song, “Pity Party On, Wayne!”, is featured in The People’s Joker), comic book writers like Michelle Perez, and artists such as Carta Monir. It connected me with hilarious and hot pornographers like Denali Winter and Bambi Belle, both of whom I was lucky enough to cast as The People’s Clark Kent and Lois Lane. I knew that by putting out a public call for collaborators, some truly beautiful and obscure artists would come out of the woodwork to join me. Realistically, I was expecting maybe 10 people at most to reach out. That next day I woke up to an inbox full of hundreds of wildly enthusiastic, mostly queer, often trans artists (and a few lawyers) who wanted to bring The People’s Joker to life.
What I had assembled wasn’t a typical movie crew, it was a global community of artists. And pretty much everyone in that community had neither previous film or television experience nor aspirations. Most of them were hobbyists or visual artists with genius work that no studio executive would ever be smart enough to make use of.
With an ever-growing team containing wildly differing aesthetics — including psychedelic artists like AT Pratt, experimental animators such as Rashaad Rosalle, and clown fetish illustrator Ash Woodham — I would have been a complete fool to micromanage or go full auteur in the making of this film. I knew that my fingerprints were indelibly all over this project already. It was going to be my (gorgeous) face up on screen for most of the film. Hell, it was my life story up there! I had a blurry image of what the movie’s style looked like in my head: Joel Schumacher meets Natural Born Killers (1994) meets Southland Tales (2006) meets Bruce Timm. But in such a unique filmmaking situation, with a big tent of internationally distributed artists working remotely, I didn’t feel my job as a director was to force that vision upon my collaborators. I knew the movie would feel inherently queer and eclectic if I just allowed everyone to lean fully into their own vision. My job was just to figure out how to parse all of these different visual voices and find a creative way to weave them together into a cohesive film.
Whenever people ask how I juggled so many different styles, I never really know what to say. It happened organically, and it turned out to be the easiest, most fun, and most communal aspect of the production. These three examples illustrate the process nicely:
1. Our script called for a faithful recreation of Arthur’s mom’s apartment from Joker. One of the artists in the fold was Paul McBryde, who makes 3D models of gorgeous, realistic interiors — as far as I can tell, non-professionally, just for the intrinsic and relaxing joy of it.
So I says to Paul, I says, “Hey Paul, can you recreate Arthur’s apartment? We should just change the color scheme a bit toward Schumacher, hang a poster of the Borat parody we see earlier in the film, and maybe add the Hell Here neon from Batman Returns (1992) just for fun.”
Then Paul adds his own touches on top of that to leave us with a gorgeously hyperreal environment. I think the intricate, meditatively meticulous detail of that set really helps ground the movie at times when it needs it most.
2. Fellow VHS archivist Kay McQueen animated our Daily Planet segments and designed the interiors for the Red Hood Theater. Critics smarter than I have discussed the otherworldly VR gaming aesthetic captured during the scenes in that location and I give Kay full credit for that motif. The only imagery I described for Kay was a “decrepit Hall of Presidents-style dark ride theater turned into a storage closet for broken down carnival ride parts.” Kay came back with a gorgeous and colorful set built completely in gaming software. With help from Paul and my VFX supervisor Jake Myers, we textured it with the hyperreal look we found in Joker’s apartment but the minimalist/saturated look prevails and creates an ethereal, “terminally online trans party on discord” vibe.
3. Salem Hughes sent me some of her simple 3D animations, and I instantly knew we had to give our Batcave and Batmobile an aesthetic reminiscent of the early 2000s Playstation game “Quake.” As that idea took shape, I quickly realized that Batsy himself should never be a live-action person in this film. The People’s Batsy is a fascist media mogul (and pedophile) who’s always hiding behind a brand, so I decided he should be a cartoon character. I pitched this concept to cartoonist Lev Cantoral, along with a few jpegs of Snidely Whiplash, and our dumpy little Batman was born. (By the way, I can’t tell you the joy of waking up to an email from Salem reading, “Our Batmobile. Does it look too much like a dick?” Without thinking I replied, “It doesn’t look enough like one. Let’s add some balls.”)
I was able to manage all of this with the help of my line producer Joey Lyons who helped me wrangle all the moving parts, kept us all on schedule, and encouraged me not to give up when it felt like we were never going to finish the film. Teams within teams blossomed and nested chaotically within this beautiful and decentralized community garden we were all building. At the end of The People’s Joker, there’s a two and half minute fight scene between Batsy and our ensemble of queer villain alternative-comedians, and that sequence took as long to make as the movie itself: Three years — collaborated entirely over email and Zoom.
Animation Director K Kypers took my rough animatic (composed of clips from Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995)) and, with a cadre of animation students, took it to an exciting, weird, and deeply gay place. One of the most beautiful dynamics in making the film was seeing how community breeds more community. Since we were all having so much fun publicly, more and more wonderful, artistic groups of people came forward and supported us. These included the artist Bugmane, and the eclectic fan bases of podcasts such as the Art and Labor Podcast, Tim Heidecker’s Office Hours, We Need to Talk About Kevin (co-hosted by The People’s Riddler Trevor Drinkwater), Have a Nice Apocalypse, and Struggle Session (which is how Megaspell ended up being the motion capture artist for our Edith Massey-inspired Lady Clayface and how we came to cast Ruin Carroll as a nonbinary Poison Ivy).
I cashed in every favor I had accrued during my time in the movie and TV business. I asked my former bosses/comedy daddies Scott Aukerman (Comedy Bang! Bang!) and Tim Heidecker (Us (2019)) to respectively play Mr. Frieze and Perry White (who’s inspired by Alex Jones). Then I asked Tim to ask his comedy daddy Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul (2015–2022)) if he’d play Bob The Goon.
When I talked to Bob on the phone about the character, he said, “Just make sure you make me look sorta fucked up. I don’t want it to basically be ‘Hey look I got Bob Odenkirk in the movie.’”
Since that’s sort of what the joke was, we didn’t fuck him up too much — we just gave him a nice big scar on his face.
The entire production was such an amazing collaboration between so many people that word began to travel far beyond trans-Twitter. Then the film was selected to show at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. But things didn’t go as planned.
Long story short, Warner Bros. thinks that The People’s Joker infringes on their brand, and the night before our very first screening at Toronto, they sent me an angry letter. In the end, the film was shown at the festival, but only once.
When I say that Warner coming after this film was the single most traumatic experience of my life, I realize how that sounds. Some journalists, YouTubers, and podcasters think it’s buzzy to ask me interview questions about the legal hurdles we faced. Being a “banned filmmaker” the instant you premiere your film is a lot less fun and punk than it might sound. Especially after you invested so much time, energy, money, love, and community into the “banned” film you just spent three years making. The only thing I want to say about the Toronto affair is that the only reason this film was ever able to premiere after our brief/overblown legal drama was because the Toronto film community advocated for us. Both Peter Kuplowsky (the Midnight Madness Programmer) and Toronto CEO Cameron Bailey put their jobs on the line and still premiered this movie despite the fact that we got an ominous email from Bugs Bunny encouraging them to do otherwise.
In fact, after Toronto, the only reason this film didn’t disappear into the ether was because film festival programmers and genre filmmakers continued to lobby on our behalf. We even did a secret screening tour with the film, notably in Australia courtesy of Static Vision.
The secret screenings we did of The People’s Joker throughout 2023 gave me the chance to see how much the movie meant to trans people. My favorite experience during our legal limbo was when we screened at the White River Indie Films Festival in Vermont. It’s held in a town that consists of a single block, and since it’s a small festival, one of my agents tried to talk me out of playing there. But the festival fought for us, put up money to fly me out there, set me up at a nice spooky hotel, and promoted the shit out of this movie. And you know what happened? I think about three-quarters of the trans people in the state of Vermont showed up at that screening.
Watching live audiences react, and hearing so many folks say in Q&As, “This movie changed my life… will I ever be able to watch it again?” kept me buoyed and steady. That Jokerfied queer community spirit, the same one that got the movie made, continued through our film festival run, so it was easy to hold out hope that eventually the film would find some semblance of traditional distribution. Sure enough, after the absolutely badass film programmers at Outfest gave us our first public-facing premiere since Toronto, we finally found the perfect partner to bring this movie out to the world. Frank Jaffe’s film distribution company, Altered Innocence, was always destined to be The People’s Joker dark knight in shining armor. Their entire catalog is queer coming-of-age stories and/or genre films. (Plus, Frank even has a porn label, Anus Films. Its logo is basically the Janus Films logo except it's a butt! This partnership is a gay parody match made in Heaven.)
The theatrical run for The People’s Joker is still going strong. Theaters all over the USA and Canada continue to play the movie because The People keep demanding it. We’ve played on over 100 different screens so far and the showings I’ve been able to attend in person have been life-changing. We sold out my favorite cinema, The Music Box Theatre in Chicago, twice, and both nights I had trans people telling me, “This movie brought the whole queer and trans community together tonight.”
I’ve watched eggs crack, grown cis men cry, and mothers of trans people feel like they finally know how to talk to their kids. Someone at a Q&A once asked me, “How do you stay humble knowing you made Gay Citizen Kane?” I mean it’s hard to stay humble when someone asks you a question like that in a room full of people, most of whom are wearing clown cosplay, who are there to see a movie about your life — a movie that almost didn’t come out; a movie I put so much more of myself and my life into than anyone realizes. The only thing that keeps me grounded is that I can go to bed each night knowing that The People’s Joker gave me the two things I’ve always wanted in life: the opportunity to make my own movie and a sense of community and connection to other people on this planet. My advice to folks is to go make some art that pisses off the right people and inspires others to be more creative and authentic. It certainly changed my life.
Published July 1, 2024
Published in Issue XII: Cinema
