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Four years ago, Vera Drew, the director of The People’s Joker, had a YouTube show called Hot Topics With Vera Drew. It was, she admits, a blatant attempt to get funded by the mall retailer and suburban hub for emo wear. “I only made four episodes of it,” she says, “mostly because I got really bitter at a certain point because Hot Topic never sponsored me.”
Drew’s bitterness has since subsided, and even though she never got bankrolled by Hot Topic, Hot Topics did get her the help she needed to make her first feature film. It’s a dark and often deeply funny coming-of-age story about a trans woman, Joker the Harlequin (played by Drew), who tries to make it as a comedian in a Gotham City where comedy is all but outlawed. She also falls in love with a fellow comic named Mister J and tries to get a spot on UCB Live, a Saturday Night Live send-up run by an animated “Lorne Michaels” (voiced by Maria Bamford).
“I put out this call [on Hot Topics] like, ‘I’m making this really colorful Batman parody with my friend [cowriter Bri LeRose], and anybody who wants to help, write in and let me know what your medium is and we’ll find a spot for you,” Drew says. “I was really only expecting like five or six people to reply. I got hundreds.”
At the time, The People’s Joker in Drew’s head was just a weird remix of Todd Phillips’ Joker. As Drew and LeRose wrote, it became an autobiographical tale that reflects Drew’s own coming out and real-life relationships. (Nathan Faustyn, who plays an alt version of Penguin, is a longtime friend.) Shot in just five days and full of animations and visual-effects work from all of those Hot Topics fans who wrote in, it’s full of ragtag energy that’s been missing from movies about heroes for a long time.
This probably isn’t what you’ve heard about The People’s Joker. If anything, you’ve gotten wind that it had a buzzy midnight screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and then got pulled from the fest after an intervention from Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns the rights to the DC Comics universe that Joker and the rest of the Batman-adjacent characters are a part of. A #FreeThePeoplesJoker campaign ensued.
That’s only kind of true. Several outlets reported that Drew potentially got a cease-and-desist letter over the film. Drew maintains it wasn’t a cease-and-desist and believes, as does her distribution partner Altered Innocence, which is now releasing the movie at nearly 100 indie theaters in the US, that it’s a parody and doesn’t infringe on WBD’s intellectual property. (They are, though, prepared to scale back the release if another letter arrives.)
Drew, though, is over talking about the legal stuff. Instead, she’d rather discuss Joel Schumacher, getting “soft canceled,” and the $12 Venmo transaction that started it all.
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Angela Watercutter: After everything that happened at the Toronto International Film Festival, does it feel surreal to, more than a year later, finally be releasing The People’s Joker?
Vera Drew: We had a really nice festival run after TIFF that was mostly secret screenings. That was really like the light at the end of the tunnel the entire time, because I was just like, OK, the movie's at least good. It'll find the audience it needs to find, whether it's me finding somebody to partner with for distributing it or just posting it on Google Drive. I'm so glad I didn't have to post it on Google Drive.
Right. Or you could post it in 15-minute snippets on TikTok. Was it easy to find a distributor after TIFF? I feel like the movie had buzz, as much as I hate that word.
TIFF definitely killed all distribution interest in this movie. It got misreported that we got a cease-and-desist, and we never got one. We just got kind of like a slap on the wrist and a strongly worded letter. But that next morning [after the premiere] my face was on every trade, and every headline was like “pulled due to rights issues.” So nobody was eager to jump in with us.
That probably wasn’t what you imagined going to TIFF would be like.
It was kind of devastating in that moment. ’Cause I grew up on ’90s indie film cinema, so it was like, “Oh, you take your movie to a festival and then the worst person in the world buys it.” But that's OK because that's the business.
Right.
Thankfully that didn't happen. Because the message of the movie is so vibrant, and it's very pro-labor and anti-capitalist. So we could have never really partnered with a huge distributor. It was always supposed to be Frank Jaffe at Altered Innocence.
How did that come about?
We finally had our, like, public-facing screening at Outfest last July, and it was a beautiful screening. It was our most trans audience that we ever had at any of these festivals. It was just like, “Oh my God, cool. This is the place. This is the moment where everything's gonna finally be OK and change.” Frank Jaffe saw it at that festival, and I think he called me that next weekend and was like, “Let's get lunch.”
So what happens now? Is it a matter of putting it out there and seeing what happens?
I'm not really sure what other details I wanna fill in at this point. Whatever's in The New York Times article happened. What I will say is the movie is protected by fair use and parody. We never got a cease-and-desist. They've never brought us into litigation. They really just tried to intimidate me and, honestly, they did.
Let’s change the subject. In the movie’s credits there’s a bit where you thank your cowriter, Bri, for Venmo-ing you $12 and asking for your cut of Joker. What’s the backstory there?
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It was the first art commission I've ever gotten in my life. I was a gun-for-hire editor and an unsuccessful alternative comedian for years. But I had never gotten money to just go like, “Hey, do a thing only you can make.” It came about because Todd Phillips was in the press talking about how he didn't wanna direct comedies anymore because it's too hard now with “woke” culture or whatever.
Oh, I remember that.
On one level, I get the conversations around like, woke culture being restrictive, just ’cause we do live in reactionary times. I feel like I have pretty good politics, and I get soft-canceled on Twitter every couple days for something stupid. But I think for both Bri and I, seeing him say that in an interview and like both of us having worked in comedy for 10 years and both of us being successful in our fields, but struggling to get like our own voices heard, we were like, “Let's make the rudest movie ever.”
Very different from the movie it became.
It really did start as this remix movie that was just gonna take Todd Phillips’ Joker and kind of turn it into an experimental, found footage feature-length Everything Is Terrible video.
How did it evolve?
I really wanted to make something just processing what it had been like coming out as trans working in comedy and my family situation. So this idea started to form about a comedian who's literally poisoned by irony and is physically addicted to it, but it's like decaying her.
In the movie, Smylex is a drug given to Joker the Harlequin after she talks to her mom about her gender. That seems related.
It all started to crystalize into a blurry vision. Then it was Covid and everything was shut down. Nobody was hiring me to add fart sound effects to comedy videos. So I was like, why don't I make this my first feature film? I went back to Bri and was like, “Listen, you got me in this mess. Will you help me write this script?” She immediately got it. Even though she doesn't watch comic book movies.
Did you make her watch any?
I was like, “Please don't. Well actually, just watch Suicide Squad and Batman Forever. That's it. Those are the only two. She was like, “You don't want me to watch Joker, the movie we are parodying? I was like, “I got that part covered. You just help me make this funny.” Because I think the story I was telling was kind of a sad story, but I very much wanted it to be realistic but optimistic and hopeful.
It seems semi-autobiographical. Was that your intent?
It's funny hearing it described as semi-autobiographical because I don't think of it as semi. It’s just autobiographical. The only difference is instead of my abusive ex-fiance, it's Jared Leto's Joker. Instead of me starting my medical transition, we'll just have this Joker character dive into a vat of feminizing hormones. I'm from Illinois, a small town in the Midwest, so we made young Joker from Smallville. When it comes to the family stuff, that is very much 50 percent me and 50 percent Bri.
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Even as a superhero/trans coming-of-age story, it’s very relatable.
Every single trans person I've met has been as distinct as every single cis person I've met. But, you know, you can really find these through lines in a coming-of-age arc and in like a Joseph Campbell hero's journey arc, no matter how toxic that arc actually is. It's very useful in finding those commonalities.
I think that also speaks to why the movie does resonate with cis people and people who aren't because like everybody comes of age at some point and we mythologized our lives using these characters. Myth existed because it was a way of talking about society and talking about how people come of age in a world that really does encourage you not to be an individual.
So yeah, it's deeply personal. Like, I literally am about to have a Skype with my parents pretty soon to mentally prepare them for the film.
The mom in The People’s Joker doesn’t come off great and is very non-receptive to her child’s identity. I was going to ask if your family had seen it.
You know, I hadn't talked to my parents in a few years just 'cause, as people will gather from the film, coming out was very rough in that dynamic. But in the course of making the movie, and processing it, I was like “I need to dedicate this to my mom”—and Joel Schumacher, of course.
Yeah, the influence of his Batman movies comes through.
But like, definitely, definitely dedicate it to my mom because the only thing my parents really did right was encourage me to make art. Like they saw the little damaged freak that they had given birth to, and they were like, “OK, cool. She wants to do comedy and make films.”
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Another thing that struck me about the film is that it almost feels like fan fiction, in a way. It’s using characters you love to tell a story of your own.
I never thought of it as fan fiction. I like fan fiction. Like I grew up on Tumblr.
So say we all.
I’m a recovering Tumblr queer, so I have a deep love for that, but for me this is less a Batman movie, less a Joker movie, than it is about my relationship to these characters and the lore as a whole. Like, when I watched Batman Forever at 6 years old in the theater with my dad, that was one of the earliest moments of me realizing I was trans.
Also there’s a sort of metanarrative scene in the movie like that.
That was weird because it was like, “Can we do this? Like, how does that make sense? How would a character in a Batman movie see this?” Well, Batman in our movie is a media mogul. He's a cop and a politician, but he's also almost like a Netflix producer, [cough] Obama [cough]. So it's like let's just make it a commentary on these things.
By the end of the movie I wanted the lore to be so deconstructed. I wanted Joker the Harlequin to be so specifically like our Joker that if I ever revisit this character, it wouldn't be a Joker movie anymore. Ultimately, the movie was just like super expensive therapy for me. [Laughs]
There’s a moment when your Joker gets cast on UCB Live as part of its new “diverse” cast. That felt pointed.
That came just from a place of truth. The second I came out as trans, it did affect my work. I was up for directing gigs and producing gigs. Then I came out and changed my pronouns, and suddenly those gigs went away. But then over the course of my transition, I noticed something else happening where my identity was a commodity for some people. It had value, particularly in a writer's room.
Queerness is a commodity in some circles because it's a talking point and, like, it gets clicks. Even to some extent, this movie is starting to get the buzz it's getting because, like, I think the alt-right is finally paying attention to it, and there's some outrage happening. It's weird when it's, like, your identity.
Yes. Do you know if Lorne Michaels has seen it?
I'm sure at this point he may have heard that he's the main villain in a Batman parody that's coming out. But yeah, I don't know. I'd love for him to see it, because we did make him a buffoon in it, and we made him kind of a warlord. We also didn't give him a butt or genitals, but I really saw it as like, this is like a parody of him.
You mentioned this movie was expensive therapy. How did you finance it?
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I used to host a web series called Hot Topics With Vera Drew, which is the only web series with the express purpose of getting Vera Drew sponsored by Hot Topic.
Did it fulfill that purpose?
Hot Topic never sponsored me, even though the show had like a little niche following. They did follow me on Twitter eventually. Now I just wanna go on the record and say my door's closed. They are no longer welcome to sponsor me.
So you found money some other way.
It was on that show that I announced that Bri and I were making The People's Joker. It didn't go viral. It didn't even go soft viral. It just got a lot of attention from various artist circles, which was so cool. It was just like, oh my god, OK, this is what the movie is.
It's a mixed-media movie. It's Natural Born Killers or Pink Floyd—The Wall. It's a coming-of-age Batman parody, but it's also a big colorful collage of an impressionist media hellscape.
But also one that has a through line in your story.
My face is on camera for most of this movie. It's my story, it is my life, but mythologized in this way.
I really wanted everybody involved to feel like they were bringing their like personal artistic vision to the table just because everybody was just so into the idea. I think it already felt like everybody's movie. The People's Joker—it invites you to be like, OK, I wanna be a part of this magic and what about my identity can I shove in here?
Did people end up volunteering?
It started all on a volunteer basis. As the scope of the project grew, it was like, I can't justify all these people working for free. So I did end up doing a money crowdfund. I raised like $25,000, which was great, but all of that ended up going into our shoot. Our shoot was only five days, which is crazy.
So that money burnt up real quick, and I was like, “Well, now I have this movie with, uh, 1,600 VFX shots in it and an army of people that wanna help me finish it. How am I gonna do this?” So I did what they tell you to never do—they told me this like my first day in film school: I took out a huge loan to finish this movie.
I would imagine this went to paying you and everyone else.
I will totally go on the record and say every single person that worked on this was phenomenally underpaid, myself included. A lot of people didn't end up taking money if it was offered. Then there were the people that were like, “You know what? I'll definitely take this amount of money.”
“I have to make rent.”
Yes, exactly. I never wanted this movie that is anti-capitalist, very pro-labor, very pro-queer, very pro-sex worker to ever exploit anybody involved in it. We all walked away with everybody feeling, more than anything, blown away at the attention the movie’s gotten. I think everybody involved is just like, “Geez, I just thought this was like a weird thing I was doing with my friend.” [Laughs] I don’t know. It’s really magical, I think.
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I need to let you go, but before I do I have to ask: Did you see there’s about to be a new trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux?
Oh my God, that is so cool. I mean, I pretended to be a gay guy for six years, so obviously I love Lady Gaga. She was coming into the music scene right when I was still deeply closeted but starting to figure out I was trans. So yeah, I'm definitely gonna see that movie. I hope they don't get asked about our movie too much in their press cycle.
