By Jim Gilles
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/20/22 – Harry Dodge and Silas Howard made their innovative By Hook or By Crook in 2002 and the award-winning feature film premiered at Sundance went on to win the Audience Award for Best Feature at five film festivals, including SXSW that year. By Hook or By Crook is a somewhat experimental buddy film that chronicles three weeks in the life of a handsome, gender-bending small town dreamer with a nagging messiah complex. Emotionally defeated after the death of his father in Kansas, Shy (played by a very young Silas Howard) heads to the big city of San Francisco to sink himself into a “life of crime.” He is quickly distracted by Valentine (played by Harry Dodge), a deliriously expressive, too-talkative young man who was originally adopted and is on a misguided search for his birth mother. In this boundary-shattering tale, Silas Howard s a transexual young man who is the driving force of this wonderfully acted, anti-authoritarian tale of friendship, trust and redemption. By Hook or By Crook will screen on Saturday, June 23,9:00 PM at the Directors Guild of America.
I spoke with Harry Dodge and Silas Howard about their film last week. As Harry Dodge summarizes the film: “There’s Shy and Valentine and a girl. That’s how to view it. They’re guy friends.” “This is definitely not a crime flick. It’s not an action adventure, a mystery, or a thriller. It’s an emotional thriller. I guess I want people to know coming into the theater, that they’re about to watch a movie about love, really. All different kinds of love. About friendship and finding connection in an alienated world.” The girl in the story is Billie (played by Stanya Kahn) and Valentine lives in her funky house in the San Francisco area. She considers herself to be Valentine’s romantic partner but she is also quite practical in a way – mediating between Valentine’s more poetic world and Shy’s attempt to deal with harsh realities. Even with her mix of New Age thinking and a stoner culture vib, Billie’s character is the emotional center of the film.
Valentine is a fascinating character with his quick intuition and fast-paced love of metaphoric conceits but he clearly has had some issues with mental stability that previously put him in a mental hospital in the past. He is full of vitality, living on the edge of “normalcy” and full of playful imagination. That leaves us with Shy who is driven by a lack of emotion and just trying to get out of a rut – slowly growing as we move through the story. In some ways, the film is a coming-of-age tale of Shy as a boy who always wanted to be a superhero and fly like Superman. As a transexual young man he begins to discover himself as an authentic, caring person. As Silas Howard points out, “When we made By Hook or By Crook, we had no idea the film would go on to become an iconic mainstay of queer cinema. We were young artists who wanted to make something representative of us and our culture. We didn’t see people who looked like us – gender non-conforming and trans folks – in the mainstream media and we knew waiting around to get permission to be seen was futile.”
By Hook or By Crook does not explain itself: It merely presents the characters as a third gender at a time before the terms “non-binary” even existed. Shy and Valentine are buddies and their connection as friends has almost nothing to do with sexual orientation or gender expression. They are two entirely flawed characters and certainly not queer role models, As Silas Howard puts it: “Our characters are tender fuck-ups, like us, forever trying to get to a better place.”
The plot of the film is a conventional screenplay with three-acts but what makes the film special is the unconventional and dashing performers who seem to emerge out of the likes of Midnight Cowboy, Amores Perros (2000) and Y Tu Mamá También (2001). In developing the characters of Shy and Valentine, Dodge and Howard tried to build in specifically real details that enrich the narrative – be it the macaroni-and-cheese dinner that Billie makes for the boys or the inclusion of over-sized cars from the 70s in a film shot in 2002, making the film enriched with images that are not time-specific.
Ultimately By Hook or By Crook is a story about redemption. At the start Shy feels like a failure, a failed super-hero, having not been able to rescue his chronically ill father. He’s incredibly frustrated by poverty and shut down with grief. He makes a loosely-framed plan to head to California and rob a grocery store without any idea what that might accomplish. That grand plan seems limited to messing with a coke machine to get it to spit out all the quarters inside or Shy’s acquisition of a toy pistol for his grand robbery escapade. Ultimately Shy finds his own way to be a bit of a superhero for Valentine and prove his true friendship. It is no coincidence that these two amazing filmmakers have been personal friends since 1985, right out of high school. They decided to direct their film as well as act in it because they had no budget and the film was a labor of love in a radical queer community in the San Francisco Bay area.
Silas Howard is an award-winning feature film, documentary film, music video, web series and television director and writer, with a longtime focus in telling honest, boundary-shattering narratives filled with groundbreaking characters. Silas Howard received his MFA at UCLA in directing and is a Film Independent Directors Lab Fellow, Nantucket Screenwriting Colony Fellow, the 2014-15 Arthur Levitt Fellow at Williams College and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. Howard has since directed and written award-winning feature films, documentaries, musical videos, web series and television episodes. Recent television credits include Transparent, The Fosters, Faking It, Hudson Valley Ballers, and NBC’s upcoming series This Is Us. If you happened to have seen Finding Agnes at Outfest on Sunday afternoon, Silas Howard is one of the personalities in that interesting film.
Harry Dodge is an American sculptor, performer, video artist, writer and a professor at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Since 2008, Dodge has focused on sculpture, drawing, video, and writing. His interdisciplinary practice is “characterized by its explorations of relation, materiality and ecstatic contamination.” His solo exhibitions have included works in New York, Los Angeles and Connecticut. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and is the author of the book My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (2020). Dodge explains that when he and Howard made By Hook or By Crook, “We were the anti-film industry. It was acts of kindness and connection that made it work. Love and connection, that’s the heart of joy, the heart of a life well-lived. I’m a professor at CalArts right now, teaching in the art program, and with my students I talk about love and community-building a lot more than you might imagine.”
