The “Banned” Film Coming Soon To a Theater Near You
Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, one year later.
by Lindsay Lee Wallace
“The movie was never banned,” director, writer, editor, and actor Vera Drew explains patiently, emphatically, and for what seems like the hundredth time. “We were able to have our world premiere at [the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival], and all that happened was I got an angry letter from Warner Bros.”
The movie in question is Vera’s first feature-length film, The People’s Joker, the best “illegal” crowd-funded community-created queer trans comic book coming-of-age story that thanks to Vera’s unerring determination you may just get the chance to see.
It’s been just over a year since the film screened at TIFF, and one year since Vera received a stern letter from Warner Bros. Discovery about copyright issues related to her film’s use of Batman, the Joker, and other characters that are part of the company’s intellectual property. Suddenly she was feeling the pressure of not only having her deeply personal passion project accepted into a prestigious film festival—but also having it draw the ire of a giant corporation.
After a year underground, The People’s Joker has made a bold return to the festival circuit, which kicked off with a United States premiere at Outfest LA in July of 2023. “It was great to finally have a public-facing premiere at Outfest.” After all, she says, “it’s the kind of movie you’re supposed to watch with a group of your gay friends.”
Since then the film has screened everywhere from Austin, Texas to Oslo, Norway. “It seems like people are interested in the movie again as a theatrical experience and it’s not just this ‘banned filmmaker’ shit, which I’m so over and annoyed by.”
She gets that to an average viewer, it might make total sense that Warner Bros. Discovery got angry about a film that portrays the Joker as a trans woman, Batman as a pedophile, and Robin as his abused and abusive ward who is also trans (and is also-also, simultaneously, Jared Leto’s Joker). But “angry” doesn’t warrant legal action, and Vera reiterates that according to the multiple attorneys she’s consulted (and relayed her trauma to “beat by beat,”) the film fits neatly within the letter of the law: “It’s every lawyer’s favorite movie.”
The letter from Warner Bros. Discovery was intimidating, she says, but something she’s been fastidious in reiterating throughout the whirlwind of the past year is that it didn’t “ban” the film. “Any sort of ban, or pulling it from festivals, was really self-inflicted. I really just needed a break.”
So far as breaks go, it’s been busy. Vera’s spent the last year organizing underground screenings around the U.S. and as far away as Australia, and building momentum behind a campaign to #freethepeoplesjoker. “We had a blast doing it,” she says, “and it was also our pathway to where we are at with the movie now.”
The response to The People’s Joker’s delayed festival circuit has been a healing reminder of how hungry people are to see this film—not just for the story surrounding it, but for the story within it.
Some people want to see it so badly that they end up in Vera’s DMs, questioning her punk bona fides and asking why she doesn’t just dump the project—which she and many of her friends have spent years on, which has put her in enough debt “to buy a house in the middle of America”—on YouTube. “Yeah, the healthy part of this is, I don’t look at social media as much anymore,” she says. She has bigger plans, and interested distributors.
Vera remains confident that The People’s Joker is covered under fair use copyright law as a parody, and can therefore have a traditional theatrical release. “It was done the punk way, it’s the most DIY movie anybody will ever see. But we were always looking towards what falls under the guise of parody law and fair use,” she explains.
When she first received the letter from Warner Bros. Discovery, Vera was taken aback—“Why the hell is the second biggest media conglomerate that is literally facing bankruptcy right now going after a mentally ill trans woman who has worked for them for 10 years?” She recalls that many individual people at the company even knew about the project as she was working on it, checking on her progress, and telling her it sounded like fun.
But in retrospect, she says the company’s reaction as an entity makes a sort of sense. “The thing everybody forgets, particularly about last fall, is Warner Bros. was doing all types of weird stuff.”
“Nobody’s ever going to go, ‘Okay, now you can make your big anti-capitalist Joker movie.’”
In the lead-up to TIFF, the company had faced controversy and taken major stock hits as it hinted at a revamp of the streaming platform HBO Max, scrapped the already-finished film Batgirl, and released a series of frankly bonkers branding strategy slides which basically asserted (as Vera summarizes): “men like superheroes and sports and cumming and women love reality shows and crying into tissues.”
So the decision to blow up a film that might otherwise have passed unnoticed under the noses of the company’s target audience? Not all that shocking. Vera says it’s in line with the trends she feels she’s observed in the media and entertainment industry in recent years. “I understand on some level what they’re doing, like what Elon Musk’s doing with Twitter. These corporatist idiots buy these big, top-heavy, failing media platforms that don’t actually make any money because they’re just these big marketing machines mining and selling our data.” In essence, they’re flailing for profits. Of course there are casualties.
This industry disillusionment is part of what led her to begin working on The People’s Joker back in 2020, and it’s also part of why she refuses to simply leak the film online today.
Vera spent years working her way up first in the alt-comedy scene and, when that bubble burst, as an Emmy-nominated editor. She realized she’d been waiting for something akin to permission to finally make the kinds of projects she had dreamed of, and knew she was capable of. Then, she realized that permission was never coming. “Nobody’s ever going to go, ‘Okay, now you can make your big anti-capitalist Joker movie […] about navigating identity and art and commerce in a failing capitalist military structure.’ When I started making The People’s Joker, it really was kind of me going, ‘Okay, I’m done playing the game. I’m not going to be a gun for hire in this industry anymore.’”
She’s also through being hemmed in by industry norms and rules dictating what can and can’t work on screen. “I was the lead editor on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? and Sacha is crazy. I love him as a person [and] he’s my hero comedically,” she says. “But one of his biggest things I always got reprimanded for was, you’re including too many jokes at once.” In response, when she began working on The People’s Joker, she decided “every frame [was] going to have 50 jokes in it. It was really a test for myself to see, can we actually do that? Because my gut tells me that you can.”
She’s also following her gut when it comes to portraying queerness in her work, acknowledging that queer movies (despite being more niche than superhero movies) have their own evolving and often divisive norms. “I’ll see a lot of stuff that’s like, ‘We need trans films that aren’t about trauma and are only about trans joy,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, I live in a country that’s currently taking my rights away, and is fucking abusing children and calling it saving children.’” She points out that even where she lives in L.A., accessing gender-affirming care is still a costly challenge.
“I have a fucking incredible life. I made The People’s Joker, like that’s my job. I have so much queer joy in my life. But trauma is part of my story, and it’s part of the actual trans identity’s story,” Vera says. “I just don’t understand this rose-tinted idea of what queer film is supposed to be. And if it’s coming from queer filmmakers, we should be able to tell our stories however we want.”
That’s what she plans to do with her next film, “another trans coming-of-age story, very grounded in the tradition of body horror, body swap movies, and movies about cults.” In the next phase of her career, Vera says she wants to lean more into horror, a genre she says was key to her understanding and embracing her transness. “They take a lot more chances in that space.”
She says Joker’s eventual next steps will be more firmly in the world of horror, as well: a sequel, called The People’s Nightmare: Freddy vs. Joker. Considering the copyright issues she’s already dealt with, it seems worth asking who owns the rights to Nightmare on Elm Street. Vera grins in response: “You’ll never guess!”
“People’s Joker was really about my twenties, and navigating being an adult, and being out of the house, and cutting ties with my parents, coming out as trans and stuff,” says Vera. “It is a trilogy, there is a third one that I want to make! I won’t say what that one is—but the second one will be about my thirties, and even more specifically about this next chapter of my career.” Considering the challenges she’s faced throughout the process of making and releasing The People’s Joker, Vera says she probably won’t start working on the sequel for a long time.
Looking back, she says the attention that stemmed from the Warner Bros. Discovery letter could be viewed as a kind of “gift in disguise,” because it brought the film to the attention of those outside her social circle. But at the same time, she feels The People’s Joker still has more people left to reach. “I would love for some company—ideally one that isn’t AMPTP-affiliated or owned, and doesn’t have Warner or Disney or anybody as their parent company—to go to bat for us,” and distribute The People’s Joker. And with the leads they have right now, she says it’s looking good.
In the meantime, she’s continuing to navigate “the expectations of being a banned, controversial filmmaker,” when in reality, she says, “I’m like the most boring woman you’ll ever meet in your life. I barely leave my house. I’m like an old lady. I mean, I’m a punk! But I’m a pop punk.”
“This past year has been seriously the most traumatic period of my life,” Vera says. (And that’s coming from someone whose quasi-autobiographical film includes conversion therapy at Arkham Asylum.) But now, “the movie is liberating itself as we speak, and I’m super excited.”
Lindsay is a freelance writer, book publicist, horror enthusiast, and over-thinker in New York City. Her work has been seen on Gizmodo UK, staged by Infinite Variety Productions, developed into a short film at Prague Film School, published in the Sarah Lawrence Review, and described by her mother as, “Cool, but kind of weird.”
