‘The People’s Joker’ and the Perils of Playing With a Studio’s Copyright

Vera Drew by no means obtained a cease-and-desist letter. She want to be very clear on that time.

Drew headed to the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, newly acquired passport in hand, only a half-hour after ending the ultimate (or so she thought) reduce of “The People’s Joker.” The chaotic, crowdsourced film reframed Batman’s best-known nemesis as a trans coming-of-age story, and represented a pure evolution for Drew, a Los Angeles-based tv editor and author for alt-comedy fixtures like Megan Amram, Tim & Eric and Sacha Baron Cohen.

“The People’s Joker,” which Drew starred in in addition to directed and co-wrote, was one in all 10 titles slated for the eminent competition’s Midnight Madness part alongside the likes of “The Blackening” and “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” Each movie receives a splashy midnight premiere together with a handful of daytime screenings, most of them for press and potential distributors.

Unless, that’s, a filmmaker receives a letter from Warner Bros. Discovery the day earlier than. A letter that’s not a cease-and-desist however that does convey the disapproval of a multimedia conglomerate with the rights to the movie’s characters — and an enormous authorized staff.

“This letter was actually kind of complimentary, but it expressed their concern that the film infringed on their brand,” Drew mentioned. “I was devastated. I was like, ‘No, I got a passport for this! We hired lawyers!’”

A handful of legal professionals had, actually, suggested Drew professional bono as she wrote the script with Bri LeRose. But after Peter Kuplowsky, the Midnight Madness programmer, fell in love with the movie (“It was punk and exciting and transgressive and sort of inspiring”) and lobbied laborious to incorporate it within the competition, he did set one situation. “We wanted her to have a legal team vet her project,” he mentioned, at which level Drew retained the regulation agency Donaldson Callif Perez.

A collection of negotiations — virtually actually Eleventh-hour negotiations, in gentle of the scheduled begin time — between the competition employees and Warner Bros. Canada resulted in a compromise: The present might go on. Once. At midnight. After that, the primary “People’s Joker” TIFF screening would even be the final one. (A Warner Bros. Discovery spokeswoman declined to remark for this text.)

On one stage, the scuttled screenings have been a blessing to Drew. “Honestly, the press screenings were freaking me out a bit,” she mentioned. “We had a whole festival run planned after that, but I came back and really needed to hit pause and strategize.”

Thus started a number of months of silence till the movie tentatively began poking its head up for a handful of “secret screenings,” then movie festivals, buoyed by a #FreeThePeoplesJoker marketing campaign on social media. This skittish limbo will lastly come to an finish on April 5, a full yr and a half after the movie’s Toronto unveiling, when the queer-centric distributor Altered Innocence will launch “The People’s Joker.”

Frank Jaffe, the proprietor of Altered Innocence, mentioned he obtained his personal copy of the identical not-a-cease-and-desist letter shortly after saying his firm had acquired the movie. “I just think they wanted more information,” he mentioned. “They wanted to know the scope of the release.”

That scope is at present at 76 theaters and counting. “There are a lot of queer people in a lot of small communities,” Jaffe mentioned, “and we want to reach as many of them as we can.” He mentioned the corporate’s small measurement — he’s its sole full-time worker — makes it pretty nimble when it comes to scaling up. Or, if Warner Bros. Discovery decides to become involved, scaling means down.

As it stands now, although, audiences exterior the film-festival circuit are about to get their first take a look at a brash, kaleidoscopic riff on the Batman legend that comes with photographs and plot traces from seemingly each model of Bruce Wayne and Arthur Fleck, a.ok.a. Batman and the Joker.

The most blatant inspiration is “Joker,” Todd Phillips’s 2019 gritty reboot of the character. Drew initially deliberate to make use of a few of her Covid-necessitated down time from her alt-comedy day jobs — “People weren’t really paying me to add fart sounds to their shows at that point” — re-editing the 2019 movie for her personal enjoyment.

Along the way in which, although, she recognized varied similarities between the Batman story and her personal emergence as a trans girl within the often-regressive world of comedy. And different iterations of the Caped Crusader turned equally robust lodestars.

“I really love the Joel Schumacher Batmans,” Drew mentioned, referring to the often-derided Nineteen Nineties sequels that added nipples to the costumes worn by each Val Kilmer and George Clooney. “They feel like really big, gay, expensive comic-book movies. Queer-coded villains are pretty much my favorite trope, and Joker has always been a really queer character to me.”

And whereas she mentioned she appreciated what she known as “some of the anarcho-leftist messages” in “Joker,” Drew noticed the worth of questioning the present comic-book monoculture on a extra basic stage.

“I never thought of it as ‘Now it’s the girls’ turn!’” she mentioned of her personal effort. “It speaks more to how we have to hear all the time that these films are our modern myths. I think a lot of that is Marvel propaganda.”

The Joker often is the purview of DC Comics, not Marvel, however the worry of working afoul of copyright legal guidelines was no much less of a priority.

“I kept myself very informed legally in terms of what qualifies as a parody and what fair use really is,” mentioned Drew, referring to the authorized doctrine that permits artists to make use of copyrighted materials with out permission or consequence relying on the circumstances. The “People’s Joker” poster calls it “A Fair Use Film by Vera Drew.”

Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School and an professional in truthful use, mentioned inventive works discover themselves on safer authorized floor after they touch upon the unique materials in a transformative means.

“Favored use is critical in that it performs an interpretation,” mentioned Tushnet, who has not seen the movie however was keen to debate it within the summary. “A parody is the classic example, but it doesn’t have to be funny. If the metaphor that the Joker represents here is a different metaphor, then it might well fall under the category of transformative fair use.”

“Transformative” is an understatement for what Drew and her crew — greater than 100 artists collaborated together with her just about in the course of the pandemic, the vast majority of them trans and/or queer — have performed with and to the Batman universe, creating new stop-motion and 2D-animated sequences in addition to computer-generated imagery. Drew maintains that they have been hardly flying below the radar.

“I kind of assumed it was fine because I hadn’t heard from Warner Bros. the entire time I was making it,” Drew mentioned. “I worked at Adult Swim for a number of years, which is owned by Warner Bros. After every meeting, I would say, ‘Hey, just so you know, I’m working on a Joker parody!’ And everyone was always like, ‘That sounds awesome!’”

Even after Drew felt assured that the majority of “The People’s Joker” was legally within the clear, one side remained worrisome after Altered Innocence acquired the movie: its soundtrack, for which Drew had commissioned cowl songs and parodies of “Batman”-themed music by the likes of Prince and Seal.

Securing clearances for these variations, nevertheless, was one other story. “We had a budget, but every music publisher was concerned about not wanting to rock the Warner Bros. boat,” Drew mentioned.

Justin Krol and Quinn Scharber had composed massive chunks of the movie’s rating already, with what Krol described as “nods to different Batman eras.” Drew known as them again to steer these spot-on musical cues somewhat farther from the spot.

“Instead of doing a sound-alike,” Krol mentioned of the brand new materials, “we came in from the perspective that we were doing an extension of that world.”

Not even these last-minute soundtrack tweaks have been sufficient to keep away from the eye of the keepers of the Batman kingdom. “I felt just the way Vera felt,” Jaffe, the Altered Innocence proprietor, mentioned of listening to from Warner Bros. Discovery himself. “It is very intimidating to get a letter from a company with a ton of lawyers.”

Jaffe mentioned he was additionally conscious of not antagonizing the corporate when its personal “Joker” follow-up, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” was set for an October launch.

“Obviously, if ‘Joker 2’ was coming out in April, we probably wouldn’t want to put ours out in April,” he mentioned. “We didn’t want to be aggressive. Everybody should have space to play.”

Drew additionally wished to see some area between the 2 “Joker” openings, if solely to keep away from any confusion. And she mentioned she was sympathetic to Warner Bros. Discovery and different company megaliths.

“I understand why media conglomerates want to protect their brand,” she mentioned. “They’re probably never going to give us their stamp of approval, and I don’t blame them. But at every festival screening, it seemed like some lawyer came up to me and said, ‘Yeah, I think this is fine.’”