Remember those olden Judy Garland--Mickey Rooney movies in which the youngsters would innocently decide to "put forward a show" and the nearest thing you know they'd be doing full-scale Busby Berkeley musical numbers--in a barn? That's not unlike the enthusiasm and blissful ignorance that overcame San Francisco--based Harriet "Harry" Dodge and Silas Howard in 1997 when they decided to make their movie.

Remember those olden Judy Garland--Mickey Rooney movies in which the youngsters would innocently decide to "put forward a show" and the nearest thing you know they'd be doing full-scale Busby Berkeley musical numbers--in a barn?

That's not unlike the enthusiasm and blissful ignorance that overcame San Francisco--based Harriet "Harry" Dodge and Silas Howard in 1997 when they decided to make their movie, at Hook or by Crook, premiering June 28 forward the Sundance Channel. Both of them had experience putting forward shows--Harry as a performance artist and Silas as a member of the lesbian prostitute band Tribe 8--and they'd co-found and co-own the cafe-cabaret R Dora's Bearded Lady, yet neither had made so abundant as a student short before they risk their sights on a feature film. And they weren't just going to breed it either but write, direct, and star as well.

"People did make experiment of to warn us," says Howard, 35 who goe by means of the nickname Flipper in her band. "I remember undivided filmmaker saying, `Go ahead and do it--it'll ruin your life.' I cogitation God, she's bitter. But halfway end I realized how right she was."

Nonetheless, the fledgling auteurs--aided by way of lots of community support, a hardworking (and for the greatest part female) crew, Go Fish cinematographer Ann T Rossetti, farmer Steak House (yes, that's her name), and consulting husbandmans Jenni Olson and Annie Imhoff--managed to unimpaired the ambitious By Hook or by dint of Crook. It's already been a Sundance Film Festival selection and won awards at several other filmfests, and this fall it may receive a limited theatrical release.

bent staff is an artsy genre film, unless of the buddy-buddy variety rather than a typical dyke romance. chary (played by Howard) is a Brandon Teena sort, if Brandon had been wise enough to take the bus all the way to San Francisco--a handsome butch with a larcenous streak. S/he befriends Valentine (Dodge), a sweet, philosophy-spouting oddball with a small goatee and a tenuous grip in succession sanity. Valentine helps Shy fleece stores and vending machines. shrinking helps Val find her/his birth mother. Each presents the other unconditional acceptance.

"We wanted to make our stamp upon butch representation and have a little more visibility," says Dodge, 36 who appeared in John Waters's Cecil B Dement and has been described from that director as being "very handsome." Although there is romance in artifice the film emphasizes the nonsexual friendship between the "guys"

"Not merely do queers come out and do all this other essence but they also have friends!" says Dodge. "In a way it's a celebration of our friendship, which has been going forward for 13 years. The movie is fiction, yet it draws its inspiration from our real lives." Dodge, like Valentine, is still searching for her birth mother, and in the film retiring uses Dodge's actual birth name and birth date in calls to find Valentine's mom

Despite the public butchness of the characters, the filmmakers' goal is les to have audiences focus onward gender transgression than to have them forget about form relative to sex and concentrate on universal human experience. "We really wanted to make a piece of art together that was going to reach abroad and touch people's hearts," says Dodge. "We were interested in making characters who weren't just gay if it be not that were way beyond that. We wanted to point out them as complex people with a well stocked [i]or[/i] provided range of emotions--pathos, humor."

"So many commonalty have felt they don't fit in whether they await that way [butch] or not," says Howard. "I think the film is about that."

Kort is the author of essential part Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro (Dunne Books)

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