A mischievous road
Writer-producer Ethan Coen and his wife, Tricia Cooke, try for a tone reminiscent of a 1970s sexploitation romp.
Source: Los Angeles Times
If ever a movie begged for the resurrection of the drive-in, "Drive-Away Dykes" is it. A lesbian road-trip action sex comedy penned by writer-producer Ethan Coen ("Fargo") and his wife, film editor Tricia Cooke, "Drive-Away" promises all the laughs, thrills and mischief of the old double-bill sexploitation cinema. "Women on the road. All kinds of action," deadpans the tagline.
I'm there.
When Marion, a skirt-chasing party girl, gets kicked out after her cop girlfriend finds her in bed with another woman, she convinces her buttoned-down friend Jamie to let her come along on a get-away-for-a-few-days drive-away car assignment from Philadelphia to Miami. Packed along for the ride are Jamie's crush on Marion, Marion's unrelenting desire to cruise every lesbian bar on the eastern seaboard, and — since this is Coen territory — a severed head in a hatbox, a mystery briefcase full of plaster phalluses, a mélange of angry pursuers, an evil senator, a bitter ex-girlfriend and loads of hot boyless sex.
"The sensibility is exploitive but innocent," says Coen, who said he was aiming for the tone of the early-'70s exploitation romps he saw as a teenager, only with more sincerity.
"The way that Ethan so perfectly put it is that it's a 'naughty comedy,' " says Allison Anders ("Sugar Town"), who is attached to direct the script and is particularly eager to film sequences like the girls' encounter with a women's soccer team at a basement party. "It's definitely sexy but it's also fun in its naughtiness. It is a love story too, ultimately."
From "Gas Food Lodging" to her segment of "Four Rooms" and the agonizingly personal "Things Behind the Sun," Anders has often navigated nudity and sex scenes, and she alludes to a political climate that's made the movie difficult to get produced. But she's hoping to move "Drive-Away" into production this year, and the filmmakers and producers have been looking at "absolutely everybody" to find the right leads, including daring actors like Selma Blair and Holly Hunter, who have been attached at various times.
"These girls have to be hot, smart, brave and funny," Anders says with a chuckle. "It's really bold material in a lot of ways."
Coen, with brother Joel, is of course half of the idiosyncratic filmmaking partnership that so deliciously twisted genre convention in screenplays like "Raising Arizona," "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," and Cooke has worked as an editor on most of their movies since "Miller's Crossing." Years ago, someone mentioned the potential title to her and inspiration struck.
"We were both taken with the title and, as with old exploitation films, it all derived from that," Coen says. "We figured, 'All right, what kind of movie has this title?' "
The result was their first screenplay collaboration (they apparently enjoyed it; they've since collaborated on other scripts), which they churned out as a "spare time kind of thing" around other projects.
Anders, Coen and Cooke have been friends since 1995, when they met on a plane to China for a Sundance function, and Anders' daughter was Coen and Cooke's nanny for many years. In Anders' recollection, before they had written "Drive-Away," Cooke and Coen pitched the black comedy to her in hilariously deadpan fashion during a Christmas vacation in San Francisco a few years ago and then asked Anders to direct it.
"I was just so immediately into it," says Anders, who got the finished script about a year ago. "I could see why it would be a great fit, them and me — there are a lot of great women characters in it. It's really a girl buddy movie, from a female point of view, but it's also very Russ Meyer-esque, with that same kind of innocence. The way that Ethan and Tricia always saw it was like a B movie of the past. We gotta bring back drive-ins."
the dykes aren't gonna be happy, and the lesbians won't either.
Well P, you can't please everybody.