Besides delivering madcap lesbian antics, one of Drive-Away Dolls’ greatest gifts has been the Ethan Coen/Tricia Cooke press tour, in which the husband-wife duo has opened up about their “very non-traditional marriage.”
Cooke has long collaborated with Ethan Coen on the films he made with his older brother and former directing partner Joel, editing titles from Fargo to The Big Lebowski to O Brother, Where Art Thou? But Drive-Away Dolls, a raunchy queer caper starring Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as unlikely road trip partners, was actually Cooke’s brainchild, inspired by her own time at lesbian bars.
“Being married to Ethan and being queer, there’s always a little disconnect sometimes,” Cooke, who co-wrote the film, told MovieMaker magazine in January. “I wanted to be able to make queer films as well.”
In that interview, Cooke opened up about her relationship with Coen, saying, “We have a very non-traditional marriage and relationship where there’s a bigger unit; I have a partner and Ethan has another partner.” The film, she explained, began “as a way for us to spend time together.”
That marriage — pun intended — definitely comes across in Dolls, which melds nineties dyke drama with a Coen-esque crime caper. Qualley and Vishwanathan play Jamie and Marian, two polar-opposite pals who decide to ditch the city for Tallahassee, Florida only to find themselves pursued by a shady crime syndicate that’s awfully concerned about the mysterious briefcase in their rental car.
To call this a coming out for Cooke would be an overstatement. A filmmaker in her own right, she is no stranger to the queer cinema scene. She co-directed the 2003 documentary short Where the Girls Are, which centers on the historic lesbian pool party event known as Dinah Shore Weekend, and co-wrote and co-directed the 2008 comedy short Don’t Mess With Texas, which follows two young lesbians who get into trouble at a roadside diner. But Coen and Cooke have been more vocal on this press tour about how they navigates a creative partnership and a non-traditional marriage at the same time.
“I kind of represent the queer world,” Cooke told ABC News last week. “All of the bumbling men in the movie and all of the caper stuff definitely comes from Ethan’s mind.”
“Tricia’s queer and sweet and I’m straight and stupid,” Coen joked. “That could be the slogan of the movie: ‘Straight and stupid.’ Me and Joel couldn’t do that because we’re both straight and stupid.”
Drive-Away Dolls is heavily indebted to Cooke’s own late ‘90s and early 2000s experiences in lesbian bars like the West Village’s Cubbyhole and the now-closed Brooklyn venue Cattyshack. (Drive-Away Dolls takes place in 1999, an era when there were still considerably more lesbian bars across the U.S. than the scant 32 that the Lesbian Bar Project reports there are today.)
“For the queer community, at least in my experience, bars are one of the historically safe places that we could all come together and feel like a community,” Cooke told MovieMaker. “It’s tragic that there aren’t as many lesbian bars.”
As it turns out, when it comes to lesbian romps, Coen and Cooke are just getting started. In a June interview with Collider, the duo shared that they’ve already written a second script in a proposed “lesbian B-movie trilogy.”
“The idea was to write three queer B movies that I always thought would just kind of sit in the drawer and our kids would look at one day when they were old and get some laughs,” Cooke said. “And now we’ve made one of them.”
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