Tricia Cooke has been married to Ethan Coen since the early 1990s and the two raise children together, but make no mistake, Cooke is a lesbian. If this doesn’t make sense in your head, that’s something for you to work through on your own time and dime, but Cooke is and has always been a lesbian, and queerness has been central to her work outside of the Coen Bros. In 2003 she and Jennifer Arnold (“TableTop,” “P-Valley,” “Shamelss”) co-directed a hybrid comedy documentary called “Where the Girls Are” about Dinah Shore Weekend, an annual lesbian pool party in Palm Springs. It won the Outstanding Narrative Short Film at Outfest in 2003 but is now ridiculously hard to track down.
Equally as difficult to get your hands on is the 2008 short she co-directed, “Don’t Mess With Texas,” alongside Carrie Schrader (“The Founders”) from a script she co-wrote with Ethan Coen. It’s about two cocksure lesbians who get in over their heads at a roadside Texas diner and certainly sounds like the spiritual forerunner to “Drive-Away Dolls,” a movie Cooke has been trying to get made since the 1990s. Initially, “Drive-Away Dykes,” as its original title, was supposed to be directed by Allison Anders, the brilliant filmmaker behind “Gas Food Lodging” and “Mi Vida Loca.” But despite also being one of the directors of the anthology film “Four Rooms” (alongside Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez), no one would finance the project.
Suppose you’re wondering why Cooke has only ever co-directed short films and why it took decades for “Drive-Away Dolls” to make it to the big screen. In that case, I kindly implore you to head on over to the ol’ Google machine and learn a bit about gender inequality in the Hollywood studio system, lesbophobia in America, or just read any comment section on Facebook of any article I’ve ever written about a queer film or filmmaker. That should catch you up to speed.