After a long stretch of drafting and revision, I’m glad to say that The Left Hand — a feature screenplay adapted from my memoir Soulfully Gay, along with a full treatment — is finished. One hundred thirteen pages. Nine sequences. A year in the life of one man in Seattle.
I want to say something first about the book it came from, because that’s the part of this that isn’t mine to be modest about.
Soulfully Gay was published with a foreword by Ken Wilber, who wrote:
As it turns out, Joe is a writer, a rip-roaring wonder of a writer, and he had the courage to tell those truths, to endure them, to have them tear him apart, hospitalize him, brutalize him, kill and reassemble him, in one of the most astonishing tales of death and resurrection you are likely to find in today’s literature.
That was a generous thing to say about a first book, and it set a bar I’ve spent the years since trying to clear again. The Left Hand is my attempt.
The film is a character study rather than a biopic. It follows a fictionalized version of me across a single year, and its center of gravity is a relationship with Ramon, a landscaper who arrives in the story speaking almost no English and leaves it speaking a good deal more. A meaningful portion of the dialogue is in Spanish, subtitled — not as texture, but because the distance between what two people mean and what they can actually say to each other is one of the things the movie is about.
Around them are a handful of people who complicate the question rather than resolve it: Daniel, who moves easily between both languages and therefore holds more power in the room than anyone acknowledges; Mike, who keeps asking the questions a friend is allowed to ask; and Ben, whose own reckoning with sobriety lands at exactly the wrong moment, which is to say the right one.
The dilemma underneath all of it is theological, though nobody in the film would use that word except under duress. What is a person actually for? Can someone believe that they were made deliberately, and made good, while also believing what they’ve been told their whole life about who they are? The story doesn’t argue toward an answer so much as it puts a man in a position where he has to act.
Practically speaking: this is a contained, dialogue-driven drama built for the $2–5M range. Small cast, Pacific Northwest locations, no set pieces. It’s the kind of picture that lives or dies on performance and on a director with real taste.
Which brings me to the ask. If you have a connection to a producer, director, or production company working in indie prestige drama at that budget level, I would be grateful for an introduction. The treatment is ready to send, and I’m happy to make it easy.
Thank you for reading — and for passing this along if it lands with someone.