Creative Screenwriting Pilot Screenplay Competition Grand Prize Winner Rae Binstock Talks “Butch”

Rae Binstock is a playwright and screenwriter from Cambridge, MA. She also recently won the Creative Screenwriting Pilot Screenplay Competition with her TV Pilot, Butch, an urban noir thriller. Rae has worked on numerous TV shows including Fosse/Verdon, Liberty, and Schmigadoon. She shares her process on developing her hard-edged pilot.

What was the moment when you decided you had a strong idea and started to write this TV series?

My younger sister Halie and I have been making up stories together since at least one of us could talk. During the pandemic, we (like everyone else) had ample time to sit on the phone together and muse about things much bigger and more exciting than the insides of our apartments. She was the one who brought up the idea of setting a story around a hardy, street-toughened butch lesbian, the kind of stocky masculine woman that both of us had always idolized and identified with, but so rarely appeared in any kind of mainstream entertainment, let alone as a protagonist.

My instinct was to not only center this kind of person, but to do so in film-noir, a genre where gender and sexual norms – the same ones she so blatantly violated with her very existence – are fundamental to its drama and appeal. And where better to set both a butch lesbian and a gritty noir thriller than 1970s New York City, the crucible of corruption, prejudice, and protest, where the gay rights movement first began? The first thing that came to me was her name: Butch. And the rest followed shortly after.

What are some films and TV shows that you moved towards and moved against to set the parameters of the story?

In terms of the queer world I was creating, I admit to taking some notes on the bizarre configuration of subcultures from John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus and on the joy of filthy New York living from Jonathan Larson’s RENT. I wanted to go for a different tone and focus than shows like Pose or The L Word, which are both very distinctive takes on different segments of the queer community – however, like them, I did want to be very specific for the time I was writing in.

In terms of noir and urban thriller, I really dove into classic movies, including Double Indemnity (pretty much all Billy Wilder’s noir) and The Maltese Falcon. The New York of the 1970s – at least the glorious way it appeared on film – I got from iconic movies like The French Connection and Serpico, which may not reflect the total reality of the 1970s in New York City, but honestly, nobody who writes drama is ever going for total reality. I also looked at more recent shows like Mindhunter to get an idea of that thriller series arc. However, I steered clear of other genre staples, like Chinatown, that felt saturated with a hatred for women. My main character is manly and secure enough not to have to slap anyone around, women or otherwise, to prove a point.

The 1970s New York gay community is a very specific locale and time period. Why does it mean so much to you?

I think sometimes it’s very easy for younger queer people in the world today, specifically those who live in prosperous and objectively liberal countries, to lose track of massively, insanely, radically different things are from our fairy godmothers’ and grandfathers’ days. Today, the fight for queer and trans rights is front and center in the news – but sixty years ago, the idea of “gay rights” didn’t even exist. Being homosexual and gender-nonconforming wasn’t a choice you could make while still living a “normal” life. If you want to live truthfully, you had to either cut ties with your life as you’d known it to this point, or watch the vast majority of it burn to the ground as people distanced themselves from you and your “inversion.”

There was no fighting or resistance on the national stage – how does an invisible person block out any light? You connected with other queer people, not necessarily because you liked them, but because you needed protection from a society that wanted nothing more from you than your nonexistence. The culture created by the hounds at the heels of people just trying to fall in love and wear the clothes they wanted to, is beautiful and fascinating to me. There was so much joy in that world, mingled with so much grief and anger: an infinitely fruitful orchard of stories. I could talk forever about this period in time, but I wrote about it because I wanted to honor those people who came before me, who lived in a world of hostility and suffocation I can’t even imagine, and who put themselves quite literally into the line of fire for the sake of their right to live.

What are some of the unique aspects that make your pilot stand out from similar TV shows?

For all that we’ve come a long way in onscreen representation, I think the characters in Butch are pretty rare in the general milieu. Very few shows have masculine women at their center, and even fewer paint them as sexy and tough and suave. There’s an NYPD officer who is discriminated against for being brown, but doesn’t hesitate to embrace homophobia. There’s a lesbian whose only desire is to stay in the closet, yet can’t resist using her “undercover” status to plumb information from the higher-ups.

The show is predicated on the idea that none of us live a convenient life, and our intersectional identities are often brought into deep contradiction by the things we have to do to get by. But it also posits that these contradictions may be the key to connection, if only because we can all relate to each other’s struggle to fit in.
How did you decide on the title?

Even though it’s become more controversial (maybe because of that, actually), I like the word “butch.” It’s a loaded word drenched in history, and a lot of women have taken a lot of hits in its honor. It also refers to different levels of the premise: the lesbian “butch” roleplay, the general pose of masculinity, even a loose connection to the bloodiness of a butcher. Also, I like short titles. Doesn’t waste the audience’s attention.

What research did you undertake for the pilot?

My fascination with queer history probably began with the huge anthology book of Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel’s iconic cartoon strip about the lives and loves of a lesbian community. Since the strip itself started running a decade before I was born, it served as a wonderful time-tunnel back to an era of gritty, confused, experimental, vagabond queerness that existed almost but not quite close enough for me to touch.

Butch is very influenced and informed by the social bonds and crazy humor of DTWF, as well as by the soul-singing biomythography Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name, by Audre Lorde, and the incredible nonfiction work Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, by Madeline D. Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy.

I also read a number of articles on bathhouse culture and gay cruising scenes in 1970s New York, and read endless primary sources – newspaper clippings, public letters, proto-zines – about the discontent in the time period and place. I found old ethnographic studies that listed gay slang from the 1950s-1970s, and to get a sense of what my characters were pushing back against, I watched many episodes from the greatest TV show ever made (probably), All in the Family.

Describe the tone, mood, and energy of the show.

Butch is a dramatic thriller that occasionally laughs so it won’t cry. The characters are pursuing a mystery, but only because nobody else will. They’re on their own, ignored by a system that wants them gone, and so they have no choice but to clean up their own messes. But instead of feeling like victims, they do what the tough and beaten-down have done since time immemorial – crack jokes about it. And yet, it’s not a satire or a spoof of noir. This is the real deal, with all the passion and melodrama that makes the genre so beloved. Butch is relevant and classic at the same time, its significance reverberating backwards from the present while it plays its own drama completely straight (well, not straight).

How do you describe your writing voice?

I’m a dialogue-based writer, which means that the challenges I perpetually face are:

a) cutting about half of what I originally put on the page, and
b) making sure that the words feel enough like action to warrant their prevalence in the script.

I always like to go around the corner with emotions. My characters are saccharine when they want to be funny, angry when they want to be sad, and vulnerable from behind locked doors. My characters have their interest hooked into the main drama through peculiarities that, in all their differences, they somehow manage to share. I go in through something very specific – a time period, a profession, a singular experience – but then I pull everything else through that tiny hole, gender and age and race and sex and religion and all of it, to show that none of them are ever too small to fit through.

It’s all about using contradictions to make characters continually surprise each other – and by extension, the audience.

Have you written any further episodes or a series bible?

I’ve written a series bible, with a season arc and a proposal for a 3-5 season series. It’s very cool-looking, there are graphs. Of what, I couldn’t tell you. But they’re very professional.

Who’s your dream cast for this project?

My true dream cast involves either Lea DeLaria circa 1985 or Katherine Moenig circa 2008 as Butch. (Honestly, I’d faint if I met either of them circa any dang year.) But alas, since time travel does not exist, I would instead go with Kristen Stewart as Butch, the private detective; Zendaya as Olivia, her femme vivante lover; Janelle Monae as Yvonne, Butch’s partner in crime; Indya Moore as Caladenia, the mysterious femme fatale showgirl; Billy Porter as Mama Donny, a retired queen who looks after the young; Lea DeLaria (now) as Izzy Feingold, the Godfather club-owner of lesbians; and Kumail Nanjiani as Shahid Kambarzahi, the mustachioed cop who grudgingly wants to do the right thing.

Find out more about Rae Binstock HERE.