November 6, 2020

In this episode, I speak with the writer, director, and producer of Socks on Fire, Bo McGuire. The film was the winner of the Best Documentary Feature Award at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and will have its international premiere at IDFA. Since Bo is a country boy at heart and Reba McEntire is one of his favorite artists, this episode’s song is the country classic, “Fancy.”

Photo credit: Carl Conway Maguire

[Image Description: Bo McGuire is pictured from the chest up. He wears a black hat, pink blazer, navy blue and white patterned shirt, and a bolo tie. He holds the blazer by the lapels as he looks into the camera.]

Photo Credit: Matt Clegg

[Image Description: Bo McGuire is pictured from the waist up. He wears a worn, purple baseball cap, red glasses, a burgundy shirt with yellow and pink flowers, a tan blazer. He smokes a cigarette as a gazes at a pair of socks set on fire hanging from a clothesline.]

Bo’s Bio

Bo McGuire (Writer, Director, Producer) was born the queer son of a Waffle House cook and his third-shift waitress in Hokes Bluff, Alabama. The first movie he truly fell for was the music video for Reba McEntire’s “Fancy.” He is a 2019 Ryan Murphy + Half Initiative Mentee and was recently selected one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 2019 25 New Faces of Independent Film. His transgenerational docudrama entitled Socks on Fire won the jury prize for best documentary at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. It is supported by Cinereach, Field of Vision, Doc Society, the Southern Documentary Fund, IFP and Film Independent. The film also won the Cuban Hat Award for best pitch at the Hot Docs Pitch Forum in 2019. His original television pilot, Shitbird, was selected by Spike Lee to receive the NYU Sandra Ifraimova Award and his feature script, Alabama Snipe Fight, appeared on NYU’s Purple List. He belongs to the the Church of Dolly Parton.

WuWD_Episode 12 Transcript_BoMcGuire_Fancy

Socks on Fire Logline

A poet composes a cinematic love letter to his grandmother as his homophobic aunt and drag queen uncle wage war over her estate in Hokes Bluff, Alabama.

Socks on Fire Short Synopsis

SOCKS ON FIRE is Bo McGuire’s lyrical testament to Southern women couched in the familial battle for his beloved grandmother’s throne. McGuire returned home from New York City to Hokes Bluff, Alabama to find that his Aunt Sharon—his favorite childhood relative—had locked her gay, drag-queen brother, his Uncle John, out of the family home. As a queer Southerner who is both protective and skeptical of the South, this family rupture stoked a fire within McGuire to document the place and the people he calls home. Through a series of stylized reenactments spun in with family VHS footage, SOCKS ON FIRE documents the fluidity of identity, personality
and performance in his hometown among his kin and the many women who’ve been a force in
Bo’s life.