Growing up in Columbia, Luke Hodges had an unusual childhood. The son of South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges and first lady Rachel Hodges, Luke and his brother, Sam, lived their early years in a fishbowl.
Hodges says now he is glad he wasn’t old enough to understand all the politics and scrutiny his family endured, but it was that early existence that led him to believe a small liberal arts college would be a better fit for his aspirations of being a writer and filmmaker than the large flagship university in his hometown where his father had earned two degrees.
“Because I grew up in Columbia, I had a lot of assumptions about what USC was, and I was determined not to go to USC because I was determined to leave South Carolina,” Hodges says. “In an ironic twist, once I transferred to USC and I joined the English department, I realized, my God, there's just this insane smorgasbord of opportunities here.
“As an adult now, I think back on my teenage, college-applying self, and I wish that I had just gone straight to Carolina because it was the community that I was seeking.”
Now 32 and living in New York City, Hodges, who earned his English degree in 2016, works as a copywriter and brand strategist at Cyberwoven, a Columbia-based digital marketing, branding and web firm to support his filmmaking habit.
It’s a habit he formed early in life.
“Since I was 13, I had the secret, repressed desire to make movies,” Hodges says. “I loved arty, dark, weird, hard-to-watch movies from an early age. So that has been a constant in my cultural diet growing up through today.
“I realized as I transferred to Carolina and entered the English department that film was really where my interest was and what I should prioritize.”
In Columbia, nurturing a love of arty, dark, weird, hard-to-watch movies leads to just one place — the Nickelodeon — the city’s arthouse theater that formerly hosted the Indie Grits Film Festival.
Hodges volunteered at the Nick, as it is known, and worked as an intern for the festival. There he met other filmmakers from USC and around the world — some became friends and collaborators on film projects.
“I saw all these amazing filmmakers making incredible works of art for peanuts and not having necessarily to leave the region they're in or to look beyond like their immediate network for the support they need to get made,” he says.
Hodges co-founded the documentary production company Nine Patch Pictures with Matt Nadel. Their first film Cashing Out looks at the stories of gay men who sold their life insurance policies to investors for cash during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. The documentary had its Columbia premier earlier this year and is expected to be available for streaming later this year.
Nine Patch Pictures also made a documentary short, Odd Man In, that will premiere online next year on PBS’ Independent Lens.
“This new film for PBS, Odd Man In is about a pre-Stonewall gay rights pioneer who basically launched what was then called the homophile movement at the height of McCarthy-era anti-gay hysteria,” Hodges says. “Then he went on to embrace what we would now call ‘conversion therapy’ and betrayed that early movement that he helped found.”
It is that dichotomy that Hodges wants to capture in his films, whether documentary or scripted.
“I'm really drawn to stories like that, where they're surprising and contradictory,” he says. “Those are always the stories that interest me — that this person or character feels true in their complexity and their contradictions. I think that's what I'm chasing.”
He credits mentors at USC and the Nick with helping him form his understanding of the world, especially English professor Nikky Finney, who arrived at USC about the same time Hodges did and who also is the child of a high-profile South Carolina political leader — Ernest Finney, a civil rights attorney and first African American state Supreme Court justice after Reconstruction. It was Ernest Finney who, as chief justice of the state Supreme Court, administered the oath of office when Jim Hodges was sworn in as governor in 1999.
“I really learned a lot about what it means to be a citizen from her and to participate in a democracy, to uphold democracy,” Luke Hodges says of his class with Finney. “We talked a lot about integrity in that class and what it means in practice and how important language is in shaping and creating the world that you want to live in.”
Finney, who led the question-and-answer period when Hodges’ film Cashing Out was shown in Columbia, remembers Hodges well from her class.
“I can see where he used to sit in this huge space right now. He was always two rows from the front; he was always on time; his hand was always in the air,” Finney recalled. “I was teaching a course I had never taught before, and I had no idea about Luke's DNA as I began to teach him. I had no idea whose son he was. I just knew somebody had raised him well and had put their wonderful stamp on him and sent him out into the world to be himself.
“He is so down to earth. He's so full of all the good things a young person should be filled with — curiosity, kindness, and the thing you can't teach a student, which is empathy. He had all those components.
“He is now chiseling out a path that I believe fits his personality and fits his intelligence and heart. I'm just so proud of him.”
Hodges wants to continue to make documentaries, and he uses research skills he learned at Carolina to provide material for his projects.
“I do archival producing, too, for these films,” he says. “That’s includes sussing out the archival photo stills we need, or old footage that we thought was lost, or old archival audio recordings. And I attribute that interest and passion that has grown more over the years to some of those early experiences at Carolina.”
And, he still has that desire from his younger days to make scripted films.
“My dream is to direct and there are a lot of scripted projects that I'm dreaming about and a lot of films that I can only imagine shooting and making in South Carolina,” Hodges says. “I’ve always adored Paul Thomas Anderson and Jane Campion. They make films that are so unmistakably of the place that they grew up in, and I my dream is to do that, to do something of that scale and something that weird that feels quintessentially Columbia.”
Watch online
Luke Hodges' two documentaries will soon be available online. Cashing Out will have its online premiere with The New Yorker magazine in September 2025. Odd Man In will premiere online with PBS' Independent Lens in 2026.
Banner image: Luke Hodges, left, and Nine Patch Pictures co-founder Matt Nadel discuss Cashing Out with USC English professor Nikky Finney at the film's Columbia premiere.