April 27: SNL: A movie based on an SNL character.

Julia Sweeney created the character Pat O’Neill Riley for Saturday Night Live but it wasn’t intended to be a mystery as to the character’s gender. Sweeney said, “I’d been an accountant for like five years, and there was one person I worked with in particular who had a lot of mannerisms like Pat. This person sort of drooled and had the kind of body language of Pat. I started trying to do him. I was testing it out on my friends and they were just like, “Yeah, it’s good, but it doesn’t seem like a guy that much.” Like I couldn’t quite pull off being in drag convincingly enough. So then I thought, maybe that’s the joke. I’ll just have one joke in here about how we don’t know if that’s a man or a woman just to sort of cover up for my lack of ability to really play a guy convincingly.”

First appearing on December 1, 1990 and showing up in twelve other episodes, Pat is of another era, a time when non-binary and transgender people were seen mostly as someone to joke about. Let’s be honest, they still are and even worse today. But for a time, Pat was the first character of its type.

Sweeney said about this film — yes, everyone from SNL was getting a movie at this stage — “I wrote It’s Pat with Jim Emerson and Steve Hibbert. We had a great time writing and a lot of fun making the film. The movie didn’t do well at the box office, not by a long shot. In fact, It’s Pat became a popular example of a film so despised that it got a zero percent Rotten Tomatoes rating! I guess in that way, it’s sort of a badge of honor. But I can’t help it, I love this film. It has so many people in it who I love, and loved. Many are dead: Charlie Rocket, who played Kyle, and Julie Hayden who played his wife (who died of cancer a couple of years after the film premiered,) my dad who played the priest who married us, and my brother Mike who had one line at the wedding shower of Pat and Chris. And there are so many good friends in the film too: Kathy Griffin and Dave Foley and Kathy Najimy and Tim Stack and Tim Meadows. And the band Ween! We had so much fun together.”

Yes. Ween is in this. It still makes me laugh that they show up.

Pat (Sweeney) and Chris (Dave Foley, who continually has played women in nearly every show that he’s been part of) have met, found out that they both like to eat and become engaged. Yet Pat can’t get her life together, she has a neighbor (Charles Rocket) obsessed with her and an appearance on America’s Creepiest People turns her into a celebrity, which causes the couple to break off their engagement. The entire free world then becomes obsessed by whether or not Pat is a man or a woman while Pat tries to get Chris back.

Sweeney didn’t want to make the film. She said, “I resisted it completely. I just didn’t know how we could make it last for two hours. But 20th Century Fox was really keen; our producer was really keen. So we thought, OK, we’ll write the script. And after three months, we fell madly in love with the script. Unfortunately, Fox did not.”

This was made by Touchstone Pictures instead of that studio.

It also has an uncredited writer.

Quentin Tarantino.

Playboy: You were hired to do a rewrite of It’s Pat. As one now familar with the perspiring androgyne from Saturday Night Live, is Pat a he or a she?

Tarantino: The androgyny aspect is only a part of Pat’s appeal. What I love about the character is that Pat is so fucking obnoxious. To tell the truth, I don’t know what Pat is. But I know what I want Pat to be: I want Pat to be a girl. There was only one sketch that Julia Sweeney, the actress who plays Pat did on Saturday Night Live that gave a clue to what Pat is. It was the sketch that Pat did with Harvey Keitel. They’re stranded on a deserted island and they have sex — and Harvey still doesn’t know what Pat is. And the thing is, they kissed in it. At one point they were thinking of taking the kiss out of the sketch. But Harvey, being Harvey, demanded they keep it in, that there’d be no integrity without the kiss. So that was the first time we’d seen Pat in an intimate situation — a smooch. There is a certain way that you hold your head, the way you come in for a kiss. And sitting there, watching it, I thought that Pat didn’t kiss like a guy. Pat kissed like a girl.

Sweeney was so upset after this that she never wanted to play the Pat character again. However, she had previously agreed for Pat to be honored as mayor for the day”in West Hollywood on Halloween. She would play Pat one last time on October 31, 1994, but claims that it was “halfhearted and pathetic.”