I’ve seen THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT before, but haven’t reviewed it, and it’s one of those ones that I might come up blank trying to say something fresh about. It’s extremely well known and appreciated, I’m not sure who out there would need to know about it who doesn’t already, and I’m not qualified to speak on it either as a drag/trans film or as Australian cinema. But it was an unlikely international hit and has stood the test of time, so it would be a shame not to say a few words about it in this series.

Written and directed by Stephan Elliott (FRAUDS starring Phil Collins), it was released on August 10, 1994 in the United States (about a month before it came out in Australia, I guess?). It’s the story of three drag queens in Sydney who get a bus (Priscilla) and travel to central Australia together for a gig at a hotel. Bernadette (Terence Stamp, ALIEN NATION) is a wry older trans woman who ordinarily would avoid this sort of thing, but wants to take her mind off the recent death of her husband. Adam (Guy Pearce in only his fifth movie) is the diva of the group, kind of a pain in the ass but takes it well when they tease him. It’s Tick (Hugo Weaving, RECKLESS KELLY) who got the gig, and he’s nervous as hell because, unbeknownst to his friends, he used to be married to and have a kid with the owner of the hotel (Sarah Chadwick, GROSS MISCONDUCT), and he doesn’t know how it’s gonna go.

This is a road trip movie, it’s not as much about the plot as the little incidents (adventures) and people they meet along the way: performing for a campfire of Aboriginal locals who add didjeridoo to “I Will Survive,” strutting into a small town in full fabulous regalia, winning over some but not all customers at a rowdy pub, befriending a surprisingly open-minded mechanic (Bill Hunter, THE MAN FROM HONG KONG) when their gas tank needs replacing. The movie acknowledges some of the prejudice they face without dwelling on it or turning into a tragedy like so many of the Important LGBT movies that cross over. When someone scrawls hate graffiti all the way down one side of Priscilla they don’t even discuss it, but soon turn it into an opportunity to paint the whole bus lavender.

More than just optimistic, it’s light and goofy, with some silly running gags and broad supporting characters. But I think they’re a good medium level of broad. Most of the rural locals are more open to strangers wearing dresses made out of flip-flops than stereotypes would suggest, but it’s also not some fantasy world where everybody’s over-the-top nice. It’s cute without laying it on too thick, in my opinion.

There’s a bit of a “most people aren’t that bad” hopefulness to it, but it feels like its their confidence and the fierceness of their presence that pushes the world to accept them. If they’re on a long bus ride in the desert they’re still gonna sip martinis like they’re relaxing at the pool, and nobody’s gonna stop them from sitting in a giant high heel prop on top of the bus, fluttering a long piece of metallic fabric like a tail. What will people think? is not a question they worry about too much.

Of course the music goes hand in hand with that attitude. It’s mostly obvious disco and R&B type stuff – “I Love the Nightlife,” “Shake Your Groove Thing,” “Mamma Mia,” “Finally” by CeCe Peniston – but that’s part of the joy of it. Catchy songs everybody knows and kind of enjoys, at least as camp. I like that the end credits feature a lip sync of “Save the Best for Last” by Vanessa L. Williams. In the ‘90s it was pretty common for that type of ballad to play on the end credits of a movie – for example, the following summer’s POCAHONTAS had Williams singing “Colors of the Wind.” (It would be funny to bring that tradition back now. Get her to do a song on GLADIATOR 2 or something.)

I guess THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT only made $11 million in theaters outside of Australia, but that was on top of their $18 million and on a $2 million budget. And it was widely discussed and well known for something like this, even winning an Oscar for costume designers Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner (who famously wore a dress made of American Express gold cards to the ceremony). And obviously it was seen by many more people on video.

30 years later drag is both more mainstream (with RuPaul’s Drag Race being a popular show for so many seasons) and more controversial (with ridiculous anti-drag hysteria being a major component of the right wing’s assault on the rights of gays, lesbians, trans people and others). I think PRISCILLA is generally considered a classic, and as far as I can tell it’s not one of those ones that feels dicey in retrospect. If they made it now there would be some factions arguing that cis and heterosexual men couldn’t play these characters, but maybe they were grandfathered in, I don’t know. I would be surprised if anybody says they didn’t pull it off. (They’re also now set to return in a sequel.)

The one thing that I know has been criticized is the character Cynthia (Julia Cortez), a gold-digging Filipina prostitute who shoots ping pong balls out of her vagina. Yeah, I agree that that character is a racist and sexist stereotype. So that taints the undeniable fact that it was unprecedented in 1994 for a movie celebrating drag to be so widely popular, not just at lesbian and gay film festivals, but all over. I’ll use myself as an example on this one – I don’t particularly have an appreciation for the artform of drag, but this movie and these characters make a good case for “Geez, lighten up, man. Have some fun.”

I have a confession to make. The reason I didn’t review PRISCILLA earlier in the month is because IT’S PAT (or IT’S PAT: THE MOVIE according to the poster) wasn’t released until August 26, 1994. It’s probly weird to do a combined review of a still popular sleeper hit and a pretty much always hated flop. But I thought it was interesting that two such different comedies dealing with the crossing of gender lines ended up (however briefly) playing theaters at the same time.

My memory of seeing IT’S PAT when it came out on video is of feeling kind of protective of it. It had already been declared one of the worst movies ever made, but I thought it had some funny parts and was being punished for being different. It fits the description I used in that Ernest review of “this particular type of character-based comedy movie I’ve always gravitated to, mostly sketch comedy people who get a chance to make a movie and do it as kind of a skewed, campy, live action cartoon.” Though it’s not nearly as good of a movie as CABIN BOY, which was released earlier in the year, it seemed like a similar case of the mainstream declaring something the absolute worst shit ever partly because it had more weirdness and personality than the average comedy of the time. In the ’80s there were all those movies about an asshole you’re supposed to think is cool, I kinda dug these (always unpopular) ’90s ones where the character thinks they’re cool but we know they’re an asshole.

I’m always down to stand up for something like that, but there are extenuating circumstances. I’m aware of things I wasn’t thirty years ago. There seemed to be a high likelihood this one would now be horribly offensive.

If you’re young or outside of the U.S. you might not know the Saturday Night Live sketch this is based on. Julia Sweeney stars as Pat, a somewhat obnoxious character of ambiguous gender. The sketches revolved around people making conversation to try to ascertain Pat’s gender without directly asking, and never having any success. The questioners are always polite; the joke is about Pat’s obliviousness and the awkwardness of the situations.

I’ll use the modern parlance of they/them pronouns, though Pat is either a him or a her, we just never find out which one. They’re like the PULP FICTION briefcase. I do think the distinction is clear, but that doesn’t mean these jokes wouldn’t be painful for people who identify as non-binary and don’t want to be a part of that kind of guessing game. For example I found an article about Transparent creator Jill Soloway calling the character “a hateful, hateful, awful thing to do to non-binary people – to create this character that the whole world laughed at openly.” Another TV show creator, Abby McEnany, actually had Sweeney play herself on her show Work In Progress and confronted her about the character being hurtful. I also found a trans Youtuber with a channel called “Evasive” who made a funny video about showing IT’S PAT to a group of non-binary friends. It might be worth looking up but I decided not to embed it because it’s one of those things where young people watch a movie from before their time and act like it’s the worst and most nonsensical thing they have ever encountered. I get so stressed out wondering if they truly don’t understand the jokes they’re claiming make no sense, and if they’re really so confused by absurdity, or if that’s just their shtick. I can knock them for that, but not for finding the movie offensive. That part is fair.

In her 2020 one woman show Older & Wider, Sweeney she asked, “Was I the Al Jolson of androgyny?,” but she doesn’t want to disavow the character. She told The Seattle Times “In my mind, it wasn’t mean because it wasn’t targeting people who were intentionally androgynous or gender-nonconforming,” but she also “recalled watching the IT’S PAT film with her college-aged daughter, who was mortified.”

For what it’s worth I found an article from the ‘90s that mentioned Sweeney being asked to play Pat in gay pride parades. I also found a thread on r/asktransgender where a few posters (very much in the minority) stood up for the character as funny, with one called burke_no_sleeps writing that as a young person they “took Pat’s existence as a lesson that remaining positive, even oblivious, in the face of judgment and criticism is key to survival as a gender non-conforming person.” And a recent People article claims that “in June, Sweeney met with 10 transgender comedy writers to discuss how to potentially ‘reinvent’ the character. These writers viewed Pat in a more positive light.” Supposedly some people find Pat empowering, but I’ll take that with a grain of salt until I hear it first hand. Any conversations about representation are complicated by the actual joke of Pat being a self-absorbed asshole. (Sweeney based the character on annoying co-workers before even coming up with the androgyny angle.)

Problematic, not problematic – it’s at least a touchier subject than it was then. What I didn’t expect is that in one aspect IT’S PAT actually aged really well. Charles Rocket (also in WAGONS EAST that summer) plays Pat’s new neighbor Kyle, whose fixation on discovering Pat’s gender ruins his life. I don’t think it’s meant as commentary, it’s just a funny idea. How do you extend that skit to feature length? You have a character who turns gendering Pat into his ZODIAC. But in the age of TERFS, transvestigators and harassers of female athletes determined to be too masculine, Kyle is actually a real type of person worth making fun of. Obsessed with his neighbor’s private life to the point of trying to barge into their bathroom with a video camera while they’re peeing, stealing their laptop and going through the entire dictionary to guess the password on their journal (it’s the last word, zythum). He loses his wife and ends up dressed as Pat, conversing with a ventriloquist dummy also dressed as Pat. Pat never notices anything weird, of course, just points out that they have the same glasses.

I was familiar with co-writer Jim Emerson as the film critic at the Seattle alternative paper The Rocket – his reviews were a huge influence on how I look at film to this day. He’d been best friends with Sweeney since the University of Washington, he helped her with sketches at The Groundlings (where she created Pat) and SNL, and I think he left The Rocket while working on this. But I remembered that he returned to write a story about it, so I found it in the digital archive. There he spells out Kyle’s motive: “He has fallen in love with Pat and he doesn’t know if Pat is a man or a woman. Kyle needs to find out whether Pat is male or female so he can find out if he himself is straight or gay. We liked that idea, particularly because we wanted to make it clear that Kyle doesn’t care either way; he just wants a definite answer.”

Okay, yeah, that’s what’s going on, but it also works as an extreme example of a guy who should just mind his own business.

The movie is written by Sweeney, Emerson, and Sweeney’s then-husband Stephen Hibbert, also from The Groundlings. Emerson makes it clear that they were skeptical about a Pat movie when Sweeney’s manager pestered them into pitching one to Fox. “We did not believe for a second that anyone would actually make this film… As far as we were concerned, Pat was never meant to be anything more than one sketch at the Groundlings… But we eventually put a lot of work into making something that reflected our point of view, that was somewhat subversive and that (above all) we think is funny.”

What they came up with was a first person narrated coming of age story about Pat falling in love with, losing and winning back Chris (Dave Foley, “Grocery Store Clerk,” THREE MEN AND A BABY), whose gender is as unclear as Pat’s. Chris is incredibly bland (the two of them think it’s an amazing coincidence that they both enjoy dinner) but very sweet and forgiving of Pat kind of acting like a live action Garbage Pail Kid (drooling and sneezing on things). Nevertheless, Chris starts to worry about Pat constantly getting fired from jobs.

Pat is a terrible employee, for example working for the postal service and greeting customers with a summary of their mail (having already read it). But they achieve an early version of viral fame when Kyle sends a tape of their horrible karaoke to a TV show called America’s Creepiest People. The appearance is commented on by Camille Paglia (as herself) and inspires the band Ween to invite Pat on stage for one show, leading Pat to believe they’re now a permanent member of the band and a huge rock star. The joke I’ve carried with me since seeing this the first time is Pat strutting into the apartment complex squealing “I played with the Ween!” to a bunch of appalled neighbors. I’m sorry, younger generations of Youtube, that part’s definitely funny. Just trust me on this one thing.

Kathy Griffin (also of The Groundlings) plays Pat’s neighbor, Kathy Griffin, a radio advice host who doesn’t know how to deal with Pat coming into her apartment uninvited, even appearing in her bedroom at night and waking her up to tell her they’re going to be on TV. At one point Pat comes to the radio station, answers the phone and is rude to the callers, impressing the station manager (Tim Meadows, CONEHEADS) so much that he hires them to replace Kathy. So Pat excitedly goes over to Kathy’s to tell her about the new job.

It culminates in a confrontation in a mirror maze at the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum and bad slapstick (naked dangling) during a Ween concert. Emerson says that a Fox development executive asked them to add a car chase, but the runaway bumper cars scene they came up with was never filmed. He speaks more highly of the freedom they were given by Disney after Fox lost interest and put it in turnaround. Michael Eisner was a fan of the character and the script and produced it through Touchstone.

Before the switch Fox was trying to get them to hire new writers to add more jokes, like HOT SHOTS!. Sweeney and friends preferred to strip it back down and hired their friend Quentin Tarantino to do a revision. “Quentin, a major Pat devotee, actually edited together several of our drafts with scissors and tape.” I can’t find it but I know there was an interview back in the day where Tarantino described an unused scene he wrote – I want to say it was a dream sequence about Pat getting the electric chair?

The unlikely Tarantino/Sweeney friendship seems to have been pretty solid. He later executive produced and appeared in the movie of her one woman show GOD SAID, ‘HA!’ And please note that Sweeney, Griffin, Phil LaMarr (who plays a stage manager here), and co-writer Hibbert all appear in PULP FICTION, released that fall. Hibbert played “The Gimp”! They should do a PULP FICTION/IT’S PAT double feature disc.

Director Adam Bernstein came from music videos. He’d done a bunch for They Might Be Giants, the B-52’s, and Ween’s “Push th’ Little Daisies,” so it makes sense he would be the guy to direct this wacky movie with a score by Mark Mothersbaugh (Pee-wee’s Playhouse). I never knew this, but he also directed the classic Public Enemy video “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” plus “You Gots to Chill” and “So Whatchya Sayin” by EPMD, “Hey Ladies” by Beastie Boys and “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot. He was able to do one more feature (the 1997 crime movie SIX WAYS TO SUNDAY) plus a bunch of TV movies (PRYOR OFFENSES starring Eddie Griffin as Richard Pryor). His subsequent TV work includes a ton of respected shows: Homicide: Life On the Street, Oz, 30 Rock, United States of Tara, Breaking Bad, Fargo, Better Call Saul, Fosse/Verdon and many more.

According to Box Office Mojo, IT’S PAT only played 33 screens and made $60,000. (Supposedly it was only released in 3 cities, but would each really have it in 11 theaters?) To say it was poorly received would be an understatement. Obviously it was nominated for 5 of the Stupid Fucking Razzies (it lucked out by being included in the same year as SHOWGIRLS, a better movie but one that Razzie types think is the worst thing ever). More harshly, it’s one of only 40 films that have a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes with more than 20 reviews. But the list also includes STAYING ALIVE, HIGHLANDER 2, and SIMON SEZ, so it’s not the end of the world.

I was afraid I’d have to disown IT’S PAT, but my opinion on it has stayed about the same. To me the personality of Pat is still funny. The androgyny stuff is a corny hook to hang it on, but it’s so clearly done without malice that I don’t find it as offensive as I thought I would. I definitely don’t think it works overall, but it has a bunch of parts that make me laugh. Like for example the love scene where the camera moves across all their clothes strewn across the floor, including Pat’s trademark western shirt and glasses, and it ends on the two of them cuddling at the fireplace still somehow, for some reason, fully clothed. Sure, that leads into a pussy/cat joke, but I missed it at first because I was laughing about the clothes thing.

So I at least respect that it’s different. Maybe it’s no PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT, and maybe it’s for the best that society rejected it, but the truth is I’d rather watch it again right now than do the same with PCU, BEVERLY HILLS COP III, ERNEST GOES TO SCHOOL, BABY’S DAY OUT, AIRHEADS, IN THE ARMY NOW, BLANKMAN or WAGONS EAST!. If I don’t have to though I’d be fine waiting another 30 years.

p.s. If any of this seems insensitive or ignorant about the issues these movies bring up, that’s not my intention. I’m a growing person open to learning more. Thanks!