In 1994, Julia Sweeney’s popular Saturday Night Live character, Pat Riley, was given a movie adaptation entitled It’s Pat. The film revolves around the androgynous and obnoxious Pat, who falls in love with Chris, another person of indeterminate gender played by Kids in the Hall star Dave Foley. Meanwhile, Pat’s neighbor, Kyle (Charles Rocket), develops an attraction to Pat and becomes obsessed with finding out Pat’s gender. This has a negative effect on Kyle’s relationship with his wife as he begins to question his sexuality, and eventually starts dressing up like Pat.
It’s Pat was a notorious box-office bomb, grossing just under $61,000 on an $8 million budget. The film was also far from critically acclaimed. Even all these years later, it sits at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
“That this silly excuse for a movie knows it’s silly isn’t nearly enough to justify its waste of talent, time, and money. Skip it and save yours,” read one review in The Seattle Times. Variety did them one better, saying that Sweeney “almost perversely turned the relatively harmless TV character into a boorish, egotistical creep for the big screen.”
One of the Worst ‘SNL’ Movies Ever Had a Secret Quentin Tarantino Connection
Here’s the weirdest part of all this: At one point, Quentin Tarantino was hired to do a rewrite on the It’s Pat script—just a couple of years short of winning an Academy Award for Pulp Fiction, which featured an appearance from Sweeney as well. This, of course, wasn’t Tarantino’s first foray into comedy, as he’d previously made an appearance on The Golden Girls that partially helped fund his film career.
But how did he land a gig writing an SNL movie? According to Sweeney, Tarantino was hanging around with Harvey Keitel when the actor guested on SNL in 1993—Keitel did a Pat sketch with Sweeney that same night.
As it turns out, Tarantino was a big fan of Pat and could recite all of Sweeney’s lines—including ones she’d written herself and forgotten. The director later told Playboy, “What I love about the character is that Pat is so f—king obnoxious.” Tarantino and Sweeney became good friends after that initial meeting and bonded over their love of movies. The two would collaborate again on Sweeney’s 1998 one-woman play God Said Ha!, which was much more well-received than It’s Pat.
The post 30 Years Ago, Quentin Tarantino Somehow Helped Rewrite One of the Worst ‘SNL’ Movies Ever appeared first on VICE.
