It’s Pat, It’s Short, but Just What Is It?

It’s Pat--or is it? It seems the fate of Touchstone Pictures’ movie take on Julia Sweeney’s sexually amorphic “Saturday Night Live” character is as nebulous as Pat his/herself.

Sources on the set say that Sweeney’s one-gender-fits-all screen version, which is scheduled for a Sept. 2 release, has already been clipped to 76 minutes--with credits.

“Geez, the trailer (promoting the film) is longer than that! Maybe they should just show the trailer,” says one source. The average length for a feature film falls somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours, without credits; credits usually roll for about five or six minutes.

“It’s Pat” is so short now that Touchstone has reportedly asked that another 16 minutes be tacked back onto the picture. Compare that to such upcoming summer fare as Warner Bros.’ “Wyatt Earp,” which is three hours, or the two-hour “Maverick.”

But a Disney spokeswoman says the rumors about the film are not true and that Disney is very hopeful about the picture’s performance at the box office; she also pointed out that the hit “Airplane!” was only 76 minutes.

“The problem with ‘Pat’ is not Julia’s performance,” says one Disney source. “The problem is every scene is the same joke.”

That joke being, what is Pat--male or female? It’s a joke that works pretty well in three-minute skits on “Saturday Night Live” but is stretched a bit thin over the course of a film. In “It’s Pat,” Sweeney’s Pat is living with a crummy job until a mystery person named Chris comes into Pat’s life, and they fall in love. Chris is as gender-amorphic as Pat, which stymies wedding plans until Pat figures out what, exactly, Chris is. There is a wedding--the film’s big climax--but the film doesn’t spill the sexual identity beans. The happy couple are reportedly wed in complementary muumuus.

For her part, Sweeney says that the film was always targeted for 80 minutes or under. “I was told it was 77. . . . We were joking the other day about how it would play in theaters : ‘It’s Pat.’ Now showing at 1, 2:15, 3:30, 4:45. . . . Theaters ought to be thrilled. They can sell more popcorn with all of these extra showings!”

Harvey Keitel, who had shot three or four scenes in one day, has been cut from the film, Sweeney says. “The rumor about cutting him out because a test audience hated it isn’t true. What is true is I had to cut Harvey out and it killed me. He was playing a priest that Pat went to see for marriage counseling. But he was a priest on death row that should have been going to see Pat. It was a very funny device but it just didn’t work.”

Sweeney says she hasn’t had a chance to even tell Keitel about it yet. Co-starring with Keitel in Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming “Pulp Fiction,” Sweeney notes, “I had four scenes but I’m down to one now. Harvey’s out of mine, now I’m out of his . . . almost!”

Also cut were early scenes of Pat’s life.

Addressing the “one joke” criticism, Sweeney defends, “the first 15 minutes are pretty straight-on jokes about gender, but the rest of the movie is a look at what androgyny is really all about. For example, one of the neighbors falls in love with Pat, but is grappling with whether he’s gay or not. It’s much more than one joke.”

She says she’s sensitive about overexposure on the What Is Pat? joke. She hasn’t played the character once this year on “SNL” because she didn’t want to tire the audience before the movie’s out. And she’s only played Pat four times a year in the past three years. “I want to keep Pat as a quirky alternative. I want this to be the little movie that could.”

So does she know what Pat really is? “Nope.”