I, Screenwriter : The inside story on how androgynous Pat from ‘Saturday Night Live’ turned into a mainstream (kind of), big-budget (not very) Hollywood movie.

Part of my job used to be to condemn the homogenized blandness of certain factory-tooled studio motion pictures. I was a movie critic at the Orange County Register and the Seattle Rocket, and I used to pride myself on being the only person I knew in Los Angeles who wasn’t working on a screenplay. So I never dreamed I’d actually find myself in the belly of the Hollywood beast.

All that changed in the fall of 1992 when a producer and former manager of my friend, actress-writer Julia Sweeney, persuaded us to pitch an idea for a movie based on Pat, Julia’s androgynous “Saturday Night Live” character.

At first we had exactly the same reservations you probably do: How can you make a feature film out of what was supposed to have been nothing more than a one-joke sketch at the Groundlings Theatre? We did not believe for a second that anybody would actually make this movie. Especially after they heard our pitch, which we (Julia, myself and former Groundling Stephen Hibbert) basically made up as we went along, and which must surely rank as one of the worst pitches ever delivered at a major studio--including the ones at the beginning of “The Player.”

It had something to do with an impending wedding between Pat and Pat’s equally androgynous significant other, Chris. You know, “The Crying Game Meets Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”

Then, at the end of our spiel, the executive clapped his hands and said: “Great! Let’s do it!” We went into shock.

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Luckily, the movie we made bears practically no resemblance to our pitch--except that Pat and Chris do get married in the end. We had time to refine the concept a bit.

After months of legal delays, we finally signed our writing deal with Fox. Two weeks later, the top executives who had wooed us left the company. Thus orphaned, we went through development--the process whereby, as the cliche has it, the executives try to take anything original or distinctive out of the movie, while the writers struggle to salvage the stuff that made them want to write the thing in the first place.

I thought of Christopher Guest’s “The Big Picture” in one early development meeting when an executive turned to us and said: “You know what? I want you to put a car chase in here.” What does a car chase have to do with Pat? I don’t know; but it evidently has something to do with “upping the stakes” for the character and with “externalizing” conflicts that were otherwise “too internal.”

Naive though we may have been, we were pleased that our first draft was basically a non-car-chase kind of script. Instead, it was a character-based comedy with a provocative take on the nature of human (bi-)sexuality--featuring a strait-laced, married, Orange-County-type neighbor of Pat’s who is forced to question his own sexual orientation when he falls in love with Pat and still doesn’t know if Pat is a man or a woman. (He doesn’t care either way; he just wants a definite answer.) And we prided ourselves on refusing to stoop to the trite, overused devices (guns, drug deals, explosions, car chases) that are usually invoked to grab the audience’s attention, but that usually put me right to sleep.

We ended up writing a car chase, of course. But it involved bumper cars and, fortunately, proved too expensive to film. I’m very happy to report that no car chase made it into the shooting script.

Later, a helpful producer suggested that, to “increase the sense of danger” for Pat, we should have Pat on the trail of a “Jeffrey Dahmer-like serial killer.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean the bodies are so badly mutilated that you can’t tell if they’re male or female? That’s hilarious.” He got the point. The idea was rejected.

We honestly thought we were going to get expert guidance from the studio professionals on things like story structure and “character arcs.” Instead, the constructive criticism from the pros rarely went any deeper than: “This isn’t funny” or “This is hilarious.”

One day, a development executive singled out one scene in our script that he “didn’t get” and another he “loved.” Since I’d been taking notes through the whole process (none of the studio people at Fox ever wrote anything down), I pointed out that, in our last meeting, his aesthetic judgments had been precisely the opposite. “Oh really?” he said, shrugging cheerfully. “Never mind, then.”

T o be fair, the studio system is no better and no worse than any bureaucracy I’ve ever dealt with, whether it’s a university or a major metropolitan newspaper. As in most bureaucracies, there’s an incredible amount of wasted time and energy--chiefly in the form of tedious meetings and memos that don’t accomplish anything except to justify the jobs of middle-management. Sound familiar?

And yet, in the end, that wasteful and inefficient system did allow us to make a small-budget movie that we’re proud of, that reflects our sensibilities and values, and that (above all) we think is funny for the right reasons--which means we don’t expect it to play well to Republicans or teen-age boys who are insecure about their sexuality. We didn’t get everything we wanted from the studio, but we were kept involved throughout the entire process, from the writing and hiring of cast and crew, through shooting, to the final editing, music and even marketing, advertising and distribution.

Making this movie was a hands-on experience like nothing I’d ever expected and it taught me one thing above all else: It really helps when your co-writer is also the star of the picture. And when your executive producer (Teri Schwartz) understands what you’re trying to do and is willing to fight for it.

It soon became clear that Fox envisioned “It’s Pat” as a gag-filled, “Hot Shots!” kind of movie, while we were thinking more along the lines of an androgynous version of “The Awful Truth.” What did they expect? “Wayne’s World?” (Answer: yes.) Now, we all loved “Wayne’s World,” but it wasn’t the kind of thing we wanted to do, or were even capable of doing, ourselves. To give you an idea: “Wayne’s World” had “Laverne & Shirley” jokes, we had Camille Paglia jokes. And for music, they had Queen, we had Ween.

As our ever-developing script became cluttered with elaborate fantasy sequences, locations and stunts, the projected budget went higher and higher. When Fox wanted to hire another writer, Julia persuaded our friend, director Quentin Tarantino, a major Pat fan, to take a stab at it. Quentin agreed with our less-is-more philosophy, and his version--basically a cut-and-paste editing job, as he described it--brought the script closer to our simple first draft. Fox responded by putting us into turnaround, offering the movie to any other studio who would reimburse them for their expenses.

We wound up at Disney-- Touchstone, actually-- where we finally became the low-budget movie we had always thought we were. We immediately streamlined the script further and shot with a union crew on a tight, six-week schedule for roughly $8 million, or about one-third the cost of the average studio picture.

At first, however, we feared the studio was going to stifle the life right out of the movie. They gave us notes on every little thing: Pat has too many zits today, Chris’ voice is too high, Pat’s shirt is too tight. We were consumed, inundated with notes. But, miraculously, after they’d seen the dailies for a week or so and loved them, they left us alone.

Well, almost. When it came time to shoot a scene that was a parody of “Indecent Proposal” (this was about as mainstream as our comedy got), we were told we had to cast a European actor in the Robert Redford part. Apparently, the guy was a EuroDisney investor. So, we ended up with a guy in a tux and a mane of blond curly hair saying, ‘Vat vould you say if I offered you a million dollarz to zleep vis Pat?’ Needless to say, the scene didn’t work and we wound up cutting it.

Nevertheless, I was horrified during post-production to find myself agreeing more often with the creative instincts of the Touchstone studio executives than I did with the first-time director we’d hired. Critical heresy. And I used to consider myself an auteurist.

As somebody who’s worked for newspapers all his adult life, one of the revelations of making a movie has been seeing for myself how the press coverage compares to reality. Not well, I’m afraid. In fact, what happens in the news media is just as absurd and Kafkaesque as anything in the studio bureaucracy. Let’s just say you don’t want to see what goes into making certain things--among them, laws, movies, news stories and sausages.

Reading an article about something you’re involved in is kind of like watching blindfolded kids play Pin the Tail on the Donkey. They keep stabbing in the dark, but they never quite hit the mark.

For example, the Los Angeles Times has run two articles suggesting that there must be something wrong with “It’s Pat” because--God forbid--it’s short. (The running time is 77 minutes, something neither story got right.) Well, it is short, and it was meant to be. Because we trimmed the script before shooting to fit our budget and schedule limitations, the first cut of the movie was only seven minutes longer. Instead of the usual procedure of cutting a 2 1/2-hour assembly down to 90 minutes, we tightened it from 84 to 77 minutes.

Some of the press’s peculiar zealousness--covering “Last Action Hero” or “I’ll Do Anything” as if they were as momentous as Watergate, for example--I think is due to the exaggerated sense of importance we place on entertainment these days, and general lack of understanding about how movies are made, especially how they are shaped and reshaped in the editing room. For instance, when we were in post-production, I was amazed to see again and again how choosing a different take or altering a couple cuts could make or destroy a whole scene.

E ven our trailer came in for scrutiny. In a recent Times story, a reporter included “It’s Pat” in a list of recent trailers that “divulge nearly all plot elements or visual gimmicks.” Had the reporter seen the movie she was talking about? No. So she didn’t know how few jokes are revealed in the trailer, or that there’s absolutely nothing from the climactic third act. She was just passing off unsupported and unattributed speculation as if it were fact.

Well, on Friday the speculation about “It’s Pat” will end and, after almost two years, the picture will open--in a limited, cult-picture-like way--at last. We never really thought it was a mainstream comedy (with our play, “Mea’s Big Apology,” we only had to fill 99 seats at a time at the Groundling Theatre), but from test engagements in Seattle, Houston and Spokane, let’s just say it looks like it’s a whole lot less mainstream than we’d suspected. The early reviews have been wildly mixed--from three stars to zero--with the best ones being from small, gay and alternative papers read by hundreds and the worst ones being from major dailies read by millions.

From being a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., I know that, no matter what the movie, opinions always vary dramatically. In the meantime, I can’t help speculating (especially after this article): Will I ever work in this town again?*