She / He / It's Pat -- New Movie Renews Julia Sweeney's Affection For Androgynous `Saturday Night Live' Character She Invented

When Julia Sweeney decided to make a feature-length comedy about her androgynous "Saturday Night Live" character, Pat, she had to sign an agreement with NBC-TV not to reveal Pat's sex.

"It's so funny to me that anyone would think there would be an answer," she said by phone from Houston, one of three cities where "It's Pat: The Movie" opens tomorrow. The others are Seattle, where the movie had its first test screening last spring, and Spokane, where Sweeney was born.

"That was the first time I'd seen it with an audience," said Sweeney, who graduated from the University of Washington. "I was pretty happy. They were laughing more than I expected them to laugh."

Although she's not sure if Pat has any gender at all, Sweeney and her co-writers, Rocket film critic Jim Emerson and Stephen Hibbert, do have their own leanings.

No he or she

"I think of Pat as a man," she said. "Jim thinks of Pat as a lesbian. I always refer to Pat as `he,' while everyone else thinks `she.' Steve, I think, says `she,' too. The studio was making press releases with `she.' I asked them to take an extra minute and take out the pronouns."

Although she had grown tired of the "Saturday Night Live" sketches, the movie has made Sweeney fond of the character again. Pat and another character, Mea, grew out of Sweeney's work with the comedy troupe The Groundlings. She was working as an accountant at Columbia Pictures at the time.

"Pat was like a few people I'd worked with as an accountant," she said. "If you brought their most annoying qualities together they'd be Pat, although they were were definitely guys and girls. It was me trying to be a guy and not pulling it off that led to the androgyny."

Eventually she decided to "just put in one joke where it's not clear whether it's a man or a woman. That of course is the `SNL' thing. With the movie we went back to the beginning.

"I really do love Pat, and I wouldn't have said that a year and a half ago," she said. "The first year on `SNL' was really fun, but I never even thought of doing Pat again after the first time. I thought Mea was going to be my big character. Pat was more popular than the character deserved to be. There's so little personality in the sketches."

Sweeney says she never understood why people found the television Pat lovable, but there was no question that Pat was a hit character the second season, inspiring T-shirts and guests who wanted to do Pat sketches.

"Linda Hamilton wanted to do a sketch with Pat. What was I going to do? This character was never three-dimensional on `SNL,' but the movie really revived my interest in Pat. The payoff is more satisfying than just a set-up and punch line."

Another gender mystery

Another reason she likes the movie better is Dave Foley, who plays Pat's significant other, Chris, whose gender is also a mystery. A member of Canada's Kids in the Hall troupe, Foley came up with several key lines and bits of business, including a scene in which Chris gets nostalgic about Pat's sneezing habits.

"My favorite thing is when Dave is spraying himself and remembers Pat sneezing on him," she said. "Who would think of that as an endearing memory? I had food poisoning all day when that was shot, and I didn't see it until they put the first rough cut together. I think it's the funniest thing in the movie."

Foley also added dialogue to the scenes in which Pat and Chris find out how much they have in common.

"People in love think they have all these things in common, but they're usually things that everyone has in common," said Sweeney.

"You learn so much about androgyny when you're going through the audition process. There were a couple of people I didn't know what they were, but the guys always seemed gay and effeminate, men trying to be women. Maybe androgyny is a lack of mannerisms."

Also in the cast are Charles Rocket, as a neighbor who becomes obsessed with Pat ("that was Jim's idea, someone straight-laced who was repressing his own sexual interests"), and controversial author and college professor Camille Paglia, whose cameo was originally intended to be a larger role.

"I always wanted her," said Sweeney. "I'd read `Sexual Personae,' and it turns out she's a Pat fan. I wanted to do her on `SNL.' I just loved her as a character. She's just so over the top. She's such a drama queen. Somehow we just had to have her in there.

"Originally she was going to be living in Pat's apartment building. They'd talk on the elevator, and Pat wouldn't know what she was talking about. But we couldn't afford to have that many people in the building."

Eisner liked Pat

Although "It's Pat" wound up as a relatively low-budget Disney production, it started out at Twentieth Century Fox.

"Unfortunately, the father of the baby, Fox, didn't like the baby," said Sweeney. "They really didn't want Chris to be an important character.

"Fortunately, (Disney chief) Michael Eisner is a fan of the character. He told us he wanted to make a Pat movie. He told us he'd be very interested. It was because of his enthusiasm for the character that we felt a lot more willing to do the character we wanted."

She's proud that the movie cost under $8 million, which is half what the "SNL"-inspired "Wayne's World" cost. Next time, she hopes to make an even cheaper movie, by limiting sets and locations that gobble up budgets.

"Our next script will have two sets," she said. "If we do a Mea movie, we'll have it all take place in an accounting office."

She describes Mea as "a parody of my own personality, with my sister's personality thrown in. As an accountant, I was very good with numbers, and very bad at managing people. So when they made me a manager, I was a disaster. I couldn't tell people how to do anything. We wrote this play with the Groundlings (`Mea's Big Apology') about a woman whose boss dies and she gets promoted.

"We want to make a Mea movie, but we'll see how many people like Pat," she said. Scheduled to open nationwide in September, "It's Pat" is getting a limited test release in Seattle, Spokane and Houston.

"The studio just wanted cities with high per-capita moviegoing populations, good testing cities. I know people who like the movie, but I don't know how many of them there are. I don't want them to open it in 2,500 theaters."