The influence of GLOW lives on
NETFLIX: Women of the original recall their pain and joy before the new show debuts
LOS ANGELES — The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling have endured kicks to the head, knees to the groin, body-slams, insults, rivalries, ridicule and spangly neon unitards. On Friday, they face what may be their toughest challenge yet: a new Netflix series based on them.
Their old TV show, GLOW, was huge in the 1980s. The women sang, danced, did sketch comedy and flung each other around a ring. Orange Is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan is bringing it back as a half-hour scripted comedy called, well, GLOW.
The new GLOW is a fictionalized version of how the old GLOW came to be. None of the original women are in it. Nor were they consulted — a fact that doesn’t exactly sit well.
When asked about it, former wrestler Tracee Meltzer — whose character on the old show was Park Avenue princess Roxy Astor — rolls her eyes. “Some are happy. Some are sad. Some girls you can’t even bring it up to,” she says.
The women are in their 50s and 60s now. They are accountants, real estate agents, sales associates, tech support workers and pet groomers. Yet wrestling is still very much on their minds.
Meltzer continues, “They say it’s not about us, but then why are they using our name? Why not call it something else?”
If the women feel proprietary about GLOW, it’s only because they gave so much of themselves to it. It was brutal work. The pay was measly, the material was campy and racist. For many, however, it was the best job they ever had.
The joke, of course, is that professional wrestling is fake — but the pain was real. Virtually none of them started out as trained wrestlers. They were actors, dancers and models who answered casting calls for “a new sports entertainment show.”
Dee Booher, who played German villainess Matilda the Hun, recalls that after a match, “these girls sometimes came out with handfuls of hair.” At her apartment in Seal Beach, Calif., she flips through an old photo album while sitting in a motorized wheelchair — the result of wrestling-related spinal deterioration. Her fingers, numb from nerve damage, are tipped with Band-Aids from burning herself while cooking.
Angelina Altishin, who played Little Egypt, tore her anterior cruciate ligament. Laurie Thompson, a.k.a. Susie Spirit, knocked her elbow out. Everybody suffered cuts to the eyes from cheap glitter weaponized with dried hairspray.
Patricia Summerland, a.k.a. Sunny the California Girl, cracked a wrist, broke two knuckles, ripped muscles and ligaments in her waist, and blacked out from being hung upside down and dropped on her head — a piledriver. “It’s the deadliest manoeuvre in wrestling,” she explains. “They no longer do them.”
The women made between $300 and $700 per week. No dental. No medical.
Then there was the emotional pain.
“The boys” — meaning director Matt Cimber and producer David McLane — “liked to get us riled up,” Booher recalls. The angrier the girls, the better the footage. “It was twisted.”
At the centre of everything was the ring. It was violent, yet intimate. Careful, yet wild. You had to protect your opponent from injury, yet make the crowd think you were killing her.
“We came alive in the ring,” Booher says. “Like winding up a goodgirl doll or a bad-girl doll.”
Then, in 1990, GLOW was abruptly cancelled.
The women dropped back into their ordinary lives. Of the hundred or so girls who churned through the system, zero went on to full-time acting careers. Only four became full-time wrestlers. Some of the girls became drug addicts. Some, alcoholics. At least two wound up homeless.
The new Netflix GLOW turned out to be an easy sell. Showrunner Carly Mensch had worked with Kohan and emailed her the idea.
“Do you want to make a show about women’s wrestling in the ’80s?” she wrote. “Yes,” Kohan wrote back. Mensch and co-showrunner Liz Flahive were drawn to the connections among the women.
“There was something amazing about learning that wrestling isn’t really about fighting your partner,” Flahive says. “It’s about trusting your partner.”
They hope that the interest in the old world will drive interest in the new, and vice versa.
As to whether they plan to bring in any of the original women: “We can’t answer that at this stage,” Mensch says. “We made Season 1, and now we’re just hoping to get to Season 2.”
Some of the women plan to bingewatch the new GLOW when it debuts. Summerland will be there with popcorn: “Whether we’re gonna eat it or throw it at the screen,” she says, “remains to be seen.”