GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012; director: Brett Whitcomb)
The women of GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling will never forget the years from 1986 to 1990 when they grappled with each other every week on syndicated national television while dressed in skimpy showgirl outfits.
I understand completely.
I was a preteen when GLOW was on the air and I can’t forget it, either. Never in my life have I been as big a sports fan as when I sneaked peeks at all-girl wrestling on TV when I was 11 years old. It was a challenge. GLOW was not the kind of thing that you could watch with your family (or at least I couldn’t). No, a boy had to spend time with this alone. It was all girls in skintight costumes flinging each other across a wrestling ring and, for that, a young man needs some privacy in order to properly sort through his feelings. That’s just how this particular path works. In retrospect, I think I only got to watch GLOW twice back then, but both experiences made valuable contributions to my pubescent years. Especially when that blonde in the little denim shorts showed up.
That’s my story, but it’s a very, very small part of the story. This documentary gives you most of the rest, in which the old GLOW girls talk about working for this campy curiosity, the brainchild of a wrestling promoter (David B. McLane, who came up with the original idea), a serial businessman (Meshulam Riklis, who brought in the money) and an exploitation filmmaker (Matt Cimber, who refined the vision and cracked the whip). GLOW was one of those outrageous low-budget 80s television productions that, like The Morton Downey Jr. Show, looked like it was shot in a crumbling black box of a studio with bargain basement set design that could collapse any minute. I expected the reminiscences to be about exploitation, exhaustion and embarrassment.
NOPE. The ex-GLOW gals, now in their fifties and sixties, are nostalgic, wistful and even tearful over old memories. There were two kinds of GLOW women. Most were pretty actress wannabes and model hopefuls who were happy to have a gig even if it meant being body-slammed. Then there were the bruisers, hulking 350-pounders who either had no other stable place in the entertainment industry or who came to GLOW from genuine wrestling backgrounds at a time when female wrestlers were merely big as opposed to being muscular athletes. They all got along, though—or at least the movie avoids talk about personal friction among the women—living together, obeying strict (downright invasive) rules during training and forming a bond while getting used to this strange place where they found themselves.
Curiously, the three men who ran the show declined to be interviewed, but this movie does fine without them. This is about the low-rung of the show business ladder, that place of struggle and spontaneity and the building of character through trial by fire. None of the women here speak of GLOW as a misstep in their careers. It was grueling and physically brutal (injuries galore), with only meager rewards and not much of a credit to propel them toward more high-profile work, but they felt alive. They also had a devoted audience and, thus, made an impact.
The world today is full of students of 80s kitsch (I’m one of them). For them, I recommend sneaking in a little knowledge of GLOW in between watching Night Flight clips and digging up Pac-Man Fever from the used vinyl bin. This crash course is only seventy-six minutes long and is full of the finest fuzzed-out and battered consumer-grade VHS-sourced clips of the original show that director Brett Whitcomb could locate.
Whitcomb also directed the Rock-afire Explosion documentary! How have I not seen THAT, yet? I’ll get on it. Sometime before 2019. Probably.