Bachelorette Pad 1982
Bachelorette Pad 1982
“Anita was at NYU film school with classmate Spike Lee when we met back in the early 80’s. Spike’s thesis film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads was screening at the New Directors film series along with “Wild Style,” which featured myself along with Lee Quinones, Zephyr, and Patti Astor. Anita and Patti were good friends hanging on the downtown scene back then, and Anita directed her thesis film, a cool short called Bachelorette Pad, which starred Patti, and she got me to do a cameo.”
-Fred Brathwaite aka Fab 5 Freddy
My thesis film, Bachelorette Pad, was a romance comic book come to life with stop-motion-animated Barbie dolls (I hired Academy Award-winning Claymation animator Jimmy Picker). The film starred underground film star Patti Astor, as Candy Stone, swinging single bachelorette, and included cartoonish sets by graffiti artist Zephyr (my then-boyfriend), with Fab 5 Freddy as the disco king.
While fellow classmates Spike Lee and Ernest Dickerson (Juice and DP on Malcolm X) worked together on their student films, Maryann Brandon (Oscar-nominated editor of Star Wars & Star Trek) and I worked on each other's projects. Maryann turned on the camera with one hand while holding the boom microphone with the other. She tackled two different jobs because none of the guys in the class wanted to work on my girly projects. Bachelorette Pad turned out pretty well, thanks to Maryann's help. My cartoonish thesis went on to be developed by Universal Studios as an ABC sitcom in 1983.
