But perhaps the biggest stumbling block for most intrinsically fascinating concepts is personal bias and affection. It takes a brave, fearless filmmaker to avoid the often-inescapable siren song of their subject. If they don't, there is not much they can do to keep their entire enterprise from crashing on the rocks of redundancy and/or boredom. You can do no greater disservice to a sensational subject than to muffle its essential magnificence with personal perspective. After all, the documentary is about it or them, not you. This is something filmmaker Ruth Leitman forgot when she headed out to tackle the topic of lady wrestlers from the 30s - 50s. Instead of maintaining detachment and directness, Leitman fell head over heels with the people she was depicting. As a result, her film Lipstick and Dynamite, Piss and Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling plays like a love poem, not an in-depth discussion of a meaningful part of sports history.

The DVD:
It got its start in the carnivals of the 30s. Barkers would lure unsuspecting men off the midway and into the tent with the following tantalizing proposal: a female wrestler would take on "all comers". This meant you could get into the square circle with a member of the opposite sex and "have your way with them" for as long as the timer allowed. Unfortunately, what most of these mooks failed to realize was that nothing about a sideshow is real, and the come-on was just that, a ruse to get a mark inside the show. There his money and machismo could be sacrificed for the sake of the show. Indeed, these lady wrestlers were athletes, capable of holding their own with even the toughest drunken bum.

Ex-wrestler Billy Wolfe saw how popular these sleazy showcases were and decided that there was a quasi-legitimate buck to be made. He started signing women, acting as their manager and promoter, and soon, the girl grappler circuit was up and running. Unlike the men, the gals got next to nothing to compete in the ring. In some cases, it was even banned outright as being antithetical to proper morals and social values. Slowly, the sport began to gain some authenticity. It wasn't long before big names like The Great Mae Young, The Fabulous Moolah, Gladys "Killem" Gillem and Ida Mae Martinez mixed it up with the likes of champions June Byers and Mildred Burke.

Later, a new generation led by Ella Waldek and Penny Banner helped guide the sport to its place of prominence. They still had to fight the same prejudices as before, and scrap to stay on track with the men, but female wrestlers found an underserved niche in the entertainment marketplace, and it's one that is still being served today (except in a far more famous and fancy package). Some of the old gals are still around though, participating in the sport and keeping the memories alive. Filmmaker Ruth Leitman got to know a few of them and decided to make a film. The result was a story filled with determination and detriments, adversity and advances. And at the center was a sextet of old school girl wrestlers laced with Lipstick and Dynamite, Piss and Vinegar.

Fascination can be a foolhardy approach for a documentarian. Getting lost in a subject, letting its mythology and particulars overwhelm your objectivity can be almost fatal. Part of your job as a fact filmmaker is separating the truth from the trick, the basics from the bullshit. But when you stop investigating and start idolizing, perspective is lost and your subject slowly turns insular. Before you know it, you're ability to communicate is jeopardized, as assumption and acceptance replace the by now dull desire to lay out the entire story. Or worse, you start developing the biases and borders of your participants, never crossing over into areas where you should be striding, allowing your newfound friends to keep things to themselves that should really be part of the record.

One gets the impression that this is what happened to Ruth Leitman when she discovered the subject of old school women's wrestling, and the six main ladies who she eventually chose to focus on. All throughout her interesting, if uninspiring film Lipstick and Dynamite, Piss and Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling, Ms. Leitman is lost, hopelessly addicted to the fascinating females she has gotten to know, and unable to figure out which story to tell first, or best. Honestly, when dealing with entities as engaging as The Great Mae Young or The Fabulous Moolah, as feisty as Penny Banner or Ella Waldek, or as wounded as Ida Mae Martinez, it's hard to know where to settle. Each one offers such a wealth of wonder and insight that to leave out one seems unfair. And then there is a true character like Gladys "Killem" Gillem, who seems like a physical, emotional and spiritual embodiment of the sport all wrapped up into one cranky curmudgeon.

Unfortunately, this was Leitman's job, and it's sad to say that she dropped the ball on what could have been a true knockout of a doc. Over two years ago, Something Weird Video released a DVD compilation of female wrestling sports films, in connection with the infamous film Pin Down Girls (a.k.a. Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite Racket Girls). It was a stylized look at a far denser subject. The newsreel-like matches were mesmerizing (as were the color commentary provided by the announcers) and along with the forced fake "truth" of the misguided movie (notorious for championing the non-entity "Peaches" Page) it provided a pathway to understanding a great lost segment of female sports. Leitman therefore had the chance to build on this foundation, to take the modern Amazonian ideal of wrestling, marry it to the old fashioned barn burning days of the carny, and deliver a devastating look at a forgotten facet of cultural history.

So why doesn't Lipstick and Dynamite work? All the pieces are in place, the roll call is ripe with almost everyone who needs to be present (or who can be) to tell the story. Leitman has access to wonderful archival material, and her subjects are forthcoming and highly personable. Heck, many of them could sell soft soap with the best of the crocked carnival barker. So why is this film just tepid when it should be transcendent? Why does it take a subject with a wealth of inherent interest and micromanage it down to a love letter to six sensational ladies? Part of the answer comes from the director's approach to the subject. The other derives from her distance - or lack thereof - from the subject itself.

For Leitman, Lipstick and Dynamite is an oral history. It's like Rashomon with 'rastling moves, or A Tale of Two Cities told by six separate narrators. Focusing on Billy Wolfe, the infamous promoter who many felt was the model for the slimey Scali of Racket/Pin Down Girls, and using his dictatorial control of the sport as a stepping stone for the individual stories of her "characters", Leitman starts out trying to paint the big picture out of little bits. And for a while, she succeeds. Hearing how Moolah, Mae, Gladys, Ida May, Ella and Penny got into the business of brawling is incredibly interesting. They outline their mostly sad stories of home fronts filled with turmoil and nowhere lives longing for escape, and parlay that passion into a Hell-bent daredevilism that led to the sideshow, the local armory, and eventually, the legitimate wrestling ring. Seeing photos of them as near bombshell babes, well-formed figures tailor made for the lid of a soldier's field locker, you know that some manner of distress led them to the dead end life of $50 per match.

But once Wolfe enters the story, the narrative gets muddled and mannered. You can tell that many of the women here have seething contempt for this pro pimp, a man who more or less manipulated them into doing things they really didn't want to, both on the matt and in their private life. While Glady Gillem is more than happy to name names, call out carnality and spew venom, the rest apparently come from a school of closed mouth closeness, one that keeps the long dormant secrets of their sisterhood as close to the singlet as possible. That Leitman does not reach down beyond the pat answer and the simple description is a huge fault of Lipstick and Dynamite. Instead she keeps tossing in clips of Pin Down Girls as if there is some obvious connection to the story she is telling in the exercise in exploitation (the link is never made clear) This film doesn't allows us inside the real cogs and gears of the woman's wrestling world. Instead, it becomes an arch anecdotal display where everyone is out to preserve her own lasting legacy.

Nowhere is this truer than in the case of The Fabulous Moolah and the Great Mae Young. These octogenarians are cards, cut-ups and absolute characters. They stare at the camera with a quizzical "if you only knew" kind of look in their eyes, and such a tease is terrible for an audience member. As they play out the company line (in their 80s, both still work for Vince McMahon and WWE) and hint, ever so slightly, at the stories and scandals they could discuss, we grow more and more irritated. Nothing is ever spelled out here, no information made obvious or truths told. Instead, these are variations on a common theme - the patriarchy oppressing the female athlete - garnished with lots of amazing black and white archival footage. Every lady here has a film worth forwarding. Each on has lived more lives than Leitman will ever legitimately see herself. But to try and cram them all into this movie was mistaken. Juxtaposing the cocksure stride of Moolah with Ida May Martinez's obvious vulnerability seems to dismiss one at the expense of the other - and visa versa.

But perhaps the most damaging aspect of her approach to this subject is the closeness Leitman felt for and to her subjects. Certainly, some of it came out of necessity (we learn in the bonus materials that she chased Moolah and Mae Young for over a year to get them on camera), but most appears to be formed out of a false belief in a pre-feminist ideal that, frankly, none of the ladies themselves believes in. Leitman says several times (in the commentary, in film festival Q&As) that she sees the girl wrestlers as trendsetters - iconic feminist symbols in an era where such symbols dare not show their suffrage face. Leitman loves to glamorize these glamazons, turning them from agile gals looking to make a dollar in a mean man's world to something on the level of universal martyrs, sacrificing their bodies and their pride for some cause that was more than three decades away.

Again, her subjects are not in agreement with her. As Leitman keeps guiding the conversation over into the ethereal, these ladies just want to tell their story. They could care less how emblematic they were, or what their presence meant to the future of women's rights. Each suffered unimaginable indignity at the hands of an industry that watched and winked as their "sport" was marked as a kind of drinking man's T&A talent show. Had she stepped off her soap box for a moment and seen what "Killem" Gillem was saying (that the only thing she could rely on was herself) or how Moolah made it for 60 years (playing the man in a gent's world) the movie would instantly become amazing. But these messages can't pierce Leitman's prejudice. Besides, the director violates one of the first facets of storytelling - narrow your scope. Lipstick and Dynamite would have been so much better had Ida May, or Gladys been the SOLE subject (or take your pick of the six), allowing the others to act like ancillary elements in a far more finite story.

Gladys seems to be the logical choice. She was never a champ, never allowed to win, worked the circuit like a mule, and was more or less left bruised, beaten and bent when the sport decided she was done. Her toothless mouth moving a mile a minute, a no holds barred approach to subjects and language, she could cut through all the crap and give us the real picture of ladies wrestling. Moolah would also be a good choice, but her tendency toward revisionist history and outright fairytale factuality would work against her. Indeed, what is missing most from Lipstick and Dynamite is a core, a single figure that can act as a beacon for the rest of the subject to revolve around. Then slowly, as the information begins to unfold and spiral, we start to see the tale's design. The end leaves us breathless, unsure of what to think except that we've just witnessed something sensational and insightful.

This is not the reaction to all of Lipstick and Dynamite, Piss and Vinegar. Instead, we feel like certain pieces of the puzzle are missing, that many subjects have been left in the souvenir books and personal memoirs of those being interviewed. The fan perspective is mentioned in passing, and the modern plastic surgery sentiments and advanced storyline scripting of the sport are never even entered into (Moolah and Mae work for these entertainment conglomerates, after all). Had Leitman relied on instinct instead of infatuation, had seen drawn back from the additive personalities we see in the film and actually asked some tough, borderline sacrilegious questions, we'd have something special here. As it stands, this is an interesting movie that should have been sensational. The subject is inherently intriguing. It takes a lot to scuttle it - something that Ms. Leitman just barely misses.

The Video:
Created on camcorders (though professional edited) the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of Lipstick and Dynamite looks fairly good. The archival material is missing most of the dirt and grain we'd expect from such old footage, and it is incorporated into the modern elements expertly. Certainly some of the interviews suffer from less than expert lighting and camera work (Leitman occasionally had to play director, questioner and lensperson all at the same time). Still, Koch Lorber provides a near pristine image with the minimal defects one expects from an analog to digital shift.

The Sound:
There is not much one can say about the sound. The Dolby Digital Stereo is pleasant, not doing much until the folk/rock/country songs on the soundtrack start spinning. Then, we get quite the aural workout. The older material has some noticeable hiss, and there are times when the internal microphone mannerism of capturing on camcorder causes dialogue to drop out. Overall, however, this is a decent auditory offering.

The Extras:
To call the bonus material here an exercise in egomania would be an understatement. Of the added features offered, a good percentage revolve around Leitman, the lessons she learned while making this "labor of love" and the kudos she captured at various film festivals around the country. The extras are divided up into categories. The first contains interviews, and this is really just outtakes and additional footage gathered while the filmmaker attended conventions and reunions. It is appealing, but not mandatory to our understanding of the Lipstick and Dynamite story. Neither are the deleted scenes, which fail to provide additional insight as well. The trailer is standard DVD fare, as is the photo gallery, and the festivals section sees the director (with various ladies from the film) answering questions. All of this material is nominal to the context of the main movie.

Perhaps the most telling aspect here is the full length audio commentary by the director. During her conversation, Leitman inadvertently confesses all. Listening to her blather on about tracking down Moolah, falling "in love" with her "characters" and "finding her story in the editing room" indicates the insular, unfocused approach the filmmaker took toward the movie and its meandering narrative. Several times she mentions how admirable her subjects are, how they represent a particular political stance not taken in the 30s and 40s, and why she thinks the legacy of female wrestling is so important. This is the sound of someone who is smitten. There is nothing wrong with adoring your subject matter, but Leitman leaves out far too much to consider this story to be 100% true. There is just too much internal and external manipulation to be sure of the facts.

Final Thoughts:
After three viewings of Lipstick and Dynamite, the same unsettling sentiments keep emerging. This is a wonderful subject underdone, a documentary that got sidetracked and turned into a personal paean. While there is nothing really wrong with a 90 minute celebration of an idea or a person you adore, to be blinded by the light you are supposed to be shining on the audience is detrimental to your documentary. Journalists know there is such a thing as getting "too close", of losing objectivity for the sake of passion or personal involvement. Ruth Leitman seems like a nice enough person, and her attempt at dragging the hidden world of ladies professional wrestling out into the limelight is to be commended. But Lipstick and Dynamite promises to be so much more, and yet it just can't live up to the history of the hype. There is a great film to be made about the grappling glamazons who helped blaze a trail that lead to legitimizing women's athletics. This is not that movie, however.

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