Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling: Meet Crazy Killen Gillen, the Great Johnnie Mae Young, The Fabulous Moolah - women who have lived up to their defiant show-biz monikers. Ruth Leitman’s documentary focuses on half a dozen women wrestlers who pioneered the hybrid of sporting event and carnival act in the 1940s and 1950s. A counterpart to Rosie the Riveter, women wrestlers got their opportunity when the male ranks were thinned by World War II. Many of them grew-up in circumstances as punishing as those they encountered in the ring and at the hands of promoters who controlled their careers, took as much as 50% of their income, and often demanded sex in return for their attentions. Leitman weaves pungent archival footage and interviews with these former wrestling queens. Moolah, the one almost all of her peers love to hate, became a promoter and lives with Johnnie Mae (once known as the dirtiest woman in the ring) and midget wrestler Diamond Lil, their surrogate daughter. Gillen talks about her post-wrestling years as a lion tamer and alligator wrangler. Others like Ida Mae Martinez, who works as a prison nurse, have had less flamboyant second lives. A half-century later, however, they all remain as competitive and tough in spirit as they once also were in body. (Amy Taubin)

Director: Ruth Leitman
Producer: Debbie Nightingale

Ruth Leitman
DIRECTOR

Ruth Leitman’s first documentary, WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY, won the Audience Award at the Atlanta Film Festival. She then won a Rockefeller Fellowship to direct ALMA, and went on to direct WELCOME TO ANATEVKA in 2001. She teaches documentary filmmaking at the School of the Arts Institute in Chicago.