Photo by Kevin Abosch

Pretty Things is the most brilliant show you’re
likely to see on public-access TV anytime soon. Part Kids in the Hall,
part Ab Fab, the sketch-comedy program is the creation of best friends
Amanda Barrett (née Quinn) and Michael Lucid, who play most of the characters
themselves. With an overall budget of $500 for their second “season,”
they have to make the most of their combined talents. There are brief cameos,
including those by Aaron Ruell of Napoleon Dynamite, yet most overflow
characters are supplied by Lucid’s beautifully lo-fi animation.

The show’s intimate world has the insider/outsider quality of
Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson scripts and, at times, French and Saunders. The
characters are usually cerebral and neurotic, prone to psychoanalytical monologues
and analytical articulations. They reference Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and at
the same time might naughtily read teen fiction or other people’s diaries.

“We both grew-up watching Tracey Ullman and Kids
in the Hall,” says the 26-year-old Lucid, seated cross-legged in front
of a plate of Thai food in Hollywood. “A lot of gender-bending entered
my life at a really early age. Tootsie was one of my first movie experiences.
Eighties cinema was a strange period in film — I remember being taken to see
Staying Alive when I was really young, all those weird-dancer movies.”

Pretty Things is often tagged as “camp” and “drag,”
but that isn’t exactly how Lucid, who generally appears in female roles, sees
it.

“Gender-bending started out as an automatic mode of self-expression,”
says Lucid, who began dressing up in his mother’s clothes at the age of 8.

With a head full of film, post-structural, postmodern and queer
theory from his time at NYU, and an appreciation for gore and sci-fi from his
dad, a former horror-film professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lucid
admits that the show serves as a catharsis for him and Barrett.

Their shared reality goes back to the first grade, when Barrett
(who is also half of the eclectic pop duo the Ditty Bops) would make fun of
Lucid’s Scooby-Doo underwear, which peeked through his overalls. But
it wasn’t until 10th grade at L.A.’s heady private school Crossroads, when their
hormones were pumping and their paradigms were shifting, that the two outsiders
really connected.

“I was always late, and she would save a seat for me,”
Lucid explains.

Unlike their classmates, he and Barrett were not über-rich.
Barrett’s father was, and is, a professional clown who taught his daughter
to eat fire when she was 16, and her mother, who lived in Topanga, is a Wiccan
high priestess. Lucid “came out” in 11th grade, and Barrett, who had
been discovered in a mall, left high school to model professionally.

The two traveled to Europe together while Barrett was modeling
and Lucid was an exchange student in Prague. Later, when they were living in
New York, they created Pretty Things, named after the early glam David
Bowie song. For Lucid, Pretty Things — specifically a series of sketches
about a boarding school called “Mulberry Commons” — became
a parallel universe to his isolated experience at NYU. At Mulberry Commons,
Barrett and some of his friends who were part of the first episodes — including
Barrett’s Ditty Bops partner and longtime girlfriend Abby DeWald and fellow
Crossroads alum Adam Greenberg (who gives a mind-blowing appearance as the Reality
101 teacher in the “Mulberry Commons” sketches) — were able
to come to school with him.

“It was usually just Amanda and me,” Lucid says of the
early episodes, which they shot on grainy VHS. “We would shoot each other
and hand the camera back and forth. That’s why we use single close-ups. If we
were playing three or four people in a scene, we were always changing wigs and
makeup.”

In the beginning, they shot the scenes straight through, no editing.
Lucid aired them on a campus music-video show he hosted, sort of how The
Simpsons first appeared interstitially on The Tracey Ullman Show.
Eventually there was no room left for the music videos.

Back in L.A., they’re working on their next season and juggling
other projects. Barrett’s band is experiencing its first glow of fame, recently
touring with the Dresden Dolls as well as Nancy Sinatra. Even so, Lucid, who
recently animated a Ditty Bops video, says Barrett is as dedicated to Pretty
Things as ever.

“Amanda makes sure that all her scenes are shot before she
leaves,” he says.

In fact, the new season — which, beginning in March, should air
in the L.A. area Tuesdays at 11 p.m on Comcast, Adelphia, Charter and Time Warner
Cable — promises to be more elaborate than the last. For “Popcorn,”
which takes place in an art-house multiplex, they made six new films, which
are layered into the scenes like SCTV.

“We made a Peking Opera, an Italian Antonio film, a Jewish-family
ensemble à la My Big Fat Greek Wedding and a socially conscious
Michael Moore–esque film about corn workers,” he explains with a smile.

Lucid, who at one point thought he might direct documentaries,
edits the shows on his iMac. He supports himself tutoring learning-impaired
students and working Sundays at the Hollywood Farmers Market, selling fresh
pasta. He lives in relative obscurity, literally in a cold-water flat. But,
for the inspired and optimistic Lucid, his current situation is a step up from
the two post-college years he spent sleeping on his parents’ couch.

Thanks to fans in Manhattan, Berkeley and Santa Cruz, the show
has appeared in heavy cable rotation. And last year the two built a Web site
(www.prettythingsss.com) as another outlet. Lucid estimates, “Ten
thousand people have watched it.”

The episode of “Mulberry Commons” in which Lucid plays
a homosexual who hosts an assembly to tell other students about the joys of
being queer (“It’s like riding a bicycle,” his character says, “or
rather it’s like someone riding a bicycle into your ass”) has been accepted
into this year’s Slamdance Festival. Pretty Things has also screened
at Outfest, the New York Underground Film Festival and Mix: The New York Lesbian
& Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival.

They’ve had a couple of big Hollywood meetings, like the one
at Doug (Swingers, The Bourne Identity) Liman’s company Hypnotic,
and can also boast a small but impressive and growing list of fans, including
one of the guys who wrote Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll,” Tim
Curry and Sid Krofft, of Sid and Marty Krofft.

“I gave him a tape at the Farmers Market,” Lucid explains
of the ’70s TV legend and H.R. Pufnstuf producer. “He said it was
‘very cool.’ “

A Quotable Year

The Best of 24/Seven

“You don’t have to sleep over after a hand job. You don’t
even have to really take off your clothes.”

—”Carl,” 30-year-old Web designer from the Bay Area,
“Prick Up Your Ears. The Hand Job is Back!”

“I believe everything is a reflection of my own existence.
We are all one, and these rocks help me understand myself more. Help me have
visions.”

—Steve, a Venice Beach drum-circle participant, “Return
of the Free Spirits”

“Hello??? Somebody hasn’t had her coffee this morning. Yes,
I’m a bear. I’m a small bear and I’m pink and I have a big plastic nose with
a game inside . . . it’s broken, see?”

—Imaginary Bear,

“A Bear of Very Little Shame”

“I want to be rich, like Bill Gates.”

—Heidi, a pretty Korean-American eighth grader, “Material
Girls”

“A lot of women are insecure about their vaginas. They just
haven’t seen that many. They haven’t watched porn as much as men so they don’t
know every vagina looks different.”

—Jason Hall, “You Can’t Tell a Hero To Stop Being a Hero”

“If people knew what our party stood for, and didn’t have
this kinda inherent bias, they would realize that they are Republicans.”

—Eric Eisenhammer,

“Republican Dawn”

“I just looked too weird, too Democratic. Clearly,
velvet is not a Republican fabric.”

—Harper Simon,
on standing out at the Bush
victory party in Washington, D.C.,
“Thanks for the Weirdness”

“It’s just that life sucks so much right now, I might as
well.”

—Greg, 21, on why he shot heroin last night, “Couch Hopping
in Hollywood”

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