Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling

Did You Know?

• The first audition for GLOW was held at Gold's Gym.
• Steve Blance was the regular recipient of a GLOW Girl beatdown in Season 2.

Inception

David B. McLane came up with the idea for the show while he was an announcer and promoter for the Indianapolis-based World Wrestling Association, after noticing how crowds responded to women’s matches. His boss, Dick the Bruiser, thought local audiences wouldn’t go for an all-female wrestling promotion and called it a money-losing gimmick. McLane didn’t give up. He moved to Hollywood and placed casting ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, which drew more than 500 women to auditions at the Hyatt on Sunset.

The first tryouts happened at Gold’s Gym. The dozen women who made the cut spent six weeks training at Broadway Boxing Gym in Watts, a neighborhood in South Los Angeles. McLane brought in Mexican wrestling pro Mando Guerrero to teach them, then handed the job to veteran wrestler Cynthia Peretti, who also performed on the show as “Pepper.” To get the series on TV, McLane teamed up with Independent Network Incorporated, run by Irv Holender.

Holender had previously produced the revived Gumby series. Through him, McLane met Meshulam Riklis, the chairman of Rapid-American Corporation, which owned the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Riklis let the Riviera host GLOW. Holender’s company handled distribution with a New York syndicator called MG/Perin, while McLane ran the venture.

Director Matt Cimber, who had just made the film Butterfly starring Riklis’s wife Pia Zadora, was hired to oversee creative work and direct episodes. Some of the original dozen wrestlers moved to Las Vegas, where local actresses and showroom dancers joined them. Lauri Thompson, a future lawyer and lead dancer in the Tropicana’s Folies Bergère, played Susie Spirit and recruited other dancers. Lorilyn Palmer, who portrayed Colonel Ninotchka, took over training new performers.

The first actress hired, according to McLane, was Jeanne Basone, then a phlebotomist, who played the character Hollywood. Basone later appeared in a Playboy pictorial called Lethal Women, did stunt work, and founded her own wrestling production company, Hollywould Productions.

Broadcast

The syndicated GLOW TV show was produced for four seasons from 1986 to 1990. Seasons 1 and 2 were shot at the Riviera on Saturday afternoons with a casino crowd. McLane and the majority of the original cast left the company in a dispute over the domination of low brow, blue, Hee Haw style comedy Cimber had infused into the show; McLane's new promotion became Powerful Women of Wrestling. Seasons 3 and 4 were filmed at a former warehouse building approximately three miles east of the Riviera hotel.

Cimber cast new actresses to play the wrestlers. They wrestled approximately eight matches per live event, and the venture held live events only for the purpose of taping television programming. They had actual television seasons consisting of 26 episodes that were each rerun once to complete the year, with a total of 104 episodes produced and aired. As Cimber focused on producing, Andrew Hecker directed later episodes.

A fifth season was being shot when the show went off the air in financial turmoil. Hecker directed an initial revival attempt in 1991, which became the pay per view special GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling: Canvas Carnage. McLane later created Women of Wrestling, also directed by Hecker and syndicated to TV stations by MG/Perin, in 2000. McLane performed as ring announcer and host for Seasons 1 and 2; his announcing voice was replaced in Season 2 with Miles Headlock and "Motormouth" Mike Morgan.

Steve Blance was senior referee in Season 2 before becoming GLOW's commissioner in Seasons 3 and 4. Johnny Cafarella was ring announcer for Seasons 3 and 4 and served as company manager after McLane's departure in 1987.

Revival by Ursula Hayden

The GLOW company was owned and operated since 2001 by Ursula Hayden, who portrayed Babe the Farmer's Daughter, Princess of Darkness, and Donna Matrix. Her first venture with GLOW was a sold-out 2003 live event at the El Rey Theatre in Hollywood, California, followed by a DirecTV pay-per-view produced by Hayden and Johnny Cafarella. In April 2012, GLOW returned to Las Vegas for a show that reunited former participants and featured new GLOW wrestlers.

Later in 2012 she appeared in the documentary GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, which premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and won Best Documentary at the San Diego Comic-Con Film Festival. In 2017, after working with writers Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, a scripted comedy-drama series based on the actual promotion was picked up by Netflix; Hayden served as a series consultant until its cancellation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hayden died on December 3, 2022.

Documentary

A documentary film, GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, was released in 2012. Directed by Brett Whitcomb and written by Bradford Thomason, it features the music of ESG. The film premiered to positive reviews at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and won Best Documentary at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con Film Festival, as well as Audience Choice Best Documentary at Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama.