Tweet’s Ladies of Pasadena was planned as a pilot for an episodic television program, an impossible expectation even by Carey’s unconventional standards. The protagonist Tweet Twig, played by Carey, is a suburban village fool with an infinite tolerance for humiliation who constantly gets fired until he becomes the only male member of an old ladies’ knitting club. Formally the film transcends anarchy; besides its premise there is no narrative structure, just a barrage of surreal situations filmed through the most maddening filters and delivered through the most disjointed image and sound editing. A huge array of characters, mostly in costume or drag, is bound together by Carey’s Tweet in an unprecedented collective performance ritual filmed in the streets and parks of southern Pasadena. The conceptual result is something that would not look so peculiar to us today, if it were made by Jack Smith, Ron Rice or Taylor Mead but not by a middle-aged Hollywood character actor.