As anyone who lives in Los Angeles already knows, it is best to keep your distance from Hollywood Boulevard where a cavalcade of superhero impersonators, street vendors, panhandlers and throngs of tourists make for one of the craziest streets to navigate in town, yet it was always going to be a central locale in “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” when director David Wain and co-conspirator Ken Marino are drawn to madness for their comedies and not only would they venture into the belly of the beast to film, but after nearly three decades of doing this together, would throw their cast right into the crowd for scenes where they would fend for themselves.
“One of my favorite jokes in the movie came out of that, which is just somebody coming up to [Joe LoTruglio] and being like ‘Charles Boyle,’ naming Joe’s character from ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine,’” says Marino, of putting his longtime friend on the spot who didn’t break from his role as a mob heavy. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I get that a lot,’ but he stayed in character and we’re like ‘We’ve got to use that!’”
Adds Wain, “That was an example of our a lot of run-and-gun experience, grabbing things one way or another. without a big production, so it was fun to steal some of those shots.”
There is quite a bit packed into “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” where the jokes are piled on top of one another like a club sandwich in Wain and Marino’s wonderfully bizarro version of “The Wizard of Oz,” which sees a Midwestern hairdresser (Zoey Deutch) head west to Tinseltown to sew her wild oats in advance of her wedding, having an out for Jon Hamm. But the laughs always linger a bit longer because of the decades’ worth of experience it took to build such a comic machine, starting with the duo’s days of performing together as part of the comedy troupe The State in New York, though comprised of both film and drama majors at NYU, there was always an eye towards big screen adventures. Various configurations of the group’s members have collaborated on movies in the years since – Wain and Michael Showalter would co-write “Wet Hot American Summer” and “They Came Together” as well as convening the trio “Stella” with Michael Ian Black, and Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney spun off to create “Viva Variety” and “Reno 911” – but the most enduring cinematic partnership has been Marino and Wain, co-writing “The Ten,” “Role Models” and “Wanderlust” as well as starting the Middle Aged Dad Jam Band together.
The initial draft of “Gail Daughtry” may have come together in a whirlwind – Wain and Marino have a habit of banging a rough draft out in a matter of days before taking the time to perfect it – but spend way less time fretting if a joke will land than most when they trust the process they’ve developed over the years in which the ridiculous gradually evolves into the sublime, having the discipline from their days of sketch comedy to simply spit things out on a deadline and give themselves the time to keep searching for the better punchline after establishing the premise. While it would take nearly a decade to actually get “Gail Daughtry” to the screen from its initial incarnation, during which time Wain would get more familiar with the city it’s set in having moved to Los Angeles in 2013 where he would be closer to Marino, who has kept up a steady acting career on such shows as “Party Down” and “The Other Two,” the gestation period allowed them to see the humor in their own futile attempts to set it up and channel it into something productive when the story ultimately sees Gail and a coterie of friends she meets along the way (including Ben Wang and Miles Gutierrez-Riley) try to get past various gatekeepers to reach Hamm and learn that his chief demand is to find a screenplay suitable enough for him to star in. Of course, as the story develops, Marino is keen to stake out a good role for himself.
“Any time David and I write something, there’s always a character that is in my voice in some way, so as we move forward to making the movie, I not so covertly pitch myself to play the part,” Marino says of how he ended up as the heroic paparazzo who may be able to help Gail out from tracking Hamm during his days on “Mad Men” and may have a lead in his former co-star John Slattery (who like Hamm, appears as a silly version of himself in the film).
Although room is left for improvisation on the set, there’s not as much as one might think and Wain and Marino, having overseen the production from stem to stern can quickly decide if following a certain idea or energy is worth taking the time to pursue on a tight schedule or leaving it be. As foolish as anyone might think they look in trying something out if joining the team for the first time, both Wain and Marino’s confidence in the exact tone they’re trying to hit can be reassuring as well as the fact that a number of actors keep returning to the playground they create such as Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks. (Both Hamm and Slattery were in on the fun of the “Wet Hot American Summer” reunion miniseries in 2015 before committing to “Gail Daughtry.”) The two also know the editing room is as important a part of their process as initially cracking the script, often pushing gags past their breaking point – and sometimes making it into the film as a signature of theirs has become going well past the initial punchline to make things uncomfortable, only to become even funnier as the scene gets weirder – and they can get the film into the hands of Craig Wedren, a roommate of both Wain and Marino’s at NYU, to compose the score and accentuate the eccentricities.
“What’s so great about working with Craig is we pretty much always know he’s going to be the composer, so we can be talking to him about textures and everything from the very earliest stages,” says Wain. “I remember one of the very first things I thought about when we were doing “Wet Hot American Summer” 25 years ago is that it starts with the song “Jane” by Jefferson Starship. There’s always certain musical touchstones that you think about from the very beginning.”
“And then as we’re making the movie, we start to talk about what the sound of the movie is,” says Marino. “I just remember one nice thing about this movie is it’s a female lead and for a while, we had a lot of needle drops of male singers and we were like, ‘Oh no, we have to get a female voice in there, like a Heart. Then we asked our friend Amy Miles to be part of this.”
Like so much of “Gail Daughtry,” the request may have been a snap judgment, but the foundation had been there for some time when Wedren pulled out a song from his back catalog, “Free Los Angeles,” on which Miles was featured as part of their punk band Baby, to become a running theme song in the film.
“Craig Wedren wrote this music for her and it’s her voice that you hear from beginning to end throughout the movie and ties together the musical voice of the movie, which is cool,” said Wain, once again reaping the benefits of playing the long game.
“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” opens in theaters across the country on July 10th.