Filmmakers David Wain and Ken Marino, who first came together as members of the 1990s sketch-comedy troupe the State, and later worked together on the 2001 cult classic Wet Hot American Summer, have a writing writing ritual they’ve slowly perfected over the years while collaborating on movies like The Ten, Role Models, and Wanderlust. It involves locking themselves in a room for seven straight days and batting around ideas that Wain scribbles down as Marino paces back and forth.
“The idea is to step in on day one without any idea of what it is, and then by the end of the first day, we decide on an idea,” says Marino. “The second day, we [come up with] the sort of general outline. And then, the next five days, we write 20 pages a day without thinking about it, just getting it out there. So at the end of the week, we have a first draft, the bones of something that we can hold and be like, ‘OK, now this exists. Now, let’s go back, write a second draft, and the other drafts, and fix it.’”
Ten years ago, this process generated a screenplay, tentatively titled I’ll Take the Hamm, about a young, naive, soon-to-be-wed couple in Kansas who jokingly create celebrity “hall passes” for themselves. The man picks Jennifer Aniston, and the woman opts for Jon Hamm. But after catching her fiancé in a compromising position with Aniston after a book-signing, the woman heads to Los Angeles in a quest to meet Hamm and have sex with him.
Now, Wain and Marino’s vision is finally coming to the big screen July 10 as Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, starring Zoey Deutch, John Slattery, Marino, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Ben Wang, Sabrina Impacciatore, and, of course, Jon Hamm and Jennifer Aniston.
Deutch has the lead role as the Hamm-obsessed Gail Daughtry. “Zoey is so singular and special and there’s really nobody like her out there right now,” says Wain. “As we were thinking about who could anchor this entire crazy ensemble, she was one of the very first people that anybody thought of. I didn’t know her at all. But it turned out she knew our stuff and was super excited about it. Then I sat down with her, and within minutes I was like, ‘Oh, my God, she’s the most cool, impressive, smart, charismatic movie star. Let’s do it.’”
Securing Hamm was just as critical. Fortunately, the actor’s relationship with Wain goes back to the 1990s, many years before the rest of the world first got to know him as Mad Men’s Don Draper. “When I was first coming out to L.A. from New York to take meetings, I would stay at my friend’s house for extended periods, and her boyfriend was Jon Hamm,” says Wain. “I played poker with him and hung out with him and got to know him.”
Over the years, Wain cast Hamm in his movie The Ten and his Netflix limited series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp. It didn’t take much selling to get him to sign on to Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass as well. “I was like, ‘No pressure, but here’s this screenplay. I hope you like it since it’s about you,’” says Wain. “He was like, ‘This is really funny. I think we could do this.’ I think Hamm himself sent it to Slattery, and they both pretty immediately said, ‘Sure, let’s try to do this.’”
One of the biggest challenges was making it financially viable to shoot the movie in Los Angeles, which was crucial, since many of the key scenes take place near L.A. landmarks like the Chateau Marmont and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. But most movies are filmed far from Hollywood these days for financial reasons, and Wain and Marino were initially told by their producers to “pick almost anywhere” but L.A. “If we didn’t get our tax credit, it was probably going to be shot in Atlanta or Canada,” says Marino. “Right up until the last five weeks, we were like, ‘Are we going to shoot in Los Angeles? Because it’d be real weird if we didn’t shoot in Los Angeles.’”
They were overjoyed when the tax credit came through at the last minute. “Not just because it takes place in L.A. and it’s about L.A., but also because we have this incredible deep well of amazing crew and collaborators here, and actors that are the best of the best,” says Wain. “The set was just imbued with a sense of gratitude among all of us every day to be shooting something and working here at home, going home to our families. It was really very special.”
But they still had just 21 days to shoot the entire movie, and cram Hamm’s scenes into three days at the start due to his preposterously busy schedule. It involved many creative shortcuts, the sort that Wain has used since his days on The State. “We did every trick in the book to get it done, every cheat we could imagine,” he says. “A lot of the stuff we shot in the center of Hollywood Boulevard we just kind of stole, meaning for some things we just walked around with an iPhone.”
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The film isn’t marketed as a Wizard of Oz spoof, and it’s perhaps a slight stretch to call it a parody or homage of the children’s classic. But it’s about Gail Daughtry (a flip of The Wizard of Oz‘s Dorothy Gale) and her friend Otto (Toto with the letters rearranged), played by Miles Gutierrez-Riley, who travel from Kansas to a bizarre, distant land, go on a quest to find a powerful man capable of granting a life-changing favor, meet friends along the way (Marino, Wang, Slattery) with their own problems, and battle an evil woman (Impacciatore) and her murderous minions (Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel).
“It’s a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, a modern-day, weird, distorted, fucked-up, silly retelling,” says Marino. “It’s using that story that’s been used time and time again of going on an adventure and finding people who help you get to the goal that you’re seeking.”
The references begin in somewhat subtle fashion, but by the time Slattery enters the picture as their version of the Cowardly Lion, he delivers almost-verbatim dialogue as his counterpart in the 1939 Oz movie (“What did you do that for? I was just trying to scare you”). By the time a key figure appears in a giant hot-air balloon at the end, the parallels are almost impossible to ignore for anyone with even passing knowledge of The Wizard of Oz.
“Some people don’t pick up on it at all, and others maybe three-quarters of the way through,” says Wain. “One journalist said to me the other day, ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but there’s almost like a Wizard of Oz thing.’ I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’”
By coincidence, the movie is hitting theaters 25 years to the month after Wet Hot American Summer. “Well, let’s hope it performs better than that,” jokes Marino, since Wet Hot, while a cult favorite now, grossed just $17,481 its first weekend in theaters before quickly vanishing altogether. “Most people didn’t know it existed until years later, when it started being passed around on tape or DVD or whatever the hell was passed around back then. It built a following over many years.”
That movie has become so beloved that Wain and Marino’s Middle Aged Dad Jam Band — a touring act that plays loving tribute to songs of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, with Marino on vocals and Wain on drums — is celebrating the 25-year anniversary with a five-city club tour in July, including a stop at New York City’s Irving Plaza.
“We have this really fun medley we do where it’s a bunch of different songs from Wet Hot American Summer that we play with the appropriate footage from the movie on the screen behind [us],” says Wain. “We’re also doing some other songs from Wet Hot and the Wet Hot series that Craig Wedren composed, which are incredible. We have some cast members from the show that are going to be at least at the Irving Plaza show, and probably at some of the other ones.”
Wain and Marino are still somewhat in shock that their goofy band is now able to play a venue like Irving Plaza. “It’s so weird,” says Wain. “Genuinely, it was just a bunch of white dudes in a garage, dads just playing the most obvious songs for fun [during] the pandemic. It grew very organically.”
Three years ago, Wain and Marino also hit the road with the State for a nostalgic reunion tour that revived many of their greatest sketches and characters. As of now, there are no plans for additional shows, but Marino says, “Never say never.” With so many people in the group, “to try to get eight or nine of us together is tough,” he admits. “It just happened to work out [three years ago] because it was during the SAG strike. But when there’s no strike and many of us are working … I mean, these are high-class problems.”
“The State is definitely an ongoing thing,” adds Wain. “We still talk all the time, and we do have some projects in various forms of development. We had something we were working on with the Henson group. I think the State will return at some point.”
In the meantime, Wain and Marino are focused entirely on Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Unlike many recent comedies, it’s rolling out in theaters instead of streaming services. They hope it’s the start of a trend. “Everybody has been talking about how that experience of watching a comedy movie in a theater is slipping away,” says Marino. “And so we wanted so much to make that happen, because the experience of laughing with other people in a theater is one of my favorite experiences.”
“To me, one of the driving feelings about this whole movie for me is we need comedies that are just comedies and not trying to make any statement about anything,” adds Wain. “I think that’s deeply needed, and really important.”
