“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” Star/Screenwriter Ken Marino on Zoey Deutch, Jon Hamm & the Art of Going Too Far

Screenwriter/actor Ken Marino and writer-director David Wain have a system for creating movies. They lock themselves in a room for 12 hours a day for a week. Then, Marino explains, “I pace around the room and act things out, and David types and throws stuff at me, and I’ll say ‘No, this is a better line.’ The goal is to come out with a first draft, because once you have the bones of something, maybe 20 percent of it is good, so then you can spend the next however many months doing rewrites.”  

The method behind Marino and Wain’s comedic madness dates back to their first collaborations as theater students at NYU, where they co-founded the Emmy-nominated sketch group The State. Since then, Wain and Marino have co-created cult comedy classics such as 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, Wanderlust, Role Models, and the Emmy-nominated TV series Children’s Hospital.

For Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (in theaters now), they cast Zoey Deutch in the title role, with Jon Hamm appearing as the target of her lust. Marino plays a burned-out tabloid photographer who joins Gail and her kooky crew on a hilariously unhinged Wizard of Oz-like journey through the streets of Hollywood. 

Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, Marino revisits the film’s origin story, explains Jennifer Aniston’s naughty cameo, and reveals how California tax credits enabled the filmmakers to shoot Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass in and around Hollywood. 

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass builds on this zany sex quest-meets-Wizard of Oz premise. How did you come up with the idea?

The first day, David said he was interested in some version of this celebrity sex pass world. Then we were like, “Okay, but how do we build it? Oh, it’s sort of an adventure thing, so what if she meets a bunch of people along the way? Oh, that feels like The Wizard of Oz. And from there, let’s see who our modern-day versions of the Cowardly Lion would be, who our Scarecrow would be, and blah, blah, blah.

The journey structure for Gail Daughtry provides many opportunities to cast your own celebrity friends in cameo roles.

Because Gail wants to have sex with a celebrity, it’s gotta take place in Hollywood, and once you’re in Hollywood, well, who can we call? We’ve been around for a while, so we have a lot of celebrity friends. Let’s write them into the story.

You’ve got Wet Hot American Summer stars Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks popping up for a few seconds, Richard Kind playing a taxi driver, Henry Winkler signing autographs at the airport…

We worked with him on Children’s Hospital. Henry’s the mensch of all mensches.

SPOILER ALERT

But the movie’s inciting moment belongs to Jennifer Aniston, playing herself as a celebrity cookbook author who hooks up with Gail’s fiancée. How did you get her on board?

We became friends with Jennifer when we worked with her on Wanderlust. Then my wife [Erica Oyama] wrote a web series for her called Burning Love, which I directed. We just called her up: “Can you do a couple of hours on this?” And she’s like, “Of course,” saying basically that we’re all at a point in our lives where we should just be having fun with our friends and making each other laugh.

John Slattery plays a violent recluse named John Slattery who’s been unemployed ever since Mad Men went off the air. He eventually connects Gail with Jon Hamm, who’s a pretty big “get.” Were you also friends with these guys?

I’ve known Jon since the ’90s, when we’d joke around in audition rooms trying to get cast in sitcoms during pilot season. And then David slept on Jon Hamm’s couch before he got Mad Men. They were poker buddies, so we both knew Jon for a long time. We sent him the script, and he liked it. Then he said, “You want me to send it to Slattery?” We’d worked with Slattery in the Wet Hot Summer: First Day of Camp series, so we knew he had a sense of humor. John was in Bulgaria, where he read our script at two in the morning. He was like, “This is bizarre, hell yeah, let’s do it.” 

One actor you had not worked with before is Zoey Deutch, who excels as this sweet young woman who’s determined to have sex with Jon Hamm. She’s very funny but also quite sincere. Story-wise, what did you need from her?

This movie is so absurd and ridiculous that you can’t sustain it for 90 minutes without giving the story some sort of heart. And Zoey gave us the center for this story so that you actually care about this woman and her journey in as real a way as you can for a movie with this kind of tone. 

Gail Daughtry was filmed entirely in Los Angeles County. At a time when so much film production has left town, was it important to shoot locally?

It was very important. We remember when a lot of stuff was shot in Los Angeles, and we miss that because there are so many talented people here, behind the camera, who are our friends and are looking for work. Taking this to Canada and making it look like L.A.—that was not something we wanted to do. Since our story takes place in Los Angeles, we wanted to shoot here to make the movie feel authentic and to try, in our very small way, to bring some work back to Los Angeles.

Some people argue that it’s become too expensive to film in Los Angeles

We got lucky. We didn’t know up until four weeks out if we would be able to shoot here because we were waiting for a tax credit. Then we got it, and we were thrilled.

Did the tax credit enable you to make the movie here in L.A.? 

100 percent, yes.

Besides writing and acting in Gail Daughtry, you’re pretty hands-on as a producer, right?

David and I are co-creators, which means I’m there for all the preproduction and always on set. David directs, but I’ll hover over his shoulder, making sure we get all the things that we need. Sometimes that annoys him, and he’s like, “Shut up,” but more often than not, David appreciates it.

You filmed Gail Daughtry on a tight 21-day schedule. What stands out as a pressure-cooker sequence?

The behind-the-camera absurdity of trying to shoot a gigantic fight scene with 12 stunt guys, John Slattery (who’s in his 60s), and his stunt double. This would normally take three days to five days. Needing to shoot the fight in just two and a half hours so we can get done before lunch is insane!

In the best indie-film tradition. Wearing your actor hat for a moment, do you have a favorite memory playing Vincent, the failed paparazzi?

At that same location as the fight, I pull all these documents out of my pants. We were really rushed, so we did it in one take. Props were just throwing stuff down my pants. They would step out of frame, and I’d pull something else out, and then they’d stick something else down, and I pull something else out, and it got stuck so Zoey came in: “Let me help you with that.” It was not ideal, but we got it.

Like the papers that just keep coming out of your pants, this movie makes it feel like there’s no such thing as “too much.”

I love jokes where you think, “Okay, now it’s supposed to stop. Oh, it’s not stopping. How dare they? Oh, okay, now it’s not funny anymore. Now they’re going to stop…but they’re not stopping. Okay, now it’s funny again.” I love that type of humor.

Beating the dead horse.

Beating a dead horse is so funny to me. I mean, not in real life.

Thanks for clarifying.

Well, I’m a big fan, comedically, of “damn the torpedoes, just keep going.”

Featured image: JOHN SLATTERY as himself, BEN WANG as Caleb, MILES GUTIERREZ-RILEY as Otto, ZOEY DEUTCH as Gail Daughtry, KEN MARINO as Vincent in ‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics