Jay Duplass made ‘Baltimorons’ with Michael Strassner ‘the old way’

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 5 (UPI) — Jay and Mark Duplass established themselves as indie film moguls with Jeff, Who Lives at Home and four other films released between 2005 and 2012. The Baltimorons, in theaters Friday, marks Jay’s first feature without Mark, and he says he was desperate to get back to film.

Better known as the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark created the TV series Togetherness and Room 104, with Mark also starring in the FX comedy The League and Jay in the Prime Video series Transparent. In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Jay Duplass, 52, shared how the closure of Hollywood independents, the COVID-19 pandemic, and industry strikes impacted his return to directing films in 2023.

“I just turned 50 and I was like, ‘I need to get on the ground and make a movie and I need to do it the old way,'” Duplass said, defining “the old way” as “I need to pay for it and I need to use people in their lives who have tons of potential energy and are unexpressed, get on the ground with like 15 people and just make something very personal and heartfelt and as funny as I can make it.”

Duplass met Baltimorons co-writer and star Michael Strassner when Strassner reached out to him in a private message on social media. Duplass mentored Strassner on a short film prior to their collaboration.

Strassner plays Cliff, a character inspired by his own lived experience. Strassner survived a suicide attempt which led him to get sober.

He was hesitant to return to improv comedy, fearing he could not be funny sober. It was Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that showed him otherwise.

“In the rooms of recovery, I was able to hear laughs,” Strassner said. “When I said I was holding a little bit of holiday weight and the belt broke, the room laughed and I was like, ‘Okay, well, I’ll put that in my story more often.'”

The Baltimorons depicts Cliff’s attempted hanging and snapping belt. In the film, Cliff is attending his fiance’s (Olivia Luccardi) family Christmas Eve dinner when he has a dental emergency.

Didi (Liz Larsen) is the dentist who agrees to help him on a holiday. Cliff and Didi end up spending Christmas Eve together going around Baltimore, Md., meeting her family and attending a show by Cliff’s former improv group.

Duplass said he saw the seeds of a film in Strassner’s true story about surviving, getting sober and returning to comedy.

“This is very specifically a movie that’s really just an adventure movie on Christmas Eve of two people trying to make lemonade out of lemons,” Duplass said. “It does surround early recovery, which is a very potent time and dangerous time. It just felt cinematically right.”

Duplass also corrected a misconception about “the old way.” Many erroneously presumed early Duplass brothers movies were improvised, but Jay said they were fully scripted with allowances for improvisation.

That goes for Baltimorons too, which had a final draft Strassner estimated to be 98 to 100 pages. That included fully scripting the scenes in which Cliff and Didi perform improv comedy, and reshooting it when the first version didn’t work.

“We’re not trying to be funny here,” Strassner said. “The key of this is what’s best for the story? So that whole scene is completely written to a T.”

Jay’s first films with Mark, 2005’s The Puffy Chair and 2008’s Baghead, starred their industry friends, who included frequent collaborators Greta Gerwig and Steve Zissis. 2010’s Cyrus starred Jonah Hill, John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei, while 2011’s Jeff, Who Lives at Home featured Jason Segal, Ed Helms and Susan Sarandon.

The new realities of film production and getting to know Strassner reminded Jay of starting out with his brother.

“I just started to realize more and more just how special he was and what a hard worker he was, [how he] was similar to me in the fact that he could take an independent film and put it on his back and drive it home,” Duplass said. “Michael and I can just go to Baltimore and make a movie on his home turf.”

Duplass also knew he would have to direct The Baltimorons alone. Mark had confided in him that he preferred acting in films like Zero Dark Thirty and Bombshell, and in shows like The Mindy Project and The Morning Show.

“Mark was starting to realize that directing movies was not actually what he wanted to do,” Duplass said. “If you don’t want it really bad, you should not do it because it is the hardest of all the disciplines, the most consuming. I was realizing that I really did want to do it and that’s the thing that I love the most.”

Still, Duplass treasures his time as part of the Duplass brothers team.

“All I wanted to ever do was to be the Coen Brothers with my brother, ever since I saw Raising Arizona in the movie theater in 1987,” Duplass said. “We got to do that from about 2005 to 2011.”

Strassner has also worked in Hollywood, playing Jerry Lawler on episodes of Young Rock and other episodic TV work, including black-ish, Modern Family and English Teacher. Strassner filled in some local Baltimore details in the Baltimorons script, such as the Baltimore Ravens football team and crabcakes.

Strassner also included a local colloquialism, calling the Royal Farms convenience stores “Rofo.”

“Many of our writing sessions, I was like, ‘Oh, we can add Rofo Chicken here,'” Strassner said. “It’s Ro Fa but we called it Rofo.”