“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” the story of a naive young hairdresser who travels to Hollywood hoping to sleep with Jon Hamm, has been described as an absurdist, deeply meta, gloriously raunchy comedy since it debuted at Sundance. But the new film from “Wet Hot American Summer” director David Wain and his co-writer Ken Marino is also a riff on “The Wizard of Oz.”
“As we were constructing the story of this woman who has to figure out what to do in the event of her husband-to-be making his celebrity pass agreement a reality, it just started to organically make sense to us that there was like a ‘Wizard of Oz’ thread,” Wain says. “It seemed organically part of the DNA of what we were doing.”
So like Dorthy Gale, Gail is a naive young girl from Kansas. Only this time, instead of floating over the rainbow, she’s flying economy to a magical version of Tinseltown. There she encounters Caleb (Ben Wang), an agent-in-training at CAA, who discovers that he has the smarts to be a top wheeler and dealer, as well as Vincent (played by Marino), a down-on-his-luck paparazzi who secretly has a heart of gold. Lastly, there’s Hamm’s “Mad Men” co-star John Slattery, played by the actor himself. Only this version of Slattery is a whimpering scaredy-cat, who unleashes the beast within at a key moment in the film.
Obviously, the three are stand-ins for the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion and their quest to obtain a brain, a heart and some courage. To bring the point home, the filmmakers also included other nods to “The Wizard of Oz.” Gail’s shoes, for instance, are red, and Slattery is often outfitted in yellow like a Lion’s fur.
“We wanted there to be these little references, but we were equally motivated by telling this story about these characters, and by exploring this idea of celebrity pass and of this whimsical journey through a fantasized version of Hollywood,” Marino says.
This time, instead of traveling to the Emerald City, Gail and her buddies are trying to access Hamm’s suite in the Chateau Marmont where she hopes to — there’s no way of putting this delicately — fuck his brains out.
At one point, the filmmakers toyed with shooting the Kansas scenes in black and white, but they thought that would be too akin to “The Wizard of Oz’s” color palette and opted to just make the Hollywood sequences brighter and more dazzling. A few other things got left on the cutting room floor after Wain and Marino decided that they needed to draw parallels between the two films with a shade more subtlety.
“There were references that were even more overt that we shot and didn’t use,” says Wain. “There was a line towards the end where after Jon Hamm says, ‘I’m just the guy behind the curtain pulling the levers,’ we had a cutaway of Ken Marino and John Slattery going like, ‘Where have I heard that before?’ But it was too much.”
Marino and Wain have been friends with Hamm for years. He did a cameo in their 2007 film “The Ten,” and appeared on their show “Children’s Hospital” and their “Wet Hot American Summer” streaming series. Still, the men worried about Hamm’s reaction when they sent him the script.
“It was definitely a scary thing to share this story that’s basically all about him,” says Wain. “He could have easily been like, ‘No, I’m not cool with this.’ And the same with Slattery. But luckily we sent it to Slattery first and he called up Jon, and was like, ‘We’ve got to do this together!’”
Jennifer Aniston had a similar reaction. The “Friends” star helps set the film’s plot in motion when Gail’s fiancé (Michael Cassidy) takes the idea of his celebrity sex pass literally and sleeps with Aniston in the backroom of a book store, where she’s signing copies of her memoir. Aniston has appeared in Wain and Marino’s film “Wanderlust,” but they still thought her agents would never show her the script. Why would she want to be depicted as a homewrecker? Instead, she leapt at the chance to send up her A-list image.
“When we talked to Jen on set, she told us, ‘This is the stuff we should be doing — stuff that’s wild and fun and crazy!’” Marino says. “We’re like, ‘100%. Any time!’”
Wain and Marino aren’t shy about satirizing “The Wizard of Oz,” but ultimately they hope “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” works as more than just a film parody.
“Some people who’ve watched it didn’t even catch the connection at all, and different people seem to pick up on it at different points within the movie,” Wain says. “Personally, I like that. I hope it stands on its own.”
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