Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass<\/a>,\u201d 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 \u201cWet Hot American Summer\u201d director David Wain and his co-writer Ken Marino is also a riff on \u201cThe Wizard of Oz.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\t\u201cAs 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 \u2018Wizard of Oz\u2019 thread,\u201d Wain says. \u201cIt seemed organically part of the DNA of what we were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tSo like Dorthy Gale, Gail is a naive young girl from Kansas. Only this time, instead of floating over the rainbow, she\u2019s 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\u2019s Hamm\u2019s \u201cMad Men\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tObviously, 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 \u201cThe Wizard of Oz.\u201d Gail\u2019s shoes, for instance, are red, and Slattery is often outfitted in yellow like a Lion\u2019s fur.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWe 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,\u201d Marino says. <\/p>\n
\n\tThis time, instead of traveling to the Emerald City, Gail and her buddies are trying to access Hamm\u2019s suite in the Chateau Marmont where she hopes to \u2014 there\u2019s no way of putting this delicately \u2014 fuck his brains out. <\/p>\n
\n\tAt one point, the filmmakers toyed with shooting the Kansas scenes in black and white, but they thought that would be too akin to \u201cThe Wizard of Oz\u2019s\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThere were references that were even more overt that we shot and didn\u2019t use,\u201d says Wain. \u201cThere was a line towards the end where after Jon Hamm says, \u2018I\u2019m just the guy behind the curtain pulling the levers,\u2019 we had a cutaway of Ken Marino and John Slattery going like, \u2018Where have I heard that before?\u2019 But it was too much.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tMarino and Wain have been friends with Hamm for years. He did a cameo in their 2007 film \u201cThe Ten,\u201d and appeared on their show \u201cChildren\u2019s Hospital\u201d and their \u201cWet Hot American Summer\u201d streaming series. Still, the men worried about Hamm\u2019s reaction when they sent him the script. <\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIt was definitely a scary thing to share this story that\u2019s basically all about him,\u201d says Wain. \u201cHe could have easily been like, \u2018No, I\u2019m not cool with this.\u2019 And the same with Slattery. But luckily we sent it to Slattery first and he called up Jon, and was like, \u2018We\u2019ve got to do this together!’\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tJennifer Aniston had a similar reaction. The \u201cFriends\u201d star helps set the film\u2019s plot in motion when Gail\u2019s fianc\u00e9\u00a0(Michael Cassidy) takes the idea of his celebrity sex pass literally and sleeps with Aniston in the backroom of a book store, where she\u2019s signing copies of her memoir. Aniston has appeared in Wain and Marino\u2019s film \u201cWanderlust,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWhen we talked to Jen on set, she told us, \u2018This is the stuff we should be doing \u2014 stuff that\u2019s wild and fun and crazy!’\u201d Marino says. \u201cWe\u2019re like, \u2018100%. Any time!’\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWain and Marino aren\u2019t shy about satirizing \u201cThe Wizard of Oz,\u201d but ultimately they hope \u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass\u201d works as more than just a film parody. <\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cSome people who\u2019ve watched it didn\u2019t even catch the connection at all, and different people seem to pick up on it at different points within the movie,\u201d Wain says. \u201cPersonally, I like that. I hope it stands on its own.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source variety.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,\u201d 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 \u201cWet Hot American Summer\u201d director David Wain and his co-writer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2254722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[436602,304789],"class_list":["post-2254721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-gail-daughtry-and-the-celebrity-sex-pass","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Gail-Daughtry-Creators-on-Parodying-Wizard-of-Oz-Landing-Jon.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2254721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2254723,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254721\/revisions\/2254723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2254722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2254721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2254721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2254721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}