By Naomi Pfefferman
Actor-writer-director-comedian David Wain was pretty laid-back during our recent Zoom interview. Could this be the guy who directed and co-wrote the whacked-out 2001 cult classic film, Wet Hot American Summer, inspired by his years at Jewish summer camps? The manic flick will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a series of events this summer. Meanwhile, Wain’s seventh feature film, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, will hit theaters in July.
The movie spotlights Gail (Zoey Deutch), a naïve Kansas hairdresser, who jokingly agrees to adopt a “celebrity sex pass” with her fiancé (Michael Cassidy). For those who don’t already know, such a “pass” allows each member of a couple to choose one celebrity they can have sex with if the unlikely opportunity arises.
Within the hour, Gail walks in on her significant other in flagrante with his celebrity crush, an A-lister who for now will remain nameless to avoid spoilers. A psychic tells Gail that the only way to save her relationship is to track down and hook up with her own A-list crush, Jon Hamm (Mad Men), who also plays himself, to even the score. To this end, she accompanies her best friend, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), to Los Angeles to search for the elusive actor. Along the way, the friends team up with a posse of misfits on a journey that riffs on The Wizard of Oz.
Wain, who is 56 and bespectacled, was subversive and very funny in conversation.
He often punctuated his sentences with a brief exhale of a laugh. He wants you to know that he played the rabbi character, Jewy McJew Jew, on a mini-series spinoff of Wet Hot American Summer.
In fact, his work is chock-full of Jewish themes, characters and content. Wain gleefully acknowledged that there is a camper in Wet Hot American Summer named David Ben-Gurion.
In Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, the character of Otto, who is not Jewish, has a pen chant for “black and white Holocaust movies” and has seen Schindler’s List 11 times.
After Gail meets the actor Henry Winkler – one of many cameos in the film – she gushes to Otto that she has met her first star ever. Otto wants a hint. “Jewish!” she says.
“I feel like much of my work is personal, and part of what I am is my Jewish identity,” Wain said. “So, it’s all out there in a very big way.”
Wain’s father (née Weinstock), the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, grew up Orthodox in Brooklyn, where the family lived above their small grocery store. His mother had been raised Reform. The family attended the Conservative Park Syna gogue, and Wain’s parents were heavily involved in Jewish philanthropies. Wain himself once worked the phone banks to raise funds on Super Sunday.
But eventually, the younger Wain decided he’d had enough of Hebrew school. “I was a bit of a rebel about it,” he said. “I remember writing on the manual typewriter in our house, like a long screed to my parents explaining why I didn’t want to go anymore. It was very well thought out, with all these bullet points. And they were like, ‘Yeah, OK.’”
Wain did have a bar mitzvah. He said he and a friend bought one suit to share for their respective rites of passage, since they knew they’d each only wear it once.
The filmmaker went on to create the award-winning Web series Wainy Days (2007-2012), chronicling his highly Jewish and only slightly fictionalized adventures (and misadventures) with women. His 2007 film, The Ten, starring Paul Rudd, tells 10 sacrilegious tales, each based on one of the Ten Commandments.
On the mini-series version of Wet Hot American Summer, Wain portrayed the sexy Israeli counselor, Yaron. “At many of these summer camps, at least at that time, there were a lot of Israelis who got a deal where they could come and travel in the U.S. if they worked two months at a camp,” he said. “But they didn’t really want to be there and they also had sort of a superior attitude, which was quite earned because they were around a lot of sheltered suburban kids. And these people had been in the army and they were just more worldly than we were. They had a certain aura about them that I just sort of imitated in playing the part.”
The filmmaker attended New York University, where he met Ken Marino – who would become his longtime collaborator and “Gail’s” co-writer – on the first day of class in 1987.
Four years after bursting into the zeitgeist with Wet Hot American Summer, Wain worked steadily as an actor while trying to get other movies off the ground. But 32 separate projects fell apart over time, and Wain became dejected. “I was really feeling like I was going to give up,” he said.
He prepared an elaborate pitch for one movie job. “As I was walking up to the [studio] gate, I got a call, ‘Don’t bother coming in; they gave it to somebody else,’” he recalled. “’They’re not even going to take the meeting.’ I was very upset, obviously. But it was a moment where I looked at myself in the mirror in the car and I was just like, ‘You know what? If I just keep doing what I do, that’s OK.’ I felt, in a way, liberated.”
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is part of a comedy lineage with deep roots in The State, the anarchic, gleefully absurdist cult sketch troupe whose MTV series helped define a singular strain of alternative 1990’s comedy, according to the movie’s press notes.
Wain’s new film came about when he and Marino holed themselves up in a room for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, as they had done to create previous projects. “We’d start out with nothing at all and come out with the first draft of a movie screenplay,” he said.
As the screenwriters brainstormed, the idea of a celebrity sex pass came to mind. “The whole initial spark of this was, ‘What if in the most unlikely turn of events, somebody did meet their celebrity and did end up having sex with them?’” Wain said.
“Our first thought was, ‘That’s a really stupid idea. Doesn’t make sense, goes nowhere and has no point.’ For all these reasons, we knew we had to make this movie.”
So far, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass has earned mostly positive reviews since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past winter. Some critics have praised what they perceive as the movie’s “anti-comedy” and its parody of high-concept cinema.
Does Wain see his work that way? “No,” he replied with a laugh. “We’re not trying to make a specific comment on society or humanity. It wasn’t like, ‘We need to do the celebrity sex pass because this story needs to be told.’ That’s almost definitely the opposite of what we wanted to make. One of the things I think is important is to make comedies that are funny. And funny is the reason you make them or at least primarily.”
The conversations behind the scenes, however, could be profound. “At the same time we were making the film, we were talking about things in the deepest, craziest, nerdiest way every day in the writing room and on the set,” Wain said.
Of course, there are subtler themes in the movie – “about relationships, friendship, standing up for what you care about,” he said. “And about Hollywood, about celebrity, and about perception versus reality. But those I think are things that naturally bubbled into the script and into the movie without it being a driving intention.”
These days, Wain’s dance card is full. This summer comes the release of Wet Hot American Summer as well as a documentary about the comedy troupe The State.
“I actually have two big projects on my plate that are very Jewish, about being Jewish in a very real way,” Wain continued. “I can’t say more about either one but what I can say is what made me want to go there… I’m basically always interested in anything I relate to.”
Wain paused, then said, mischievously, “No Jews allowed in future projects… I’m joking,” he said.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass will hit theaters on July 10. For more information about Wain and his movies, visit davidwain.com