Composer Craig Wedren Breaks Down LA Musical Odyssey in “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass”
Twenty-five years ago, the rambunctious cast and crew of Wet Hot American Summer stormed Sundance. The movie was the brainchild of David Wain and Michael Showalter and features an ensemble cast of funny people like Ken Marino, Amy Poehler, and Bradley Cooper (in his film debut). When Wain was looking for someone to write music for Wet Hot American Summer, it seemed like a no-brainer to call upon his childhood friend, Craig Wedren. In all their years of making music videos in Wain’s childhood basement, from Wet Hot American Summer to the newly released Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, Wedren is adamant that not much has changed in the way the two work together.
courtesy of Craig Wedren
“It’s just the scale of the project and the tightness of the jokes that really changed. Speaking for David, that comedic voice was fully intact when we were seven.”
The friends cite a music video for the song “Something Girl,” written by Wedren for his band, The Small Minority, as the first official collaboration between them.
“It was just a straight music video we shot in David’s basement. We were trying to make it very MTV, ready for prime time. A lot of really fun, practical special effects and art falling from the sky. It’s very ’80s.”
“What was going on in his basement was really a sort of proto-production facility. I’ve never quite thought about this or made the connection, but, I mean, my studio has a live room over there, which is set up for my band, Shudder to Think, to record a new record. Right now, it’s all set up for a music video that I’m making for one of my songs.”
“I wonder how much of growing up in that playground, Romper Room production environment of the Wains’ basement set the template for what I’m doing now. His dad was in radio, so there was all this gear there. A two-track reel to reel machine, a giant cam, a drum kit, a weird old PA system, and all of his mom’s discarded wigs and outfits from the 1960s.”
“I was a more social, lead singer type personality. David was definitely more of an indoor kid. He was just hanging out, getting dressed in his mom’s outfits and letting the beta camera roll. I was out playing shows. Then we would rehearse our various projects and bands in his basement.”
“Cutting to Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, I’m going to include Ken Marino in this because David and I went to NYU together. Day one, we met Ken and fell in love. We became roommates and have been making things together ever since. It’s just a continuation of the same ideology that started when we were all very young. We just sort of compulsively need to make things.”
“Within our friend group, there’s a puritanical work ethic or a sort of healthy competition, I would say. It’s more about, what are you making? What are you creating? What are you putting out there into the world? Oh, my God, that’s amazing, I want to up my game, right? Not so much a domination game, just, like, what do you got?”
“Ken and David wrote the Gail Daughtry script, I think maybe ten years ago. They were doing a thing where they were trying to get together and, in seven days, wrote a full screenplay. That was one of them. At first nobody seemed terribly interested. Then suddenly, a couple of years ago, it was like green light, green light, green light. Not a big budget, but a very big vision.”
courtesy of Sundance
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is about a bride-to-be, Gail (Zoey Deutch), who learns that her fiancé was able to make good on his celebrity hall pass. Desperate not to be left out, Gail packs up and travels to Los Angeles to make use of her own celebrity hall pass.
“Score-wise, I think this connects to the ways we push ourselves or challenge ourselves creatively. The scope of the movie, musically, is as big and ambitious as the plot. It ranges from classic Wizard of Oz, MGM, and munchkin choir to big strings and things like that. Big musical flourishes that shift from ’50s and ’60s, Stan Getz, and West Coast jazz to super-fizzy modern, Charli, Sabrina, and modern pop music to almost parodies of ’90s song tropes.”
“Oh, and then there’s a whole mafia thing!”
What Wedren loves about composing is exactly this situation. Looking at this wide variety of musical inspirations and styles and trying to figure out how they could all work together in a cohesive manner.
“There were a lot of ideas that were thrown into the pot, and then it’s like, no matter how many times you work on things, you feel like the last one was the last time that was going to work…until it does. Suddenly, it’s like, oh my God, our idea works, it totally feels cohesive, and I love it.”
Despite the fact that it seems like Wedren would take a more modern approach to the score of Gail Daughtry, given the wide variety of genres it has to cover, he took a more traditional approach to writing.
courtesy of Craig Wedren
“We went very old-fashioned on this movie. Which is to say, every character has their sound, every character has their hook, every character has their theme. I’ve never been one for strict genre silos. Everything sort of cross-pollinates. When I was feeling confused or lost, I would just follow the characters and the story. Who’s on screen? What are their sounds? How can we combine these ingredients to make something that’s both classic feeling or familiar feeling and fresh at the same time?”
Some composers have said that comedy is one of the hardest genres to write for. It makes sense they would feel this way, as actors and directors have also shared the same sentiments. Comedy is about timing, down to the millisecond. It’s a genre that lives and dies in its brevity and flexibility. Wedren, though, has been around it since he was seven years old.
“There’s a shorthand, you know? Especially with David and Ken. We’re all college and growing-up buddies, so I don’t know that it was necessarily confusing for me, the sensibility or the timing, but the subtleties of a millisecond around a joke are really micro-surgical.”
“There’s a sort of joke trope in a few of David and Ken’s movies where they’ll just repeat some slapstick thing over and over and over. At first it’s just dumb, then it’s not funny at all, then it’s dumb again, and then it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. They have to ask themselves, how many times is the funny time that somebody gets punched in the nose over and over and over? Is it 42 or 43 times?”
“There’s a little bit of magic to it, or I should say subjectivity to it. We all grew up with a shared sensibility that probably started off with Steve Martin in the ’70s and goes all the way through now. It’s a shorter distance maybe, than for other people. That said, it’s all about rhythm and it’s all about whether it’s made you laugh or not.”
“Comedy is not like a song where you can have a thousand emotional responses and they’re all valid. With comedy, if you’re not laughing, it’s not working. I actually find comedy and horror to be similar because they’re so much about timing, setting people up. You’re playing tricks on people. You’re playing jokes on people. They’re just scary jokes.”
At this year’s Sundance, not only was Wedren there with the premiere of Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, there was also a twenty-fifth anniversary screening of Wet Hot American Summer. It was a full-circle moment for Wedren, who also performed alongside Marino and Wain at the Middle-Aged Dad Jam, to attend the final Park City Sundance and celebrate both new and old films.
courtesy of Craig Wedren
“When I was making the music for Wet Hot with Theodore Shapiro, we were just like, well, this is the funniest movie ever. This is going to change the face of comedy as we know it. Then it came out and it was a resounding box office failure. It was stunning how wrong we all were. Nobody saw it. So many people hated it.”
“Gradually, over the last, I don’t know, twenty years, it’s become what we always knew it would be. Getting to go back and celebrate it without having anything to prove, without having to pitch or convince people of the sensibility of it, was such a huge, satisfying relief.”
“We have this sort of cover comedy band called Middle-Aged Dad Jam band, and we did a couple Wet Hot shows. One was at San Francisco’s Sketch Fest, then a couple days later at Sundance. It’s joyous because everybody’s there for the same reason. They know all the jokes. They know all the songs.”
“We can just play as opposed to hustle. There are other realms in which we’re all obviously hustling, trying to get a movie or record made. Just trying to get people to know you and your work exists in this flurry of content.”
“In terms of Wet Hot, it was so lovely and satisfying to be here with our friends at Sundance and enjoy each other.”
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