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There’s a scene in Nathan Lane’s new movie in which the beloved icon of stage and screen grabs a sack of Boar’s Head deli lunch meat, chews it up, and spits it into the face of two writhing, grotesque, skeleton-like puppets. They’re the Sewer Boys, and alongside Lane, Megans Mullally and Thee Stallion, and two relatively unknown comedians—Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson—they’re the stars of Hollywood’s coolest (and weirdest) new movie, Dicks: The Musical.
A scrappy little A24 production made for about $8 million, Dicks was born 10 years ago as a 30-minute stage show created by Sharp and Jackson, who played all the parts and ran the show out of the UCB theater in the basement of a Gristedes in Manhattan. It was a riff on The Parent Trap—hence its original title, Fucking Identical Twins—and Sharp says that other than thinking that the show would maybe earn the pair a gig as stand-ins on Broad City, they truly never imagined it would go anywhere.
As the show grew in relative popularity, though, it became a touchpoint for queer comedians in New York, who, after the show, would follow Sharp and Jackson to a nearby gay bar, Barracuda, for a salon of sorts. There, people like Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers, Patti Harrison, and Julio Torres got to meet and hang out, with Sharp and Jackson’s events helping create a network of not just comedic collaborators but also close friends.
Yang first met Sharp when the two were doing Story Pirates improv shows for kids, and he now plays God in Dicks. Yang says that watching the scrappy little stage show become a full-fledged production has been “so beautiful.” Part of that is surely because he’s been able to celebrate the movie alongside the rest of the cast and director Larry Charles (Borat, Seinfeld) all over North America, from the film’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) premiere pre-party at a local Hooters to its splashy red carpet premiere in LA, where everyone from Sandra Oh and Vanessa Bayer to Drag Race alums like Kerri Colby and Manila Luzon showed up to support.
All those interviews, premieres, and press events have been possible because, earlier this summer, A24 made a much–lauded interim agreement with both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), agreeing to the unions’ demands and reminding the world that, unlike media juggernauts like Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, they’re not part of the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), who the unions were (and are) facing down amid one of the longest-running strikes in Hollywood history. Though Dicks wasn’t part of the studio’s initial agreement, which was more about continuing production of movies like Mother Mary and Death of a Unicorn, A24 used the expertise it gained there to snag Dicks a SAG exemption at the 11th hour, on the eve of the film’s Toronto festival premiere.
“We are very pro-strike,” says Jackson, “but we didn't expect it to last as long as it has. We didn't expect the AMPTP to be such a disaster.” He and Sharp say that, prior to the exemption, they’d planned to attend the Toronto screening just to sit in the back and watch reactions, but that it did feel a little anticlimactic after a decade of working on the project.
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“There was certainly a chapter we were like, ‘OK, maybe there's going to be no promo or press for talent,’” Sharp says, “but A24 was very much like, ‘We know that sucks on a personal level, but you made an incredibly unique and buzzy film that we think will cut through the noise.’”
Yang concurs, adding that at the time the movie got a waiver, SAG was being pretty selective about who got them, not wanting to dilute the impact of the strike. “People were generally pretty understanding when we got the waiver, though there’s always some armchair labor strategist who thinks that us promoting the movie is some version of scabbing,” he says. “I hope that people understand that this project is a worthwhile exception, because it really just screams indie. Dicks would never be made by an AMPTP studio in a million years.”
Now, Sharp, Jackson, and Yang just hope the movie can find enough viewers to remind studios like those in the AMPTP that it’s worthwhile to not only invest in indies but also to take big comedic swings. With the exception of something like Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, Sharp says that the past few years have been pretty dire for cinematic comedy.
“Even big, huge successful movies from the ’90s and ’00s like Zoolander and Austin Powers were very much about having lots of jokes about crazy characters,” he says. “It’s what we tried to do with Dicks but with a bit of a queer sensibility. I miss movies that try to push things in 100 different directions. They’re the kinds of movies that not only help you find your tribe but also that are just super fun to see in the theaters, because you can be all packed together screaming at this one thing.”
“Success for Dicks,” Yang says, “is when eventually, at some midnight screening, people throw ham at the screen when the Sewer Boys get fed.”
