In Dicks: The Musical, there is a truly awe-inspiring moment a third of the way into its runtime. (It doesn’t really matter the exact timing because, when you are watching Dicks, time, like most other basic social principles, is irrelevant). Onscreen, the audience sees decorated and revered actor Nathan Lane taking deli ham from a Ziplock bag, chewing it, and spitting it into the waiting mouths of his “Sewer Boys”, two diaper-clad demon-goblins he keeps in a birdcage in his Rococo-style New York City apartment.
“We wrote something to get him his Oscar. It’s an obvious awards play, as you can tell,” says Joshua Sharp, who co-wrote and stars in Dicks with creative partner Aaron Jackson.
The half-masticated deli meat showered onto puppets that came straight from a Jim Henson fever dream elicited the largest reactions during the film’s rowdy TIFF debut and subsequent Los Angeles premiere. This is saying something given the movie also includes Megan Thee Stallion walking a pack of men of leashes, a CGI animated vagina, and twincest. It’s incest but with — well, you get it.
In a series of coups – at least by Hollywood standards — Sharp and Jackson took an underground stage play and made it into a movie with both veteran talent and A-list feature newcomers, making it into the first musical from indie powerhouse A24
Dicks started off as a Fucking Identical Twins, a half-hour, two-man show in the mid-2010s put on at the Upright Citizen Brigade comedy theater. Jackson and Sharp played two dirtbag big-city salesmen who discover they are twins and attempt to reunite their eccentric parents. Jackson condenses: “It’s The Parent Trap if they’re all monsters.”
It was in 2016 when they were first approached by an exec at Chernin Entertainment, who asked if they would consider adapting their slapdash musical into a feature film. “We did the play for negative dollars in the basement of a grocery store. Never once thinking it would be anything more than that,” says Sharp. In Hollywood, Jackson adds, “You very rarely get any opportunity. So, if someone is like, ‘Do you want to make it a movie?’ You’re like, ‘Of course! That’s why we wrote it, after all!’”
They were commissioned to write the screenplay by Chernin’s longtime studio home, 20th Century, then still with the “Fox” designation. “Fox read it and was like, well, this is not a Fox movie,” says Sharp. (See: anthropomorphic genitals.) “And we were like ‘Totally.’ We shook hands and parted ways, amicably.”
The project eventually landed at A24, and enlisted Larry Charles, the veteran Seinfeld writer and Borat filmmaker, as a director. “[Charles] was like, with this movie, everyone will know for one second if it’s holding back and anyway, the audience will turn on it,” says Jackson. Whenever they would cut a joke that was originally in the stage show or try to temper the humor, Charles would intervene. “We luckily had a delinquent cheerleader.”
Sharp and Jackson would be reprising their role as the unwitting twins, approaching Megan Mullaly and Nathan Lane to play their onscreen parents. Mullaly signed on with shockingly few questions but “Nathan was more like, ‘Okay, what is this?’” says Jackson, with a shockingly accurate Lane impression. But it didn’t take much convincing, notes Sharp, “We go out to a dinner and all of us have six Cosmos a piece and get on old show Queens and he was like, ‘All right, we’re making a picture!’”
(L-R) Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp attend the Los Angeles Premiere of A24’s Dicks: The Musical
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Filming would take place over a tight 20 days in Sun Valley, California, on the outskirts of the outskirts of Burbank. Says Sharp, “Even Angelinos were like, I didn’t know Lankershim Boulevard went this far. A Starbucks was four miles away.”
Two months out from shooting, Dicks still had one spot to fill on its cast. The twin’s onscreen boss, who runs her robot vacuum parts business with an iron fist. That characters’ song was planned as an interlude, not integral to the plot but took up enough screen time to offer an opportunity for a singular cameo. Originally composed with a cabaret number, filmmakers were planning on going out to traditional actresses for the role, but with such a short production timeline, they thought to go out to a pop star with a day or two to spare in their schedule.
“She is the only one who sort of puts these shitheads in their place,” says Sharp of the role. “It needs big ball energy, high-status energy.” Grammy winner Megan Thee Stallion, a bastion of female bravado, agreed to play the part. Sharp and Jackson remained unconvinced of that reality until the “Savage” rapper showed up on set. Says Sharp, “We were like, ‘I guess she’s fucking in this thing.’”
Megan Thee Stallion makes her feature film acting debut in Dicks. “She came to us from the Super Bowl and then was going to Fashion Week,” recalls Sharp. “At one point looking over the script and was like, ‘What do we sell again?’ Which is a fair question. It makes no sense. We don’t sell Roombas. We sell the parts of Roombas. I remember she was like, ‘Okay, so this thing is stupid.’ And then she goes, ‘I can do stupid.’”
It was while on set watching Lane spit cured meat onto two puppets that the impossibility of what they had gotten away with dawned on the duo. Says Jackson, “I cannot believe that three-time Tony Award-winning Nathan Lane is spitting ham at these puppets. I wrote it and now he’s doing it.”
“We had a hairdresser who was — if you can believe it — gay,” says Sharp. “And on the day the day they were shooting that scene, he came up to Aaron after they called ‘Cut!’ and was like, ‘Girl, that’s some John Waters shit right there.’ And we were like, okay, we’re making the right movie.”
Dicks‘ aims can be described through a series of incongruent comps— part old Hollywood MGM musical, nonsense ’90s comedies a la Austin Powers, and South Park subversion. The phrase “cult status” has already been tossed around in early reviews.
At TIFF, it opened the festival’s Midnight Madness section, to a particularly rowdy crowd. Dicks is far left of center for the production powerhouse Chernin, best known for studio fodder like Hidden Figures and Ford V. Ferrari. Its last foray into movie musicals was the ultra-glossy and high-concept The Greatest Showman. That movie features Zendaya as a lovelorn trapeze artist, a world away from Dicks, where the emotional pay-off comes as its main foursome traverses the New York City sewer system. Sharp remembers looking back to Peter Chernin, amidst the TIFF chaos: “He just looked at me and went [Sharp smiles and shrugs] and I loved that. He was like, ‘Well, these kids are crazy.’”
As Dicks is prepping for its Oct. 6 theatrical release, Sharp and Jackson are reflecting on the impossibility of their movie. Says Jackson, “So many people are asking us, ‘How did you pitch this in a room?’ But we didn’t, and it never would’ve gotten made if we had to.”
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