‘Gail Daughtry’: Inside the 7-Day Writing Exercise That’s Produced Three Feature Films

While at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” co-writers David Wain and Ken Marino revealed they wrote the first draft of the script in a week. While guests on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, we asked the longtime collaborators to elaborate on their unique approach to starting the writing process.

“The exercise is sourced out of the idea that, when you’re shooting something, you get there at seven in the morning and you do a 12-plus hour day, and there’s no wiggle room,” said Wain, who also directed the film. “You’re on the clock, people are getting paid, so we just thought to ourselves, ‘Maybe writing could benefit from the same kind of rigor.’”

Wain and Marino commit to showing up at 7:00 a.m., working uninterrupted on a first draft until 7:00 p.m., for seven consecutive days, when working on the first draft of their new film.

“It’s not only a good exercise, we’re three for three in terms of getting it done,” said Marino, explaining “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” was the third time he and Wain have done the seven-day exercise to write a screenplay — the previous two were for the other two feature films they’d written together: “The Ten” (2007) and “Wanderlust” (2012).

“The goal was simply to walk out after seven days with a first draft. Not a good first draft, just a first draft,” said Marino. “ But we start with no concept.”

The no concept part is particularly surprising. “Gail Daughtry” is a pretty high concept film: Gail (Zoey Deutch) sets off to Los Angeles to seek out her celebrity sex pass (Jon Hamm) in a “Wizard of Oz”-tinged journey in which Hamm’s “Mad Men” co-star John Slattery, playing a sad-sack version of himself, joins her quest. Wain and Marino insist they didn’t have the basic idea on Day 1; nor did they reach out to Hamm and Slattery to gauge their interest until after the seven days.

“The first thing is we get together and [ask], ‘So what could a movie be about?’ And so it’s fun, and by the end of day two, we have to have a complete outline, and then we just write,” said Wain.

‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’Sony Pictures Classics

The co-writers estimated they average 20 pages a day, which they partially credited to avoiding the stop-and-start nature of a normal writing process. Explained Wain, “The ramp back up, once you’ve stopped for even one or two days, is so much more than just picking up right where you left off when you went to sleep.”

It’s a process that was born of necessity: Wain was living in New York, Marino in Los Angeles, and as both started having kids, finding time to write together in the same room became increasingly hard. It was a different, more adult life than the two collaborators’ early days with The State — the comedy troupe they formed with their NYU classmates that went on to become a hit MTV show in the ’90s and gave birth to Wain’s beloved “Wet Hot American Summer” — but nonetheless grounded in the same principles.

“By forcing [writing], something comes out,” said Wain. “It’s actually a discipline we learned when we were doing sketch comedy with The State, where sometimes you just write something, even if you don’t have a great idea, and something will come out of it.”

Ultimately, the seven-day first draft serves as a jump-start for the rewrite phase, which does stretch out over time and distance. “After seven days, after we print it out and we hold it, we then take a couple of weeks away from it and come back, and we can spend sometimes years retooling it,” said Marino.

When they first did the exercise, Wain and Marino thought they had stumbled upon something novel, but over time have learned that a number of successful writers practice some variation of the same idea. Marino pointed to a recent video of “Weapons” writer/director Zach Cregger explaining his own trick to getting past the hump of a first draft.

“[Cregger] was talking about basically a version of what we do, which is not the time limit, but of not filtering, or not censoring yourself. He says, ‘I’m going to write the elf version,’” said Marino, describing how Cregger pretends he hired an elf to write the first screenplay draft. “It’s an elf that you pay very little money to, and so you don’t expect it to be good, and you write the scenes in the script as if an elf would write it, and the elf is not too bright, so it’s not going to be a really good draft, but the elf is determined to finish the script. And then when it’s done, you have the elf script that you’re working off of, and then you make it better as the human.”

Sony Pictures Classics will release “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” in theaters on Friday, July 10.

To hear Wain and Marino’s full interview, make sure you subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.