It’s all well and good giving your spec script a taboo-busting, attention-grabbing title: names like “Fuck Buddies” or “I Want To Fuck Your Sister” certainly stand out from the pack, and both of those examples landed on the Black List in past years. But when it comes to actually making the damn thing, you’re gong to have to make some kind of compromise, or you’re going to have a movie that doesn’t have any advertising.
Such was the dilemma facing “The Hand Job.” Written and directed by comic Maggie Carey, the provocative title was entirely appropriate, as the plot revolves, as Carey’s husband Bill Hader told us a few months back, around a “type-A, studious girl who graduates high school and hasn’t done anything with a guy. The summer before college she decides that she has to find out how to do everything in order to be properly prepared, so she makes a very serious bullet list of everything, like… hand-job, titty-fuck, blow-job, fingering, and just kinda checks one off every time she does it. She’s being the aggressor and is very straight-forward about it, like ‘Okay, so I’m going to give you a hand-job now.’ And the guys are very taken aback about it, especially her straight-laced friends.”
But of course, no TV station will carry commercials for a movie called “The Hand Job,” despite its A-grade comic cast, which is toplined by “Parks and Recreation” star Aubrey Plaza, and also includes Hader, SNL co-star Andy Samberg, Alia Shawkat (“Arrested Development”), Mae Whitman (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”), Johnny Simmons (“The Conspirator“), Donald Glover (“Community”), Connie Britton (“Friday Night Lights”), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (“Superbad“), Scott Porter (“The Good Wife“) and D.C. Pierson & Dominic Dierkes (“Mystery Team“). Phew…
EW talked to Hader recently, who revealed that the film, which The Mark Gordon Company are backing, has been retitled “The To-Do List” which, frankly, we like a little more: it’s still a little risque, but without bashing you over the head. Hader also spilled a few beans on his character saying, “I play her boss. She works at pool and there’s a whole big thing with her and me. Let’s just say I may not have the best intentions.” The film’s still looking for final financing, so there’s no word yet on when it might lens, but with a cast like this, we’re prepared to make up the budgetary shortfall ourselves. Or we would be, if we had millions of dollars.