Earlier this week, Dusty Brown and Greg Bratman — who are Upright Citizens Brigade alumni — quietly released their new short film “The Nobodies,” and they rounded up comedy names like Jim Gaffigan, "Veep" star Tony Hale, Jack McBrayer, Ellie Kemper, and Tony Award-winning actress Sutton Foster to play along.
The short grew out of a duo Brown and Bratman formed in NYC called “The Barrel Brothers,” that they describe as ‘a talentless vaudevillian team of two naïve brothers from a fictional town in Kansas who were out of their depth performing in the big city.’ Their long-running show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater won Best Emerging Comedy Duo in 2004, and gave them a platform where they met the actors who appear in their short. Here’s the official synopsis:
In “The Nobodies”, our two central characters (Greg and Dusty) have to make a fantastical journey through their own identity crises. Neither one of these protagonists has a solid foundation when it comes to his approach to relationships, career, or friendship. They have both slipped through the cracks – and find themselves as lonely outcasts, as “nobodies” that are surrounded by a lot of “somebodies”.
Last year, Brown and Bratman launched a Kickstarter project to raise $7,000 to produce a short. They ended up raising $10,000, and recruited an impressive cast of somebodies along the way. See the result of their hard work below.