Corey Sherman is a 30 year-old filmmaker living in Los Angeles whose new feature, the LGBTQ coming-of-age dramedy Big Boys, is now available on demand. Born and raised in the Bronx, Corey started making comedy short films when he was eight years old, and continues making them to this day. A long-time lover of animation, Corey branched out from live action when he studied film at USC and created the acclaimed animated web series titled Billiams with Matt Maiellaro, the creator of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Corey achieved a life-long dream when he wrote, directed, edited, and voiced a character on several episodes of Matt Maiellaro’s animated Adult Swim show, 12 Oz. Mouse. Corey is also passionate about nonfiction filmmaking, and edited Lawrence Kasdan’s 2019 documentary short Last Week at Ed’s. (Photo courtesy Perfect Dog Pictures.)
Accurately portraying the little details of life as a gay 14-year-old was one of my biggest priorities when making my new feature, Big Boys. My collaborators and I wanted to cram the film full of specifics to better evoke the audience’s memories of their own adolescence, particularly if they were ever closeted. There were certainly details I pulled from my own life, but I found that as I opened the film up to ideas from the cast and crew, that’s when the movie really started to feel lived-in. However, nailing those details wasn’t always easy. It involved a lot of back and forth, as we weighed different options. We often had to take time away from a problem before we could figure out a solution we were happy with. Sometimes we had to sacrifice details, because they distracted from the story. I found the whole process to be one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of making this film.
Below are some examples of the collaborative process that went into trying to get those specifics just right …
Size-Consciousness
The movie is called Big Boys for a reason. I was a big boy growing up (and am to this day!) and was tired of seeing chubby characters humiliated or sidelined on screen. I wanted to center a plus-sized protagonist who was funny, interesting and complex for reasons that had nothing to do with his weight. However, his weight is always on his mind. How could it not be? Years of judgment from your peers and seeing “the fat kid” mocked in media takes a toll on you. There are little things you learn to do to avoid calling attention to your body. We wanted to use those small behavioral details to show what it’s like to feel self-conscious in a heavier body.
While writing the film, I remember going to the beach and seeing a chubby kid wearing his shirt in the ocean. It reminded me of all the times I worried about taking my shirt off at a pool party for fear that someone would make a nasty comment. Jamie, the protagonist in Big Boys, is the kind of guy who anticipates being attacked like that. In rehearsal, Isaac Krasner, the actor playing Jamie, and I talked about the habit of tugging one’s shirt down to cover up one’s belly. If you watch closely, he does it throughout the film. It blows me away how bravely and honestly he presented Jamie’s body-consciousness. Never hiding behind “cuteness,” always just trying to be as realistic as possible. It’s one of the many ways in which he brought compassion and nuance to that character.
The Cool Older Guy
We wanted Dan, the cool older guy in Big Boys, to encapsulate the kind of casual masculinity and confidence that would make him irresistible to someone like Jamie. He is both who Jamie wants to be and be with. There were many guys like this in my life. Camp counselors, coaches, cousins’ boyfriends. I remember noticing all the little things they did and said that made them seem so effortlessly cool. I wanted Jamie to have a keen eye for that stuff too. I thought it would better evoke the intensity of his crush to see what kind of details really draw him in.
The backwards baseball cap was a must. Maybe it’s because I was a kid in the late ’90s/early 2000s, but that will always be a very cool dude look to me. Our director of photography, Gus Bendinelli, suggested that Jamie should notice Dan putting his arm around the passenger seat headrest while backing up the car. I was so excited when he said that; it’s exactly the kind of casual, subtly masculine gesture Jamie would drool over. David Johnson III, who plays Dan, made a great choice when he chose to casually lean against a tree while advising Jamie on how to build a tent. Isaac understood what kind of impression little gestures like that would make on Jamie. Later that same day, he suggested that Jamie also lean against a tree while offering his own advice to Dan.
Internalized Homophobia
After Jamie lets himself think gay thoughts for the first time, he panics and tries to reason his way out of it. Originally, I thought he’d try Googling “how to be straight again,” but that felt too obvious. When we shot the scene, we had him listing out “Beautiful Women” in his notebook. That felt like a bit too much of a dismissible joke. I wanted this detail to feel a little more specific and serious in order to vividly evoke that panic. Our producer Allison Tate and I went back and forth on it a lot. Then it hit us at pretty much the same moment: it should be an untitled list of reasons he might still be straight. We grabbed a pickup shot of it (with our editor Erik Vogt-Nilsen’s handwriting standing in for Jamie’s) and it’s one of the moments in the film I am the most proud of.
The vicious gay stereotypes tossed around in school and the media were part of what made it so hard to come out of the closet. Being gay meant “acting gay,” and “acting gay” was an undesirable two-dimensional image of a guy who was inherently less-than, because he wasn’t masculine. A guy who couldn’t hang with the boys because his gayness made him inherently not one of them. I did NOT want to inhabit this image! I was determined to be straight, and if I couldn’t be straight, then at least I could be “straight-acting.” I had thoughts like, “At least my voice is deep. At least I’m into film, not musical theater.” It was a very “not like the other girls” mentality and it was not good for me. I wanted Jamie to be struggling with the same thing, to show how internalized misogyny and homophobia make it difficult to imagine your future as a three-dimensional, happy queer person. It took me a while to understand that being gay was so much more interesting, complex and fun than I had been led to believe. It took me a while to see that it was something to be proud of, instead of an image I needed to distance myself from in order to be taken seriously. I believe Jamie will eventually get there too.
I understand presenting details like these can be cringe-inducing and, in some cases, painful, especially if you share any of Jamie’s insecurities. But I really didn’t want to shy away from those things, because I believe putting them out in the open allows people see them for the common human experiences they are, and to let go of any shame they have around them. I think Mr. Rogers said it perfectly when he said, “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.”
