Boys Will Be Girls
By Anna David
Photo by David Strick
It isn’t easy being a homely girl—especially when you’re a guy. Just ask the three rather masculine young men on the football field who are getting crushed by pink-clad coeds while also putting Tammy Faye to shame in the makeup department. It’s just another day on the set of Sorority Boys.
Before learning the distinction between eyeliner and lipliner, the main characters, played by Barry Watson (Teaching Mrs. Tingle), Michael Rosenbaum (Urban Legend), and Harland Williams (The Whole Nine Yards), were three misogynistic college students. Falsely accused of embezzling funds from their fraternity—and tossed out of the house—they try to exonerate themselves by gathering evidence from within the frat. Since only girls are invited inside, they RuPaul it and rush the Delta Omicron Gamma sorority, or “DOG house.” Soon they learn what it’s like to be ridiculed, harassed, and even victimized by their own previous “scamming” credo: Guys should go after the ugliest girls if they want to get laid.
With its dildo fights and distinctly non-PC jabs at homosexuality, Sorority Boys is about as un-Disney a movie as the mouse house is likely to make. But it was the film’s moral center that appealed to director Wallace Wolodarsky (Coldblooded). “It’s a story about men learning to be better men by being women,” he says. Wolodarsky, a former supervising producer on The Simpsons, corralled his old writing colleagues for two six-hour “joke punch-up” sessions. (He estimates that about 70 percent of those jokes ended up on-camera.)
If all this mischief-making and cross-dressing makes you think of National Lampoon’s Animal House or Bosom Buddies, you’re not alone. The filmmakers are actually playing up the resemblance, casting actors from both the classic movie and the TV series in bit parts.
The lead actors enjoyed getting in touch with their femininity. “I hope Daisy’s pretty,” says Watson, on break from getting clobbered in football, of his character’s female persona. He admits he “felt naked” at a recent awards show “without the lipstick and eye stuff done.”
Still, cross-dressing takes some getting used to. “I’ll be talking to a cute girl and wondering why she’s not taking me seriously before I remember I’m in drag,” confesses Rosenbaum, who likens his look to “Ethel Merman meets Uma Thurman meets Tori Spelling, with a little J.Lo going on in the booty.” As for Williams, he’s getting used to his Kathy Griffin–esque appearance—and the male attention it can attract. “I haven’t seen George Clooney lingering around the set, giving me the eye,” he sighs, flipping his reddish ponytail. “But I did see a janitor behind a tool shed kind of waving his rake at me.”
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Hybrid Mode
