Meet Breck Denny and Anthony Guerino of Nickel Dickers in Hollywood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Breck Denny and Anthony Guerino.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Breck and Anthony. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
We met in New York through mutual friends in college and ran into each other in LA at The Groundlings, where we were both taking classes to learn how to be even more hilarious through the art of wig wearing. We both had a penchant for absurdist musings and dense comedic language and became frequent collaborators in sketch shows.

One day we were laughing about how silly origin stories are, and the funny way people tell these random half-baked stories of how random things came into being as if the mere fact that they are explaining an origin made it somehow awe-inspiring (sort of akin to the gasps solicited from audiences when the titular line is uttered in a movie or play).

Breck was reading about an Old Hollywood story about George Burns tricking Jack Benny into paying the bill at lunch one day that reignited this particular bit and reminded Anthony of his fondness for salad-invention origin stories, all of which go something like “Mr. Blah Blah came back to the Whatever Hotel and 2 am drunk and famished and demanded to be sated; the chef was forced to make due with the few ingredients he had (which usually number in the double digits), and so this improvisational concoction was deemed “The Blah Blah Whatever Salad”.

It was around the same time as the “me too” movement was gaining steam and we started talking about this trope of the old time hard-talking power broker producer- not only the actual people but the manner in which they were celebrated and portrayed in films about Old Hollywood- and how in reality they were mostly probably really horrible.

All these strands came together and we spent 6 hours writing the first 7 pages of a dialogue dense, Forrest-Gumpian, absurdist comedic farce about Hollywood Origins told from the perspective of two greedy, foul-mouthed, misogynist, unabashedly awful producers living in kind of a “Hollywood Forever” muddled timeline, where they could discover the origins of things as disparate as the Cobb Salad to “Weekend At Bernie’s” to Pacific Rim while maintaining a stylized manner of speaking that is evocative of old time-speech but actually invented by us.

We performed the first segment at a variety show in Fairfax Village and got a great response, so we decided to expand on it and eventually do it as a play at The Hollywood Fringe Festival. We love the world and style we created and it’s gotten a great response.

We think the piece really succeeds at being joke-a-minute in an intelligent way while still using comedy to draw attention to relevant issues and the hypocrisy that has existed in Tinseltown since its inception.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It was relatively breezy. Whenever we had our actor friends read it they were immediately attracted to the material, which was both exciting and disturbing, as actors will do almost anything to attach themselves to good material. But once we peeled their squid-like suction cuppy maw’s off the back of Breck’s bumper we were ready to get into production.

Putting together a play even for five shows is a lot of work and we were very grateful to have a cast who was so generous with their time and we love their performances very much, equally, like how I imagine a parent must be forced to love all their children equally and you smile and smile and everything is great. Always great. Forever.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Nickel Dickers – what should we know?
Nickel Dickers stands out for its inventive use of language, its dense dialogue and devilish potty humor. As if Aaron Sorkin literally liked smelling his own farts, not just metaphorically.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
We wish we could paint you a picture of a tiny apartment filled with empty Chinese takeout cartons, an ashtray overflowing with Marlboro butts, and a vintage bumper pool table which doubles as our quirky indoor hobby and the place where we take all of our meals while we miss the waste paper basket with crumpled up script pages and ask advice from a Michael Jordan poster and Claudia Schiffer cutout.

BUT we can’t because it’s not the 1990’s anymore, so mostly we just have to settle for hanging out and joking around and texting each other when we think of funny stuff and then writing that stuff. Don’t hate us because we’re millennials OKAY??

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nickeldickers.com
• Email: nickeldickers@gmail.com
• Instagram: @nickeldickers
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nickeldickers/

Image Credit:
Troy Conrad

Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.