Rap World (2024) is the story of three friends in suburban Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, set over the course of a single night in January 2009 as they record the album that will change their lives. In fact, most of their night consists of avoiding that task, riding in cars between various rec rooms, catching buzzes, chasing (and fleeing) women, and anxiously adjusting the vibe. Those familiar with the hectic online sketch-work of Conner O’Malley will recognize a world stitched from loading zones and wooded areas, populated by thwarted, semi-feral men. But Rap World’s near-hour runtime also unlocks a diversity of heartfelt tenderness and destabilizing strangeness from a cast that includes Jack Bensinger (also the editor), Eric Rahill, Dan Licata, Edy Modica, and Sarah Squirm.
From within the contested space of prestige dramedies, anti-woke podcasters, and Unfrosted (2024), debut co-directors O’Malley and Danny Scharar have delivered the rare modern comedy that’s actually funny. Rap World also provokes a culture saturated with microplastic levels of nostalgia to consider that the past was just as incoherent, meaningless, and stupid as the present. After its premiere at this year’s Los Angeles Festival of Movies, and a national screening tour that recouped its shoestring budget, Rap World is now available for free on O’Malley’s YouTube channel. I spoke to Scharar and O’Malley about the production process, the perils of the streaming economy, and the impending cultural revival of The Boondock Saints (1999).
Ryan Meehan: What does it mean to you guys making your co-directorial debut on a project that has such a collaborative aspect to it? How flexible are those roles? Do titles even apply with something like this?
Conner O’Malley: It was kind of an all-hands-on-deck situation. The crew was incredibly small and the cast was like half of the crew. It was incredibly collaborative: everybody has jokes in the movie, we would talk about story together. It was kind of like everybody was steering it and had a voice in it. We relied heavily on everybody to be generous with their creativity and ideas. And, I think we allowed room for people to invest, and then hopefully, you know, in moments like this, giving them credit. They can check out on that creative investment—go to the creative bank and buy creative bonds.
Danny Scharar: You can now use creative points at Whole Foods with Amazon checkout.
CO: We’re not far from that.
DS: As far as there being an auteur, this isn't going through one person's lens. Jack’s sensibility is so specific to him, but it also feels like an Eric movie, as much as it feels like a Conner movie. It’s going through everyone.
CO: And Danny, and [producers Harris Mayersohn and Meryl Faye Crock].
DS: We didn't know what this movie was going to be when we started it. There were days where you could feel like, “Oh, I don't really know what's going on right now.” There was one day in particular where things were like, “Oh, this idea works.” And it was sort of like a fun problem-solving thing, gaming out, “What direction should we take this?”
RM: It’s interesting that the movie is about friends making art together, which in a weird way is also how the movie itself was made. Improvisation is something the characters frequently do when they’re just, you know, rapping bars off the dome. But then so much of the humor itself also feels improvised.
CO: We all, in one form or another, have unfortunately touched improv communities. But, these characters are just guys who need an excuse to hang out. They're not actually rappers and they're not actually making a movie. We thought a lot about the documentary Overnight [2003], about the making of The Boondock Saints, and how that movie is half Maybe this is all we’re going to get out of this process, and half People are definitely going to want to see this when they’re building the Boondock Saints Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., right?
DS: We filmed the short version of it a year earlier and that one was a lot more confrontational, but when we were living in the scenes longer, and when there was an intention to make this a longer piece, we thought, what if it was like that documentary Overnight, where these guys are friends with each other?
CO: I also feel it's time for a journalistic reappraisal of Overnight, considering what we know about the Weinstein Company. Like, how much of Troy Duffy’s behavior was affected by these rapists?
RM: I’ve heard you guys say that The Dark Knight [2008] was really important as a peg. But this movie feels very loose timewise, in a way that actually feels truer to the period than movies that are stuffed with references to a certain time. Like Obama has just been elected, but Jack is rapping about how “George Bush wants to turn the world into a gun.”
CO: I think it's a bridge period between the 2000s type of guy that would listen to Immortal Technique and watch Loose Change [2005 - 2009], and kind of question stuff conspiracy-wise.
And then, the Obama era—everything's kind of fun and, for lack of a better term, hipster. I don't know what you would call the 2000s guy, but it was an interesting period, because it was so dark. Everyone was like, “We fucked up as a country.” And then with Obama, everyone was like, “Fuck man, we're going back. Everything's going to be good.” And then they were 100% right.
I think we also chose that time period because of that. There's a period of rap that was late 2000s that was like, Immortal Technique, Atmosphere, or Common that wasn’t specifically gangster rap. It's not G-Unit. It's not like that. It's exploring different avenues and different thoughts that then open up the door for a bunch of guys, like the characters in our movie, to be like, “Well, you could just do it like that,” in kind of an uncreative way.
RM: There are also these tender emotional arcs, like with Conner's character. You learn that he's a father and then later you're going to see his ex, and that relationship is going to come to a head. Eric's got the ring, and well—he's not going to propose, but he's proposing. There's all this anticipation, and everybody's kind of putting everything off, and then it spills over.
DS: Those emotional arcs were pretty plotted out by Conner, Eric, and Jack in their writing process. Getting us to those emotional beats needed to resonate and fit in the fabric of a movie that is, for the most part, pretty dumb. I do remember, when we first did a test screening, there was a sense of relief in the audience when Eric's ring arc happens. Like, there's narrative things to hold on. Like, this isn't going to be an hour-long exercise in doing wacky improvs. It's something that Jack really found: that balance of the emotion of the movie in the edit, along with things that snap you out when you get bored with the form. You want the audience to be celebrating that someone procrastinated their homework overnight to get a D on it. It’s better than a full failure.
RM: Eminem has been around for a while and yet there’s something kind of inexhaustibly embarrassing about the idea of the White Rapper, of these guys who want to slide into this idiom, who so desperately want to be cool.
CO: It's just a complete denial of the Blackness of rap. It was something we tried to bake into it, that, yeah, these guys are stupid.
DS: These guys don't understand the craft of it. The fact that they do, in the end, knock out the album in about an hour and a half—they’re not taking the art form that seriously, even though they are putting all their eggs in that basket. And there was something you could kind of say, meta-textually connected, about the way we made Rap World. “Oh yeah, you can just make a movie. Just like, go to an AirBnb and film stuff, pull 70 hours of footage.” And for both parties, I think it worked out, right?
RM: Yeah, probably fewer casualties on the production side.
DS: Thank God. We did hire the armorer that did Shang-Chi [2021]. So he does Marvel movies and Rap World.
CO: He's on the set of a Marvel movie telling them about Rap World.
DS: The day we had a real gun on set, he was incredibly professional and made us feel very comfortable, but it did feel like he was humoring us as the Marvel movie guy walking onto an indie film set. We shot that a couple weeks after the Rust incident happened, so everyone was pretty nervous about it. He was so professional and walked us through it in ways that made everyone feel so much calmer than they did on the drive over there. He explained it like, “That would not have gone down if I was on set.”
CO: Yeah, Harris called the local police department. We got a property, we got a release from them. It was maybe the most professional day.
RM: It wasn't too long ago that Hollywood was on strike. At the time, there was a sense that everybody was pulling together to guarantee a future for the most creative ambitions in the industry. And it's a little bit in the past now, but I did want to ask you guys, as people that bootstrapped this thing to life and made it happen, if you see those two things as having anything to do with each other. Do you think you could make something like this again?
CO: I don't know if we can make something like this again, specifically—this is so unique to the time and place. But I’ve definitely benefited from making my own work that doesn't necessarily have an intended commercial outcome, that's more just to make people laugh and that’s enjoyable. It helps me then sell stuff that needs a bigger budget, in Hollywood terms. I feel pretty outside of it and I feel like it's a very bad time right now for everyone, like a period of transition. I hesitate to be prescriptive or apply any sort of narrative that I've perceived in my own life or career. I guess I'll say that I feel incredibly lucky that I have Danny and Harris and Jack and Eric to collaborate with, and that we also have access to this technology and platforms to be able to create and distribute our own work. And if I didn't have access to that, I really don't think that I would have anywhere near the career I have. It's really nice to be able to make something, to put it out. And for the people who want to see it, they can see it for free. There’s something kind of cool about that. I don't know, it's an interesting time. I kind of make my living from being a touring club comedian now, which I'm incredibly grateful about, but even that's changing. I'll do a comedy club and they'll be like, “Yeah, a guy from TikTok sold this place out,” and I’m like, “Was it good?” “No, but he can move.” It’s always changing.
DS: I think the benefit of where we are working from, which is very outside of the system, is that the one resource we have, that larger productions and real Hollywood institutions have, is a lot of time. That's the one thing we can luxuriate on. We shot the short in October of 2020, and what I think makes Rap World special is that we didn't rush it out. We sat on it for a while. The ideas all got richer and everything got better. I think that's something that's true of the work I've done with Conner in general too. All these videos that are “just for YouTube,” we will spend six months to a year on. And, I do think it reflects in the work, where it feels less ephemeral than a TikTok or something.
CO: Jack and I are working on a kind of spiritual sequel to Rap World, that's about three guys who are food logistic officers in the U.S. Army in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq, and they're at a forward operating base in Iraq. It’s all shot on DV cams. That too is just like, how can you, from the jump, write something that's very low-budget? Like, who knows if it's going to happen? It just feels so weird. Like, what gets financed and what doesn't? Everything's moving kind of slow.
RM: What kind of future do you want from the project now that it’s streaming?
CO: Well, one thing that does suck is that it got age-restricted on YouTube, which heavily limits who's able to see it. You have to be signed in. It just kind of pulls it out of the algorithm, so it's not going to get recommended to people who don't know it. It’s a completely unfair thing that happens to my stuff all the time, where they're essentially saying it's pornography and that it's uploaded for sexual gratification. Some AI scans the video and finds, “Oh, there's this”—and it's the sex scene. We blurred out the nudity, but the hand motion got it slapped with an 18+ thing. So that's a bummer that it stops it cold in the algorithm. And the views have kind of stopped now. Every time I try to apply and be like, “This is a movie,” there's no human on the other side. It's handled algorithmically or something, and then it's denied.
But success for us: we wanted to make our budget back, so we did with the screenings, which was incredibly nice. And then, we're going to take that money and split it up with the cast and crew and get some merch coming out. But you know, it's a little bit of a personal practice of just making stuff that’s interesting to you and trying to make it different each time. In terms of that, it's a success. It's like one bigger step. This is the longest thing I've made and we've made as a crew, just making it for itself. We always want to be growing and challenging and getting into new and more interesting places.
DS: If anyone knows any programmers at YouTube that can maybe undo that, that would be great.
CO: There’s stuff I've seen on YouTube that's actual hate speech. So I have no idea what's going on at YouTube, but it seems like you just kind of get caught in the system. You know, it's fine for me. I'm a comedian or whatever, but it's crazy to think what that technology could do to, you know, a journalist or somebody. I’m sure it's happening, we just don't realize it. I guess it's the flip side of like, you know, if I was this age in the ‘90s, I would just be a guy with hopefully two lines on a sitcom. Now, I get to make the dumbest videos for completely brain-rotted boyfriends.
Rap World is currently available on YouTube.
