Sometimes, things don’t always go as planned. With screenplay and direction from first-timer Brandon Tamburri, actors Jamie Lee and Jon Header star in a romantic comedy showing just that, all while knocking your socks off thanks to a wild storyline and a talented cast.
In Plan B, the rebellious Piper (Lee) drunkenly sleeps with her awkward neighbor she hardly knows, Evan Ebert (Jon Heder), and winds up pregnant after a fun night out. When she attempts to tell Evan the news, she quickly realizes that he’s not the long-term guy for her and her baby. Going against the advice of her best friend Maya (Subhah Agarwal), Piper opts to keep the pregnancy a secret until she can find a more successful guy to sleep with and ultimately start a “family” with. After a few failed and comical attempts at finding a match, Piper stumbles into Cameron Cassidy (Michael Lombardi), a successful businessman who is a regular at the café she works at. Everything appears to be going according to plan as Cameron quickly falls for Piper and is onboard for the pregnancy. However, Piper’s evil scheme starts to unravel when she begins to second guess herself and realize that she might be making the biggest mistake of her life.
“There’s a series of failed, but very funny attempts at trying to find a match. She does finally meet this guy that seems perfect… he checks all the boxes, he’s on board for the pregnancy… then then the more real things get with this guy, the worst Piper starts to feel,” director Brandon Tamburri tells Celeb Secrets in an exclusive interview.
“She’s only like a quarter sociopath on her mother’s side,” Jamie Lee chimes in with a laugh. “She does have a conscience and realizes that this is a pretty scandalous operation to pull off, so needless to say, chaos ensues.”
Mentioning that he was a fan of Lee for years, Tamburri says that one of his goals was to get the Emmy Award-winning actress involved in his first project. And after sending the script around to different agencies, the New Jersey filmmaker wound up securing the actress of his dreams, who not only loved the script, but also has had pregnancy on the brain as she is going through her own IVF journey.
“It was really cool to work on the movie because I am about to be married for the second time, and my fiancé and I have been trying to have a baby. We’re on the IVF journey and freezing embryos, so like, pregnancy is kind of always on the brain for me. I’m up for any stories that speak to women going through that in any capacity. And if it’s a comedy… I think that’s kind of the most palatable way to learn about things that women go through. It’s actually quite educational when you can make people laugh and learn at the same time,” Jamie shares.
“Again, just to restate, Piper has sociopath tendencies, but has a good heart underneath it all… I think,” she laughs. “I think [‘Plan B’] spoke to me on several levels because it connected with what I’ve been going through for the past couple of years.”
Plan B was one of many that premiered on the big screen at the Mammoth Film Festival in Mammoth Lakes, California, which took place at the Minaret Cinemas from February 29 to March 4. With a full-on blizzard and 195mph winds sweeping the Sierra Nevada Mountains, out-of-this-world conditions didn’t stop Jamie, Brandon and the rest of the cast from celebrating the special moment.
“I’m really excited about the project. We shot it two summers ago in New Jersey, and it’s kind of wild because it was a small crew and it felt sort of like summer camp. And then film festivals also kind of feel like summer camp, so I feel like we’ve kind of doubled up on the hangout vibe in making this movie,” Jamie says.
“It’s really been years in the making and this is the world premiere today, so it’s really exciting just to have audiences finally see this up on the big screen,” Brandon adds.
And while the flick is meant to bring all the laughs, director Brandon Tamburri tells Celeb Secrets that his overall goal with Plan B was to tell a good story that has a lot of heart.
“The character of Piper really comes around and does what’s right in the end. She doesn’t do it because it’s convenient for her… she does it because she really does grow as a person and learn from these terrible things that she’s done,” Brandon explains.
“I think also to that point — what I love about this movie is that it is a hard comedy, and I think those are kind of a dying breed. It’s exciting to be like, ‘this is a movie with laughs.’ In a way, there’s a bit of a throwback to almost like your favorite romantic comedies and also just come comedies from like the nineties and early 2000s that were just like so solid that hold up. I think that’s what’s cool about what [Brandon] did; you can really feel your influences in this movie in a way that brings sort of that retro vibe to the modern day in the best way,” Jamie adds.
For more coverage from the 2024 Mammoth Film Festival, click here.
