Pop Quiz: How Much Money Did Michael Bay Spend on Sex Toys for Pain & Gain?

Pain &GainIf you were one of the millions of vaguely disturbed patrons who turned out at the multiplex this weekend to see Michael Bay’s attempt to apply his hyperactive meathead aesthetic to a Coen brothers–style dark comedy (his pitch to Paramount: “It’s like Fargo, but if it had harsh sunlight and 90 minutes of wood chipper!”), you probably noticed that the movie’s sex-toy budget was, er, generous. For extended stretches, overflowing boxes of wholesale marital aids played as important a function as Tony Shalhoub, who commendably endured the constant focus-pulling of the scene-hogging dildo jiggling menacingly in his battered face.

But exactly how generous was the neoprene-vagina-and-nipple-clamp budget? Take a moment to formulate a guess. Ready? The answer follows, courtesy of a Bay interview with The Daily Beast:

We bought $75,000 worth of sex toys to stock the sex-toy warehouse. I could have filmed the crew coming in that day because they’d stop and see these things — anatomically correct vajayjays and this butt (everyone would touch the butt because it felt real) — and it was hysterical. We were going to return all the sex toys to get three-quarters of our money back, but they started disappearing. We were like, “Who is taking the sex toys?”

While probably the financially responsible thing for a movie watching its bottom line, the 75-percent-dildo-rebate plan seems like a missed opportunity to do something special for everyone who worked on the production. Hopefully the sex-toy thieves were one step ahead of their penny-pinching director here, and each crew member got a Fleshlight emblazoned with Bay’s smirking likeness as a wrap gift. Seventy-five thousand dollars is a small price to pay for that kind of heartfelt souvenir of their time together.

Filed Under: Michael Bay, Pain & Gain

Mark Lisanti is an editor at Grantland.

Archive @ marklisanti