Following the creative disappointment of It’s Over and the unwieldy production of Dead Right II, Daryl wanted to make something smaller again. A project that was maybe smaller in scale but higher in ambition, serving as a testing ground for his new obsession: the Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

Hank Della supplied the answer with a script built around Jack Lewkowitz, the Dellas’ longtime neighbor and one of the central figures of Oldtimers. Jack had already proven he could hold the screen simply by being himself. This time, Hank gave him somebody to play. Mr. Rooker was conceived as a shadowy criminal fixer, a quiet man with a long history and very little time left. The character was also designed to connect into the larger world being built around Dead Right: Part Three, giving what looked like a self-contained little crime story a place inside something much bigger.

Production took the team into the Sierra Nevada mountains. Jack had a family home in South Lake Tahoe, not far from the Della family’s vacation cabin, giving the film a level of production value they could never have afforded to manufacture. The crew list, however, exposed some early fractures in the Dollars & Donuts hierarchy. Michael Martin declined to make the trip, and his absence was a real source of frustration for Daryl at the time. Stepping into the breach was Ray Revello. Always game, Ray joined Daryl for the road trip, handling sound and production duties and briefly reviving that old high-school feeling of the two of them against the world.

The film also introduced Chris Ross to Dollars & Donuts. Daryl and Chris Ross had known each other in high school without ever really being friends. Old loyalties and teenage factional nonsense had kept them on opposite sides of a divide that, years later, barely seemed worth remembering. Becker Von Felsburg remained close with Chris Ross and vouched for him. Daryl called, Chris Ross agreed, and one of the company’s longest-running collaborations began. So did one of Daryl’s longest friendships.

Cast as The Hitman, Chris Ross brought a cold, detached presence that immediately changed the tone of the film. His character spends much of the story quietly escorting Rooker toward his death, and the restraint of the performance gave the movie a menace that would have been easy to overplay.

The shoot was brutally compact. Daryl, Ray, and Ross drove through the night to Tahoe, picked up Jack and his son John Lewkowitz, who photographed the production, and shot the entire film in a single day. The heat was punishing, but hey kept moving. By dusk, the final shot was finished. They ate, packed up, and immediately drove back to the Bay Area.

Despite the exhausted crew, the results were undeniable. The Blackmagic image gave the film a crisp, cinematic texture that immediately set it apart, while Arbel Bedak’s score and “Steal Your Thunder” by The Broken Spurs helped push it into something more atmospheric and controlled than almost anything Dollars & Donuts had made before.

The film quickly became an early calling card for the company, even drawing attention from Ain’t It Cool News and reaching beyond the usual circle of friends, collaborators, and local audiences. It also earned a rare place in the company’s premiere history. A Lovely Place to Die first screened at Dollars & Donuts Premiere Night 2014, then returned to the big screen eight years later during Dollars & Donuts is Dead. Long Live Dollars & Donuts! in 2022, becoming the first Dollars & Donuts film to play at two separate company premieres.

Earlier in 2022, Daryl had returned to the original raw files and remastered the image and sound, ensuring that one of the crown jewels of the Dollars & Donuts catalog looked as timeless as the landscape it was shot in. What began as a small reset ended up introducing two figures who would matter enormously going forward: Mr. Rooker and Chris Ross.