Behind the Scenes

The Meet-Up began with a script by Mike Bedard built around one simple joke. Every detective in town seems to use the same diner for supposedly secret meetings, and the poor waiter serving them is the only person willing to point out how ridiculous they all look.

Lorenzo Ocon played Chuck, the increasingly exasperated waiter trying to make a living while detectives, informants, spies and assorted lowlifes occupy separate tables, whisper about murders and corruption, and order little more than water.

The script also called for a pair of detectives near the end, written as broad parodies of True Detective. That reference didn’t help much, since nobody involved had actually seen the show.

Instead, Becker Von Felsburg gave his detective an old-fashioned 1940s noir manner, while Brandon Reed more or less brought his own energy to the other half of the pairing. Whatever they were supposed to be on the page disappeared almost immediately. The two had such strange, effortless chemistry together that Slade McKlosky and Rochester Black became something else entirely.

They became the Night Dicks.

The response on set was immediate enough that Dollars & Donuts spun Slade McKlosky and Rochester Black into their own short before The Meet-Up even premiered. Then Daryl reversed the order for the screening. Night Dicks played first, introducing the audience to the duo on their own terms, so that when Slade and Rochester suddenly walked into The Meet-Up later in the program, what had originally been their debut landed instead as a surprise return.

Emily Erwin made her first Dollars & Donuts appearance in The Meet-Up, already on her way toward a career in broadcasting. She returned the following year in The Neighbor, then came back years later in Five Days to Live and Frank Barnett vs. Ninja Killface after becoming professional on-air talent. Daryl had met Emily at a Christmas party a year or so earlier, and she and her sister Katherine soon became friends of the company. Emily fit right into the chaos and gave the role exactly the kind of sharp, natural energy the film needed. Katherine would later join the roster herself in Number Nine.

The closing montage of detectives and informants carries its own little web of history. It includes the last Dollars & Donuts appearance to date by Emmanuel Diego, a familiar bit player during the early Golden Years, as well as a return from Donald Flores after a five-year break. Donald and Lorenzo had long existed in the company’s mythology as off-screen rivals, thanks in part to Lorenzo’s notorious “off-the-record” monologue in Rich & Lozo, but The Meet-Up brought them back into the same production orbit before they would later star together in Tipsy.

Donald’s appearance also reunited him with Emmanuel Diego. The pair had last been seen together as Julio’s thugs in Oldtimers in 2012, giving the diner sequence another small connective thread to the earlier roster.

The location had history too. The Meet-Up was filmed at Royal Pin Donuts in South San Francisco, which had previously appeared in Still Walking, also starring Lorenzo Ocon. The donut shop would later continue to exist inside Dollars & Donuts continuity even after the cameras stopped returning there, becoming the regular hangout for the Oldtimers characters in the 2023 comic sequel Oldtimers Bring Hell.

For a seven-minute comedy about detectives pretending not to know each other, The Meet-Up ended up connecting an unusual amount of Dollars & Donuts history. It introduced the Night Dicks, brought Emily Erwin into the roster, brought old collaborators back together, and gave Royal Pin Donuts a second life that would eventually extend from live action into comics.