By 2017, Daryl wanted the next Dollars & Donuts premiere to feel less like a screening and more like a show. The model was old Hollywood. Oscars. Variety specials. Red curtains, tuxedos, musical numbers, corny hosts, and the kind of overproduced glamour that had absolutely no business being attached to a bunch of homemade short films.

The centerpiece would be an opening song. While working at Udemy, Daryl discovered that his coworker Katie Bent was a songwriter with exactly the kind of musical-theater background he needed. He gave her an information sheet about the group, their personalities, their running jokes, and the history of Dollars & Donuts. Katie came back with a song that nailed all of it.

Daryl first heard the demo while on vacation in New York City. He had traveled there with Becker Von Felsburg, Ray Revello, and Sinéad Madden for a weekend meeting up with Canadian friends Jamie Hari and Mike Whitlock. One morning, Daryl woke up in the tiny Manhattan Airbnb with Ray and Becker sprawled nearby, two enormous men greeting the sunrise with their hairy bellies exposed to the room while Katie’s demo filled the air. Against all available evidence, it sounded beautiful.

Once back home, the song moved quickly into production. The arrangement called for a three-woman, Andrews Sisters-style chorus, so Lori Carsillo was recruited to sing all three vocal parts. Lori then brought in Kelly Park to produce the track. The song was recorded on October 19, 2017, just two days before the wraparounds would be filmed. Lori laid down all three parts in the studio, and Becker Von Felsburg played bass on the track, the last time to date he would do so.

The boys recorded their own vocal interjections separately. Daryl, Becker, Chris Ross, Gino Vigil, and Michael Martin gathered at Chris Ross’s place in West Portal to record their parts. Daryl and Becker later continued working at a different house Chris Ross had moved into in the Sunset.

It was during that session that another musical number changed shape. Daryl and Becker had been rehearsing a version of “Well, Did You Evah!” using the original lyrics. During recording, Daryl suddenly ad-libbed, “Have you heard about Chris Ross? He went downtown to get his salad tossed,” purely to make Becker and Chris laugh. That was enough to derail the straight version. Becker immediately wanted in and added his own line about Mitch. What had started as a relatively faithful performance became a parody during the recording itself.

Two days later, on October 21, 2017, the wraparounds were filmed on Daryl’s 31st birthday. Shooting on his birthday was beginning to turn into a welcome little tradition. The entire crew assembled at a theater school in Menlo Park chosen largely because it already had the right look. Red curtains, theatrical lighting, and an old-fashioned stage gave Daryl the classic Hollywood atmosphere he wanted without requiring much additional dressing. The guys bought cheap matching tuxedos. They looked glorious.

For the opening number, Lori was joined onscreen by Kirsten Della and Sinéad Madden, lip-syncing the other vocal parts to Lori’s recording. Matching shimmering dresses were rented from Rent the Runway, turning the trio into the glamorous Greek chorus the show needed. For once, Dollars & Donuts actually looked expensive.

Daryl wrote the rest of the wraparound script around pairings he knew would be funny. Chris Ross and Gino Vigil were put back together. Lorenzo Ocon and Mitchell Martin were paired around a premise where Lorenzo wanted to deliver old Bob Hope-style jokes while Mitch rewrote them in real time into increasingly vulgar insults aimed directly at Lozo. Rich Castromayor appeared from the audience in another one of his Bugs Bunny-style trickster cameos. Rich had always enjoyed ridiculing Lorenzo, and being given a formal theatrical setting in which to boo him was essentially a gift. The final pairing was Ray Revello and Becker Von Felsburg, playing the evening’s closest equivalent to old-school Oscar hosts.

Their material leaned deliberately into dated show-business humor, with jokes written or cribbed from old Dean Martin roasts and similar broadcasts. Daryl wanted the atmosphere to feel genuinely old-fashioned, but filtered through the kind of sarcastic delivery Norm Macdonald used when reading hopelessly corny material at the Bob Saget roast.

The outtakes show how loose the process remained beneath all that fake polish. Lines were adjusted between takes, blocking changed on the fly, and jokes kept expanding as everyone piled onto them. One running bit had Michael insisting that nobody was allowed to drink until after the show because he had already handed out laminated copies of the rules.

The joke had some history behind it. By then the guys, but Daryl in particular, had developed a reputation within the group for treating premieres and parties as endurance events. Daryl had already embarrassed himself more than a few times by getting far too drunk at earlier premieres and even at his own wedding, so the self-aware script became a way of getting in front of the joke before anybody else could. If the night went off the rails again, well, that’s all part of the bit, don’t you see?

Once filming wrapped, the crew went to dinner and celebrated Daryl’s birthday. For Daryl, there was not much distinction between the two events. Making movies with his friends was his favorite thing in the world. Getting to spend his birthday doing exactly that felt like the best present available.

While the filmed show was coming together, Daryl was also building something else for the premiere. He had wanted to make a comic book for years and commissioned artists including Diego Toro to create new stories, prequels, and side adventures connected to the films being shown that night. The resulting Dollars & Donuts Showcase Vol. 1, Issue #1 was designed like a program for the evening and handed out to attendees as a surprise. Hank Della wrote the Shadows in the Snow prologue himself.

The comic was a hit. It was also expensive enough to make clear that producing full books regularly was not going to be easy. Short stories and supplemental material helped fill out the issue, and the concept went dormant rather than disappearing.

The finished premiere returned to the Embarcadero Center Cinema, where the 2014 show had been held. By then, the venue was beginning to feel less like a rental and more like a tradition. On December 21, 2017, Dollars & Donuts sold out two theaters for one night. The guys arrived wearing the same tuxedos from the wraparounds, giving the evening a strange illusion that the filmed show had simply spilled off the screen and into the lobby.

The night was a tremendous success. After the screenings, everyone crossed the street to the Irish pub and kept the party going. For Sasha Boggs, it was the first time she had seen the full Dollars & Donuts machine operating at scale. She had acted with the group only once before, in No Pill for Regret the previous year. Returning to San Francisco in December 2017 and walking into a sold-out premiere full of tuxedos, comics, films, music, old friends, and new collaborators changed the relationship completely. She wanted in. Not for one film. For whatever came next. It was the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

Years later, in 2023, Daryl finally revived the Showcase concept with Volume 2, Issue #1, giving the idea a real second life. The comics became a home for side stories, prequels, impossible sequels, and pieces of the Dollars & Donuts universe that were too small to justify a new movie or too large to realistically produce on film.