Behind the Scenes

The warehouse gave the production control, but it also introduced problems that Disneyland never had. The largest was lighting. Daryl wanted the Maestro’s musical number to feel like a live stage performance, with theatrical lighting changing around Ray as the sequence built. Hiring a conventional film lighting crew capable of creating the effect was beyond the production’s budget, while the stage-lighting options they explored were expensive and not particularly well suited to being photographed.

So they bought the lights themselves. The crew assembled and operated a makeshift stage-lighting system inside the warehouse, trading some technical polish for the ability to attempt the sequence at all. Daryl was never entirely satisfied with the results, but the solution allowed them to preserve the larger idea rather than abandoning it because the professional version was unaffordable. Sound went in the opposite direction. The production brought in professional sound mixers Steven Lagosh and Brian Baker for the warehouse material. This time, the dialogue was going to exist when they recorded it.

Phase Two was considerably more elaborate than the Disneyland shoot. The crew had to build and dress the warehouse, manage a much larger ensemble, coordinate costumes and makeup, photograph musical sequences, handle the RED Monstro, and keep track of an extraordinary amount of Disney memorabilia and homemade production design. It was an unusual reversal of the normal filmmaking problem. At Disneyland, the world was already there and Dollars & Donuts had to find a way to photograph it. In Oakland, they had an empty room and had to build the world themselves.

By the time Phase Two was finished, Daryl was already looking ahead to a deadline that had nothing to do with the premiere. His father, Hank Della, was scheduled for a dangerous surgery almost immediately after Daryl returned from Los Angeles. Daryl understood that if the surgery went badly, finishing Am I See You? might become impossible for a while. Whatever remained unfinished would simply have to wait until he had the time, attention, or emotional capacity to return to it. That knowledge gave the Disneyland ADR an urgency it otherwise would not have had. Daryl wanted every major piece of the film recorded and safely in hand before he went home.

The Disneyland footage had always been expected to require extensive dialogue replacement. Crowds, music, ride noise, and the constant activity of the park had made clean production sound nearly impossible, and Tara Erickson had argued during the shoot that discreet lavalier microphones would have saved them considerable trouble later. In retrospect, Daryl agreed.

Tara and Sasha Boggs returned to Bedrock LA to rebuild the park dialogue, matching months-old performances line by line inside the recording booth. The session also gave Daryl an opportunity to simplify Whitney’s emotional backstory, reducing the references to both her mother and grandmother and concentrating the story more directly on the loss of her mother. Sasha later described the ADR process as “the stuff of nightmares.” Daryl was simply relieved to have it done.

Afterward, Daryl, Tara, and Sasha went to 4400 Bar in Silver Lake. Tara left first, while Daryl and Sasha stayed behind talking late into the night. What began as a chance to decompress after post-production gradually became something more consequential, with conversations and ideas that would matter well beyond Am I See You?

Within days, everything changed.

From its earliest conception, Am I See You? had been intended as a film for Daryl’s mother. Nina Della’s love of Disneyland and pin trading had provided the starting point for the story. Family photographs became props. Objects with connections to Daryl’s childhood found their way into the sets. Even the old Super 8 footage carried generations of the family through Disneyland before Daryl was old enough to remember any of it.

It was unusual territory. For years, Hank Della had been the parent most visibly entangled with Dollars & Donuts. He wrote scripts, acted, attended premieres, argued about movies, and became part of the mythology surrounding the company almost by default. Daryl and Hank shared filmmaking as a language. Am I See You? was supposed to give Nina one.

Then on November 29, 2019, while the film was still in post-production, Hank Della passed away. The planned December premiere was immediately abandoned. There was no meaningful way to finish the movie on the original schedule, and for a while there was little interest in trying. When Daryl eventually returned to the film in the new year, he was looking at material that had acquired a meaning nobody involved could have anticipated when it was shot.

Hank was already everywhere. The opening Super 8 footage included him as a little boy at Disneyland. Some of the objects incorporated into the film had belonged to him or came from his childhood. Photographs used to represent Whitney’s dead mother were actually photographs of Nina as a young woman, taken by Hank. A movie about somebody trying to understand a dead parent through photographs, possessions, and memories was suddenly being finished by someone doing exactly that.

Daryl added a new dedication to the end credits using more of the family’s Super 8 footage. This time the images were of Nina as a teenager, filmed by Hank when they were young. The choice completed a circle that had not existed when production began. Hank was behind the camera. Nina was in front of it. Decades later, their son was using the footage in a movie originally conceived as a tribute to his mother and completed in mourning for his father.

That gave the film a different emotional weight for Daryl. Whitney spends the story believing that understanding one object might somehow restore something she failed to appreciate while she still had the chance. What she eventually discovers is that the object was never the memory itself. By the time Daryl finished the movie, that idea required very little imagination.

The premiere was rescheduled for February 13, 2020, at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco. Daryl took the stage with Michael Martin, Ray Revello, Becker Von Felsburg, Mitchell Martin, Tara Erickson, and Sasha Boggs. It was the first Dollars & Donuts premiere without Hank.

Daryl had originally expected to introduce Am I See You? as the movie he had finally made specifically for his mother. Standing in front of the audience, he admitted that things had not quite gone according to plan:

That was ultimately what Am I See You? became. It started with an accidental five-second video at Disneyland and an idea for a movie about obsessive pin collectors. Somewhere along the way it absorbed childhood photographs, family vacations, objects passed between generations, songs Nina had sung to Daryl as a child, footage his grandfather had taken of Hank, footage Hank had taken of Nina, and finally the experience of losing the person who had been standing beside Dollars & Donuts since its beginning.

The movie had been conceived as a tribute to one parent. By the time it reached the screen, it belonged to both.