ASH HOLES
Some friendships last a lifetime. The grudges last a little longer.Lance Louie is dead, and his two best friends have been handed the solemn responsibility of scattering his ashes at sea. The problem is, Lance was an asshole. Before they give him the dignified farewell he never quite earned, there are a few old scores to settle, a few grievances to air, and one last chance to tell Lance Louie exactly what they think of him.
BECKER VON FELSBURG
DARYL DELLA
Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery
Monica Williams
Trader Joe's Store #19
Jordan Villa
Characters
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Cecil Horning
BECKER VON FELSBURG
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Dustin Griggs
CHRIS ROSS
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Darlene Griggs
BRITTANY CAIRO
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Wanda Griggs
LISA FIDLER
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Lola Bombay
LORI CARSILLO
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Lance Louie
RAY REVELLO
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Chico Mendez
CHRIS CAIRO
behind the scenes
Ash Holes came together because, a few weeks before the Dollars & Donuts is Dead. Long Live Dollars & Donuts! premiere, Daryl decided the show needed one more movie.
The script, originally titled Ash-Hole, was written by David Lambertson and found on Reddit. It was short, mean, funny, and most importantly, shootable fast. Daryl optioned it, flew back to the Bay Area, gathered a handful of old collaborators, and shot the entire film in a single afternoon. The edit followed almost immediately. There wasn’t much room for second-guessing. The movie had a premiere date before it had much of anything else.
One of the smartest changes came from Becker Von Felsburg. In Lambertson’s script, the dead friend was simply a dead friend. Becker suggested making him Lucky Louie from The Alibi, instantly folding the story back into Dollars & Donuts continuity and allowing Ray Revello to appear through existing footage without ever stepping onto the set.
The original ending was considerably more cynical. Daryl rewrote it, letting the hostility between the two surviving friends gradually give way to something warmer. Lance Louie may have been an impossible bastard, but he was still their impossible bastard. The film could have ended as a joke about desecrating somebody’s ashes. Instead, it became a small story about the strange mixture of resentment, affection, and selective memory that survives people after they’re gone.
Becker and Chris Ross played Louie’s two long-suffering friends. Their real history helped. There wasn’t much need to manufacture the feeling of two men who had known each other forever, because they had.
The funeral sequences carried another kind of history. They were filmed at the same chapel where Daryl’s father had recently been interred. Returning there with cameras, friends, and a comedy about two men abusing their dead friend’s remains gave the location a very different association. Grief had already claimed the room once. This time, they got to make something in it.
The bathroom material required less emotional excavation and more basic trickery. To get the unusually low toilet-bowl angles, the crew placed a mirror on the floor beneath a suspended toilet seat and photographed the reflection. Cheap, simple, and much easier than putting a camera where the camera had no business going.
Because Lambertson’s script agreement allowed other filmmakers to produce their own versions, Ash-Hole eventually developed an unexpected second life. Some time later, the crew discovered that a group of filmmakers in Scotland had made their own adaptation of the same script.
Suddenly, this little movie thrown together in one California afternoon had a distant cousin on the other side of the Atlantic.
Not bad for the film that almost wasn’t on the program.
dollars & donuts continuity
Ash Holes opens with Lance Louie’s death in The Alibi, repurposing footage from the 2014 film and turning what had been written as a standalone funeral comedy into an unlikely continuation of Louie’s story.
It also creates one of the stranger wrinkles in Dollars & Donuts continuity. Chris Ross, who played Detective Hickey in The Alibi, returns here as Dustin Griggs, apparently existing in the same world as another man with his exact face.