Behind the Scenes

The character of Jack Knife was conceived by Daryl Della and Nate Blonkenfeld as a smart-aleck action hero, blending the mischievousness of Bugs Bunny with the cynicism of Marvel’s Deadpool. Tommy Lazzari's naturally sarcastic demeanor and catchphrases, like "Attaboy," made him the ideal choice for the role.

The film's genesis was notably straightforward: Daryl, Nate, and Snyder had recently gone in three-ways on a gorilla costume, since it seemed like they needed one. After a variety of pranks pulled, the gorilla suit itself seemed to justify building an entire fight around it.

After that, the gorilla became part costume, part communal resource. For years it lived in the back of Daryl’s 4Runner, ready for whatever emergency might require the sudden appearance of a gorilla. It turned up throughout several Dollars & Donuts shorts of the era and was regularly loaned to friends at the Academy of Art for their own productions and assorted gorilla needs.

With that much use came a price. The suit was a spectacular sweat trap, worn by a rotating collection of increasingly damp men and almost never given enough time to recover between adventures. The gloves were particularly bad. After a long stretch inside the costume, pulling one off could release a small salty river of accumulated sweat.

Jack Knife's wardrobe was deliberately ostentatious, featuring glow-in-the-dark skeleton gloves borrowed from Nate's nighttime Groundies games, a vintage leather jacket from Daryl's father's closet, and sunglasses worn at night, all chosen to amplify the character's flamboyant persona.

The climactic fight was shot sporadically over the course of a year, mostly because it was nearly impossible to get Tommy and Nate in the same place at the same time. As a result, the film never really came together. It ends abruptly with Jack Knife head-butting the gorilla, which was not the intended ending. Originally, the script called for Jack Knife to decapitate the gorilla and drop its severed head into a Starbucks toilet, tying back to Stream of Consciousness’ opening scene where Emily Bordallo finds a fish in the same place.

The film opens with a cameo from Nate Blonkenfeld as Ninja Killface, who answers a call from the Zookeeper, played by the guys’ former high school principal Robert Beauchamp, seeking advice. The camera pulls back to reveal Killface in Disneyland, a nod to the short Ninja Killface Goes to Disneyland. This creative tie-in anchored both stories in the same timeline, necessitating another trip to Disneyland for Daryl and Nate to shoot additional footage, further blending the absurd worlds of the Dollars & Donuts universe.

The fight itself is rough, with most of it built around trial and error. Nate, inside the gorilla suit, spends a lot of time rolling around on the ground, usually on top of Tommy, which he seemed to enjoy more than necessary. At least one punch lands for real. Tommy takes it in the face and cracks a tooth slightly. He shrugs it off. “That’s all part of the sacrifice,” is more or less the attitude. No one stops filming.

It was originally meant to be part of Stream of Consciousness, which fell apart, leaving this as a standalone piece without much context. From there, it became something the group would occasionally return to, shoot a little more of, then abandon again. At one point, after more than a year, only three nights of actual filming had been completed.

There was always the idea that it could be wrapped up later. Even years after the fact, the instinct remained. At one point, Tommy casually suggested finishing it that weekend, as if nothing had changed, as if everyone still looked the same, still lived nearby, still had the time.

There are also pieces of other, unrelated ideas still floating around inside it. A background gag involving a 1-Up Mushroom from Super Mario Bros. ties back to a scrapped video game sequence that no longer exists. It’s left in anyway, with the vague idea that it might connect to something later. It never does. Like most things here, it’s less about whether it works and more about whether it was already shot.

The movie may have stopped, but Jack Knife didn’t.

Years later, the character was folded back into the Dollars & Donuts universe through the comics. Jack Knife was retroactively added to the comic-book adaptation of The Golden Hoot, giving him a place in a story he had never originally been part of, then spun off into several adventures of his own in Dollars & Donuts Showcase Vol. 2.

It was an unusually fitting second life for the character. Jack Knife had always felt less like the hero of one particular short and more like a character who ought to be wandering into other stories, insulting people, causing trouble, and disappearing again.

Then, in December 2023, Daryl did something he had long assumed wasn’t going to happen. He convinced Tommy Lazzari to put the old skeleton gloves back on.

Jack Knife returned.

The appearance was brief, part of the post-credits sequence for the 2024 Ninja Killface reboot. Bruce Cummings gathers an all-star collection of long-absent Dollars & Donuts characters, and among them is Jack Knife, standing there again as if the intervening years had somehow been skipped.

Of all the returning characters, Jack Knife may have meant the most to Daryl. He had always loved the character, and especially Tommy’s performance, because so much of Jack Knife's personality came directly from Tommy himself. The sarcasm, the attitude, the way he carried himself, even “Attaboy” all felt less invented than captured.

Daryl never really expected to see Jack Knife in costume again.

But there they were, two friends who had known each other since middle school, once again putting on costumes and acting out ridiculous scenes in the alleys of South San Francisco, nearly twenty years after they had first started doing it.