In an interview with DVD Talk, Robert Pulcini explained how they got the film off the ground: "We had maybe twenty thousand dollars, barely any money. We had enough to get short ends, and we cashed in a lot of favors. Shari Springer Berman was still a student at the time, so we used her film school camera. We showed up for the last two weeks at the restaurant, never having seen it before, and moved in. From there we just started figuring out who the characters were and what the conflict was. We really had a lot of fun making it. We cut a trailer in our apartment, rented a Steenbeck and then raised money to finish the film from the trailer we cut. Diandra Luker, Michael Douglas' wife at the time, had a real affection for Chasen's. She saw the trailer and wanted to help us get the rest of the money. She put together some financiers, eventually it got release theatrically, and HBO bought it for Cinemax. It's had quite a life, you know."
In an interview with Digitally Obsessed, Shari Springer Berman spoke about how the origin of the film came from staying at Raymond Bilbool's bed and breakfast, as Raymond also worked for Chasen's: "I was still a film student, we had no money, so we were looking for the most reasonably priced place to stay. So Robert Pulcini found it online, it seemed like it was in a good neighborhood, and we had to go out, we were trying to sell a screenplay, and we had our first agent, and it was this big trip to take Hollywood by storm. And of course during the day we tried to sell the script, which we didn't sell, but at night, we'd come home and hear these incredible stories about Chasen's, and the waiters who had been there for forty, fifty years, and how one waiter was on oxygen, and he was dragging the oxygen tanks, getting in everybody's way, still trying to work, and how they were closing, and it just seemed really obvious to us that this should be made into a movie."