Derrick Comedy's DC Pierson Talks Mystery Team

Encyclopedia Brown never suffers crippling crises of confidence. At the start of each book, it takes all of 10 minutes at the dinner table for Donald J. Sobol's fictional whiz-kid to solve his police detective father's cases before wrapping up two more over the next 100 pages. This has gone on for an apparently puberty-less four decades. But in Derrick Comedy's first feature-length film, Mystery Team, which just this month secured national distribution rights with Roadside Attractions, the titular group of small-town problem solvers has turned 18, and everybody finds their know-it-all crap completely insufferable. So they decide to prove their relevance by taking on a double murder.

"All we need is one big case, so people start respecting us again," the Master of Disguise (Donald Glover, 30 Rock) says in the trailer as he pours The Boy Genius (DC Pierson) and The Strongest Kid in Town (Dominic Dierkes) fresh glasses of milk at the kitchen table. "Like when we were seven."

But for the Derrick fivesome itself (which also includes Mystery Team costar Meggie McFadden and director Dan Eckman), time has been kind. After meeting and performing together at NYU and Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, the group has been posting sketch comedy videos ("B-Boy Stance," "Bro Rape," "Spelling Bee," "Memory Loss," "Post Apocalyptic Dane Cook") on YouTube and CollegeHumor since 2005, garnering the attention of Rolling Stone and other notable attention-givers. In the year since Mystery Team wrapped, it premiered to approving reviews at Sundance before recently finalizing the partnership with Roadside.

"Every step of the process has been pretty organic," Pierson told Paste, after a shoot in New Hampshire for the promos photos they couldn't afford during the actual filming. "Just kind of seeing those first couple of [YouTube] videos get millions of views, and knowing each one represented a person who had seen it. We tried to do as good a job as possible of making people aware that they weren't spontaneously generated by the internet. Of building that brand."

Derrick pitched a couple fruitless projects together—including a screenplay and a series for a major network—before taking off with Glover's long-held desire to base a project on the Encyclopedia Brown fandom of his childhood. All were "1,000 percent excited" about the plot, which meshes the world of innocent pee-wee sleuthery (Pierson: "It's, 'Here comes the cops, you've got to hide the stash,' except it's a stash of ill-gotten candy.") with bullet-dodging and confrontations with coke dealers. "Every step of the way, it never stops being work," Pierson said. "None of us had seen a dime up until now. The excitement is the only thing pushing you forward."

Pierson said the group is planning a college-town screening tour for the fall to promote Mystery Team ahead of wider distribution. "Performing live has been really critical," he said, adding that the stops would involve a live show component as well as new videos. "Getting that reaction (is important), sort of testing things out and making sure they're really tight. It's okay to sort of be an Internet video-only outfit. But i know for us the live thing has always been critical."

Related links:
MysteryTeam-Movie.com
DerrickComedy.com
DCPierson.com

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