Behind the Scenes

A miniature duel staged with operatic seriousness, Staring Contest became the unofficial test run for the partnership that would help define the next era of Dollars & Donuts Productions.

Before committing to the much larger undertaking of Dead Right, Daryl Della and Michael Martin decided to make something small first. Michael would write and produce. Daryl would direct and edit. The stakes were deliberately low enough that the two could find out what happened when their creative instincts were placed inside the same movie.

In that sense, the film did exactly what it was supposed to do.

For Daryl, however, the experiment began with an unfamiliar exercise: making something he would not necessarily have chosen to make himself.

Collaboration had always been part of Dollars & Donuts, but authorship was another matter. By 2011, Daryl had spent years developing strong opinions about tone, structure, comedy, and what deserved a place in the filmography. He could happily take ideas from friends, build roles around collaborators, or allow a performer to reshape a scene, but surrendering the fundamental premise of a film was different.

Michael’s idea was built around a staring contest scored with the grandiosity of “O Fortuna.” To Michael, it was a simple visual joke and an ideal project for testing whether the partnership worked. To Daryl, the device felt familiar, the kind of knowingly overdramatic comedy he had already spent years trying to move beyond. He agreed to make it anyway.

Part of the point was to see whether he could. If he was going to work seriously with another writer and producer, then not every project could begin with his own idea or conform perfectly to his instincts. So he put his reservations aside and committed himself to executing Michael’s concept as cleanly as possible.

The short also introduced Gino Vigil to Dollars & Donuts Productions.

His appearance here would prove far more consequential than the film itself. Gino became a recurring performer and collaborator throughout the years that followed, making Staring Contest the quiet beginning of another long-running creative relationship.

For a movie built around one rule, the finished film contains one particularly appropriate mistake. A sharp-eyed Youtube viewer later noticed that Michael actually blinks during the contest. The moment had slipped completely through the edit and remained in the released film.

There was no reason to fix it afterward. If anything, the mistake made the short more representative of what it was: a tiny experiment made quickly by people still learning how they worked together.

In retrospect, Staring Contest is significant less for what happens on screen than for what was beginning around it.

Michael saw the film as proof that the collaboration could work. Daryl came away with a more complicated lesson. Working with another voice could produce opportunities, people, and ideas he would never have reached alone. It also meant allowing choices into Dollars & Donuts that did not always feel instinctively like his own. Both truths would matter.

The partnership that followed would push the company forward dramatically. It would produce larger films, new collaborators, and some of the most ambitious work Dollars & Donuts had attempted. But the negotiation visible in miniature here, when to trust another person’s instinct and when to defend your own, would never entirely disappear.

The new era therefore began not with a grand statement, but with two men staring at each other.

Then came Dead Right.