Behind the Scenes
An early Dollars & Donuts experiment in pure chaos, Ray Vs. Donald was less about storytelling than friends figuring out how to make movies. The entire short is essentially one extended fight scene, beginning inside Daryl’s bedroom at 239 Holly Ave before spilling onto the street, through a nearby alley, and eventually all the way to El Camino High School.
Ray Revello and Donald Flores spend most of the running time attacking, chasing, and trying to outdo each other while Daryl keeps finding new places to point the camera. The physical comedy owes plenty to Bugs Bunny and The Three Stooges, with violence treated less as consequence than as an excuse for the next gag.
The entire movie was basically an excuse to see how long they could keep the fight going.
Just as importantly, the film became an early experiment in editing. Daryl was beginning to discover how separate pieces of footage could be assembled into a continuous journey, even when the geography did not actually make sense. At one point, Ray and Donald travel down an alley only to emerge moving from a completely different direction, casually destroying the physical relationship between the locations.
Mistakes like that proved useful. Cutting the sequence together taught the group that screen direction, entrances, exits, and geography mattered, and that an audience could feel when those relationships were wrong even if the action itself remained understandable. The alley would later reappear in Dead Right and Oldtimers, by which point the crew had a considerably better idea of how to photograph it.
They were learning how movies fit together by first discovering all the ways they could come apart.
It is undeniably rough now, but that roughness is largely the point. Ray Vs. Donald preserves the anything-goes energy of the earliest Dollars & Donuts years, when a bedroom, a sidewalk, an alley, and a high school could become an entire action movie simply because three friends had a camcorder and nowhere better to be.