Rich and Lozo return to El Camino High for the Rich & Lozo Olympics, settling their rivalry through push-ups, pull-ups, a sprint, arm wrestling, and a final Yo Mama joke battle that gets much more personal than planned.
Behind the Scenes
Compared with the first two films, Rich & Lozo 3 finally had something resembling a format. Keep score, move from event to event, and see who comes out on top. That tiny bit of structure turned out to be just enough to give their arguments somewhere to go.
It also found Rich visibly drunk for much of the afternoon, which did very little to improve his patience or sportsmanship.
Rich & Lozo 3 was the first Dollars & Donuts film shot in HD, using the Sony HDV Handycam HDR-HC3. After years of standard-definition camcorders, the jump gave the footage a noticeably cleaner, sharper look and marked the beginning of a new technical phase for the company.
The subject matter, naturally, remained Rich and Lozo arguing with each other at El Camino High.
Around the same time, Daryl had also made one of his first major camera purchases, a Canon still camera from the period just before DSLR video became commonplace. That gave the production another quiet first: Rich & Lozo 3 was the first Dollars & Donuts shoot to have deliberate set photography.
Brandon J. Snyder photographed the production with the specific idea that the images might eventually be used for a poster. That poster was never completed, but the photographs survived as the first real attempt to document a Dollars & Donuts production with promotional stills in mind.
One of the photographs became Daryl’s favorite image of Rich and Lozo, enough that he had a print made and signed by both of them. He framed it.
He never hung it.
Lorenzo, meanwhile, had a signed poster copy hanging for years, which raises the possibility that a finished Rich & Lozo 3 poster may actually exist somewhere in the archive after all.
He framed it. He never hung it.
The footage got an unexpected second life when Ray Revello needed material for an editing assignment at Academy of Art and hadn’t had time to shoot anything himself. He borrowed the raw Rich & Lozo 3 footage and cut together his own version for class.
It didn’t play nearly as well there. What Dollars & Donuts found funny, the college crowd found exploitative, leaving Ray embarrassed by the whole experience. He still passed the assignment, and afterward everyone involved was able to laugh about the fact that the same footage could get two very different reactions depending on the room.
The film also became the most-watched entry in the Rich & Lozo series. Uploaded to YouTube in 2008, right around the Beijing Olympics, the title and homemade “Olympics” premise caught a surprising amount of traffic from people who almost certainly had no idea what they were clicking on.