Something Else emerged as a creative rebound for Daryl Della after the unsettling collapse of Number Nine had frustrated him enough that he simply wanted to go make ‘something else.’ The placeholder became the title.

Desperate to shoot something, anything, and with the images of the wind farms outside Tracy rattling around in his head, he picked up Lorenzo Ocon in South San Francisco and the two drove more than an hour east with no script and only a vague idea that the landscape might give them one. Once they arrived, they discovered that most of the promising areas were blocked by barbed-wire fences or otherwise impossible to use safely. They drove around for a while, grabbed B-roll of the windmills, and eventually headed back toward the Bay Area.

Rather than call the day a loss, they returned to an old Dollars & Donuts standby, San Bruno Mountain. There, Daryl played an unnamed government agent pursuing Lorenzo, who was cast simply as some kind of escaped experiment. Daryl shot Lorenzo down, and later composited the Tracy windmills into the background. That tiny scene became the seed for the entire movie.

Daryl wrote a screenplay around the footage he and Lorenzo had already shot, filling it with government conspiracies, mutations, death rays, mad science, and the sort of 1950s B-movie ideas that could justify almost anything they felt like attempting. It wasn’t the most elegant script Dollars & Donuts had produced, but elegance was beside the point. They had something they could actually make.

The screenplay also became another attempt to expand the loose collection of recurring characters already forming around the company. Ninja Killface, Frank Barnett, Jack Knife, and Bruce Cummings had all begun developing lives beyond their original appearances. Daryl wanted another character who might do the same. For that, he went digging through Ray Revello’s old scripts.

Bill Bandages had originally appeared in Ray’s early western screenplay The Death Epic, where he was little more than a villainous member of a gang called the Whistlin’ Dixies. The original Bill tortured people with a baseball bat, wore bandages, and was disposed of without much ceremony. Daryl kept the name and the bandages and rebuilt almost everything else.

The new Bill became Bill Bixler, a brilliant scientist whose experiments had physically transformed him into something more dangerous. The surname was a deliberate nod to Bill Bixby, star of television’s The Incredible Hulk, another mild-mannered man carrying something monstrous beneath the surface.

Daryl called Ray before using the character. Ray agreed and immediately suggested bringing in another creation of his, Sam Haggis. Haggis came from Troubleshot, a spy screenplay Ray had recently completed while deep in a Sean Connery-era James Bond phase. The plan had been to make Troubleshot next, with Alan Wigley already selected to play Haggis, an international hunter of gunrunners. That movie unfortunately never happened. Alan still got to play the character in Something Else, turning what was meant as a small crossover appearance into the only surviving screen performance of Sam Haggis to date.

Lorenzo’s anonymous escapee was expanded into Subject L-Zero, while James Hay and Jared Coons joined as Agents Carson and Borland. Their names came from two wildly incompatible places. Carson was named after Bill Carson, the largely off-screen figure whose identity becomes crucial in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Borland was named after Al Borland, Tim Taylor’s long-suffering sidekick on Home Improvement. That was about the level of tonal consistency the movie was operating on.

Getting Jared Coons into the film was an accomplishment in itself. He was not particularly interested in acting, but Daryl managed on two separate occasions to convince him to put on a suit and come menace Chris Cairo. The second occasion produced one of the film’s strongest sequences.

Chris was working at Pasta Pomodoro at the time, where Marcus Martin was the manager and Christy Moxley was also on staff. Both names would surface again much later in Dollars & Donuts history. Daryl called Jared at the last minute and convinced him to come down for a fight scene in the restaurant’s basement kitchen. Jared had already been drinking, which turned out to be useful. The basement ceiling made Jared’s height and size even more imposing against Chris, and Jared had no particular concern about making the punches look gentle. Chris was told he could hit him for real. Jared returned the favor. The fight became unusually physical, with both men taking genuine hits and Jared even chipping a tooth during the process.

The result remains one of the more convincing early Dollars & Donuts fight scenes, partly because nobody involved seems to have been especially committed to pretending.

Jared’s participation stopped there. When Daryl later tried to arrange a proper poster shoot, Jared stopped answering requests. Daryl eventually took a photograph of him from an unrelated night out, darkened his glasses into sunglasses, distorted his smile into something more threatening, and pasted his head onto a photograph of Daryl wearing a suit. The body was widened and stretched until it looked vaguely like Jared. At the premiere, Jared immediately recognized what had happened and responded with his enormous laugh: “HA HA HA! I like the Photoshop because I was too lazy to take actual photos.”

The film’s production wandered all over the Bay Area. One major chase was staged around the pond outside Kincaid’s, where Kirsten Olsen-Davis and James Hay both worked. The little bridge and broken concrete along the shoreline provided exactly the kind of environment Daryl wanted for Bill and L-Zero’s confrontation. The shoot also produced one of the stranger family misunderstandings in the archive. Daryl’s parents happened to be walking around the pond that day. From a distance, his mother spotted Daryl alongside Chris Cairo in full Bill Bandages makeup and Lorenzo transformed into L-Zero. Her interpretation was: “That’s Daryl, but what’s he doing with that Arab woman?”

The sequence was considerably less glamorous to make than it looks. Lorenzo spent long stretches in makeup, ran repeatedly through rough terrain, scraped his knees, jumped from cars, and took a hard enough fall to suffer a concussion. Later in the film, another abrupt stop sent him flying hard enough that filming had to pause while he iced his head. The filmmakers were learning how far they could push these little action scenes. Sometimes the answer was slightly too far.

The climax required Agent Carson to escape aboard a private jet, which created the minor problem that Dollars & Donuts did not own one. The solution was the Hiller Aviation Museum. Daryl and James bought admission tickets, wandered through the museum like ordinary visitors, and quietly filmed around the aircraft displays, including the museum’s 747, until they had enough material to suggest Carson reaching his getaway plane. Additional shots of James entering an airport were filmed after Daryl and James took BART to SFO. The actual destruction of the jet was supplied by stock-effects company Detonation Films. Later, Hank Della pointed to that sequence as the moment he realized something about his son’s filmmaking. If the script said there was a jet, somehow Daryl would find a jet.

The film also became the first Dollars & Donuts production to carry a formal dedication. Before production was finished, Bob Garrett and Daryl’s Auntie Linda both died in December 2009. Their photographs were placed in Bill Bixler’s hallway, quietly folding them into the film itself, before both were honored in the dedication at the end.

Then, after the credits, the movie suddenly looks forward. Daryl secretly filmed one additional scene featuring Bruce Cummings: Librarian Extraordinaire arriving to recruit Bill Bandages for another adventure. The idea was the long-discussed Dollars & Donuts Apocalypse, an absurd crossover epic in which Bruce would assemble characters from across the company’s movies. Ninja Killface. Jack Knife. Bill Bandages. Frank Barnett. Sam Haggis. Their mission would be to descend into Hell, bring Mr. Ray Revolver back from the dead, and prepare for an approaching apocalypse. Daryl deliberately kept the scene secret from Ray because he knew Ray would be the person most excited to discover it.

They never made the big crossover film. Not then, anyway. More than fifteen years later, pieces of that same idea would find their way back into Frank Barnett vs. Ninja Killface, where the old dream of pulling characters from across Dollars & Donuts history into one larger story finally began taking shape.

Something Else premiered at the Comet Club in San Francisco. It was a good night, and in some ways the last of its kind. The film gathered together the old characters, old locations, old collaborators, and the increasingly elaborate mythology Daryl and Ray had spent years building. It felt like an attempt to prove that the Dollars & Donuts universe could keep expanding indefinitely.

Instead, the company was about to change direction. Soon afterward, Daryl would begin working closely with Michael Martin, pushing Dollars & Donuts toward a different kind of filmmaking and largely leaving this sprawling collection of homemade heroes, monsters, detectives, librarians, and assassins behind for more than a decade. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Hank Della had seen the exploding airplane and realized what his son could pull off. He started writing a script.