Behind the Scenes

The first of the great unfinished early sagas, The Death Epic was Dollars & Donuts’ first real swing at something larger than a sketch, a joke, or a camcorder goof. This was the beginning of the boys thinking in terms of movies.

Inspired by the spaghetti westerns they had been obsessing over, the production ultimately produced only a single completed scene: a cemetery showdown between Daryl and Ray in Colma, California, a location the group would return to again and again in the years that followed.

In one of Daryl’s earliest on-camera appearances, he faces Ray with blood running down his face and Ray’s Hawaiian shirt draped over his shoulders, a wardrobe choice that would eventually become its own long-running inside joke. There was no crew. Daryl and Ray shot the scene by themselves, trading places behind and in front of the camera and using a tripod whenever both needed to appear in the same shot. It was simple, awkward, and much more ambitious than most of what they had attempted up to that point.

The soundtrack helped sell the illusion. One morning before school, Ray stopped by the Della house while Daryl was editing. Daryl pulled out one of his father’s CDs and laid the theme from High Plains Drifter over the cemetery duel. Ray immediately started jumping around the room and pumping his fist, convinced they had made something enormous. It sure felt that way.

Those years were also when Daryl and Ray began seriously trading influences. Ray introduced Daryl to Goodfellas, Casino, and the broader Scorsese gangster world that Daryl had mostly known through reputation. Daryl, in turn, pushed Ray toward The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the Leone-Eastwood westerns. DVDs moved back and forth between them constantly, and the influence of those discoveries is easy to see in The Death Epic.

Even unfinished, the scene stuck with them. When the boys showed it in their high school classes, it got a stronger response than expected, one of the first hints that these homemade experiments could occasionally feel like something more substantial.

Only later did they realize that the duel had been staged at the gravesite of William Randolph Hearst, the media titan whose life helped inspire Citizen Kane. Whether a little movie magic rubbed off that day, or whether they accidentally cursed themselves to keep making films forever, remains one of the stranger unanswered questions in Dollars & Donuts history.