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 dusty grandeur of the spaghetti western, the production ultimately yielded only a single completed scene, but what a scene it was.

Set in the endless graveyards of Colma, California, one of the crew’s most frequently revisited early locations, the surviving sequence stages a full-blooded cemetery showdown between Daryl Della and Ray Revello. In one of Daryl’s earliest on-camera appearances, he squares off against Ray with a streak of blood running down his face and, most memorably, Ray’s Hawaiian shirt draped over his shoulders, a wardrobe detail that would later achieve inside-joke immortality within the company.

With no crew and no one else around to help, the entire scene was shot by the two of them alone, trading places behind and in front of the camera and relying on a tripod whenever both needed to be in frame. It was filmmaking in its most primitive and most exhilarating form.

The soundtrack became its own little legend. One morning before school, Ray came by the Della house and Daryl borrowed one of his father’s CDs, dropping the theme from High Plains Drifter over the cemetery duel. The effect was immediate. Ray reportedly began jumping up and down in the room, pumping his fist in the air, convinced they had made something genuinely epic.

In a way, they had.

By this point, the two had already begun shaping one another’s cinematic DNA. Ray had been the one to properly introduce Daryl to Goodfellas, Casino, and the larger Scorsese gangster canon, films Daryl had only absorbed through cultural osmosis until then. In return, Daryl handed Ray the dusty mythmaking of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the broader Leone-Eastwood western cycle. The two spent those years trading DVDs back and forth, each opening a different cinematic cult for the other. That exchange is all over The Death Epic.

For a production that survives as little more than a single duel, the scene left an impression. When screened in high school classes, it played surprisingly well, an early sign that even in this half-finished blood-and-dirt experiment, something cinematic was beginning to take shape.

Only later did the filmmakers realize that their showdown had been staged at the gravesite of William Randolph Hearst, the media titan whose life inspired 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 great unanswered questions of the Dollars & Donuts legend.