The third and final entry in the great unfinished western cycle, When the Levee Breaks stands as perhaps the purest artifact of late high-school Dollars & Donuts chaos.

Written and directed by Ray Revello under the banner of Machine Gun Funk Productions, the film stars Donald Flores as a hunted outlaw drifting through cemeteries, fast food joints, and suburban doorsteps in a revenge tale that never quite made it to the finish line.

If Donald brought genuine screen presence, Anthony Silva brought something else entirely.

Cast in a role demanding menace and gravitas, Silva instead delivers every line with the unmistakable cadence of an early-2000s California dude, each vowel stretched to absurd lengths, every dramatic beat sounding as if it had frosted tips. The result is one of the most gloriously miscast performances in early Dollars & Donuts history, so catastrophically wrong that it loops all the way back around to brilliance. One line in particular would later become impossible to forget: “I’m dying, goddamnit!” At the time, however, it was less cherished than quietly buried.

For years, both Daryl and Ray were deeply embarrassed by the film, particularly Silva’s performance and the broader chaos surrounding the production. Much of this era was hidden away, half-remembered and seldom revisited, treated more as youthful misfires than mythology.

The production itself only deepened that feeling. One of the film’s most infamous scenes was shot inside a crowded Burger King with no microphones, rendering Donald’s dialogue nearly inaudible beneath the ambient roar of the restaurant. The frame is dominated by a giant Burger King logo, while Daryl and Ray can be seen casually strolling past the window outside, unable to resist inserting themselves into the shot.

Elsewhere, the film veers between genuine visual ambition and total adolescent nonsense: cemetery showdowns in the Leone mode, door-to-door hunt montages, and a wanted poster hand-drawn by Daryl depicting a classmate the crew had nicknamed Dom Banks, so named for his uncanny resemblance to an off-brand, slightly warped Tom Hanks. The nickname was pure schoolyard absurdity, the sort of stupid joke that instantly became canon within the group.

Daryl also briefly reprises his blood-soaked character from The Death Epic, now wearing a towel over his head in lieu of proper gore continuity. A cameo in an unfinished film by a character from another unfinished film. The great unfinished cinematic universe. Meanwhile, Walker, the family Great Dane and future unofficial mascot of Dollars & Donuts, makes one of his earliest on-screen appearances.

The door-to-door montage also features one of the rare on-screen appearances of Joshua Nair, a childhood friend of Daryl and the wider crew who didn’t like to be on camera. His real contribution to the early years was that, for a stretch of time, Josh’s camcorder was the only one in the group with a FireWire port, making it indispensable for capturing and ingesting footage. Daryl borrowed it so frequently that it became affectionately known as the Joshcam, a piece of equipment that quietly powered much of the era’s filmmaking until Josh, exhausted by the endless handoff, eventually just gave it to him outright.

In a strange bit of Dollars & Donuts symmetry, Josh would make one of his only other notable appearances years later in Bud the Hobo & Lou the Bear (2009), once again in the middle of a door-to-door montage. Some motifs, it seems, refuse to die.

For years When the Levee Breaks remained something of a skeleton in the closet. That changed when Sasha Boggs officially entered the producing partnership. Part of her initiation into the full Dollars & Donuts history was a complete marathon of the company’s work: the good, the bad, and the utterly ridiculous. Somewhere in that process, When the Levee Breaks was finally exhumed.

Rather than recoil, Sasha loved it. Her delight at just how magnificently bad parts of it were, especially Silva’s performance, helped transform old embarrassment into something else entirely: what had once been hidden became an inside joke with new life.

The line “I’m dying, goddamnit!” was eventually revived as part of the 2025 premiere opener 22 Short Years Ago, a musical sprint through the entire Dollars & Donuts saga. In that sense, When the Levee Breaks became something greater than an unfinished film. It became proof that nothing in the Dollars & Donuts universe ever truly stays buried.

Even now, fragments of the film still linger in the vault. Somewhere, Daryl believes there still exists unedited footage of Donald and Ray performing an early dialogue scene on the small footbridge across the street from Ray’s house, material that was shot but never incorporated into any cut of the film. Another surviving fragment features the two of them stalking through the local aqueduct in full outlaw mode, photographed with a seriousness that far exceeds the actual production around it. The footage was originally intended for a trailer or promotional teaser of some kind, another ambitious flourish from an era when the trailers for unfinished films often came closer to completion than the films themselves.