Behind the Scenes

Written and directed by Ray Revello, When the Levee Breaks was the third and final entry in the great unfinished faux-western cycle, starring Donald Flores, Anthony Silva, and Ray Revello in a revenge story that never made it to the finish line.

Donald brings a surprising amount of gravity to the surviving footage. Anthony Silva brings something else. Asked to play menace with a straight face, Silva delivers every line with the unmistakable rhythm of an early-2000s California dude, stretching every dramatic beat until the performance becomes its own strange form of comedy. His immortal cry of “I’m dying, goddamnit!” would eventually become one of the most quoted lines from the early archive, although at the time Daryl and Ray were considerably less proud of it.

The production did little to help. One major scene was filmed inside a crowded Burger King without microphones, leaving Donald’s dialogue nearly buried beneath the restaurant noise while a giant Burger King logo dominates the frame. Outside the window, Daryl and Ray casually stroll past in the background, apparently unable to resist putting themselves into their own unfinished western.

Elsewhere, the film lurches between genuine visual ambition and adolescent nonsense. Cemetery confrontations play like bargain-bin Leone. Door-to-door hunting montages stretch across South San Francisco. A wanted poster hand-drawn by Daryl depicts a classmate nicknamed Dom Banks for his vague resemblance to an off-brand Tom Hanks. Daryl even briefly reprises his bloodied character from The Death Epic, now wearing a towel over his head in place of anything resembling proper continuity. A cameo from one unfinished western inside another unfinished western. Walker, the Della family Great Dane and future official Dollars & Donuts mascot, also makes one of his early appearances.

The door-to-door sequence features Joshua Nair, one of Daryl’s oldest friends and somebody who generally preferred staying far away from the camera. Josh’s larger contribution to the early years came through his camcorder, the only camera in the group for a time with a FireWire port. Daryl borrowed it so often that it became known simply as the Joshcam, until Josh eventually solved the problem by giving it to him. Years later, Josh would make one of his only other appearances in Bud the Hobo & Lou the Bear, once again in the middle of a door-to-door montage.

For years, When the Levee Breaks stayed buried. Daryl and Ray were embarrassed by it, especially Silva’s performance, and the footage became one of those early projects nobody seemed particularly interested in revisiting. That changed when Sasha Boggs worked her way through the Dollars & Donuts archive and found the movie absolutely hilarious. Her reaction helped change the film’s reputation inside the company. What had once been regarded as a failed western gradually became something much more useful: a source of old jokes, strange performances, forgotten characters, and proof that even the embarrassing material could find another life. “I’m dying, goddamnit!” eventually returned in the 2025 premiere opener 22 Short Years Ago, pulled back out of the vault and given the reception it probably deserved all along.

Some unfinished material still survives outside the assembled cut. Daryl has not gone through it in years, but among the tapes is an unedited confrontation between Donald and Ray on the small footbridge over the Colma Creek drainage channel near Ray’s apartment. There is also a stretch of deliberately “cool” promotional footage of the pair stalking through the concrete channel below, shot for a trailer or teaser that never came together. Even in an unfinished movie, they were already thinking about the trailer.