EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Yehudi Mercado, Creator of BUFFALO SPEEDWAY

Yeah it's called Buffalo Speedway, it's a comedy about pizza delivery drivers. And the hook is, that it takes place on the busiest pizza day ever. So, it's all in one day, June 17th 1994.

On that day the World Cup was being hosted by America, for the first time. And then it was the NBA finals, Rockets versus the Knicks. And then that night O.J. Simpson went on the run. So slowly throughout the day it got busier and busier. Everyone stayed at home and watched TV and ordered pizza.

I actually used to a pizza delivery driver. I drove for Pizza Hut that day. And the good thing was that the streets were clear, everyone was staying at home. I always had that gem in the back on my head.

No, actually it started as a screenplay. So, I wrote it as a featured length screenplay. I entered it into a few contests, and actually got second place in the Final Draft's Big Break Contest. So, it was optioned but nothing ever happened. When I got the option back I thought 'Hey I can draw, why not turn it into a graphic novel.' It was actually split up into acts, act 1, act 2, act 3, over three volumes of a graphic novel.

No it's just one standalone story. Yeah I have other ideas that I'm working on.

One called Monster Job Hunter, so that one I actually made a short film about. You can go to But the featured length version is like Ghostbusters meets Office Space. So, it's like, government workers assigned to go hunt monsters, and the sort of mundane things they have to through.

Yeah I'd love to, that's part of the reason I completed the comic. Hopefully I could hand it to somebody and they could see the full vision.

Yeah, and the star, there is one person that I would love to have is Donald Glover from NBC's Community. He would be the perfect star for this movie.

Exactly! Yeah! That was such a crazy phenomenon ... he should've been Spider-Man, that would've been amazing.

The main character Figgs. The main mythos is that if you last eight years as a pizza boy, you're gonna die a pizza boy. Cause it's a tough job, you're on the road, you get robbed ... it's a hard life. He is right on the cusp of reaching his eight year mark, and he has to decide is he gonna quit. And he secretly wants to become a police officer, but cops and pizza boys are mortally enemies. So, how does he tell his best friend that he wants to become a cop.

It's sort of a metaphor for your twenties. The hook is that pizza boys drive hundreds of miles each day, but they go nowhere. You wind up in the exact same spot. He is struggling in his 20's trying to figure out what he'll be. He doesn't feel like a hero, and he wants to feel heroic, he wants to be a cop. But then slowly he finds honor in being a pizza boy.

Well I've thought about it. Since this takes place in 94 and the further we get away from that the harder it'll be to make a low budget movie out of it. So I was thinking, 'Would the sequel be his son and his modern day struggles?' so I've been thinking of that lately.