San Antonio native Fidel Ruiz-Healy’s new TV pilot *Stars Diner* takes viewers into a Fresno, California, greasy spoon shortly before a volcano erupts. Credit: American Standard Film Co.

For filmmaker and San Antonio native Fidel Ruiz-Healy and his longtime co-writer and director Tyler Walker, the idea for their latest short project started during a visit to what Ruiz-Healy describes as a “lousy diner” in Austin.

At the diner, Ruiz-Healy, Walker, co-writer and producer Mary Neely and another pal ordered a meal that took entirely too long to get. When they got their drinks after an hour, one of them thought it would be funny to order a steak.

“It took two hours to get the steak,” Ruiz-Healy told the Current during a recent interview. “When we tried to pay, it took forever. It felt like we were being held hostage.”

After they managed to escape, the friends started sending each other messages and joking around in a group chat about their bizarre diner experience. The messages included a series of imaginary situations that might have been a reason their trip to the restaurant felt like they’d fallen into a time warp.

“We had a brainstorming session, and the story kept evolving,” Ruiz-Healy said. “It was like, ‘The zombie apocalypse is happening outside, and we still haven’t gotten our food!’”

Ruiz-Healy, Walker and Neely decided to turn their ideas into the script for Stars Diner. The TV pilot takes viewers into a small diner in Fresno, California, where a volcano is about to erupt and ruin everyone’s day.

During our interview, Ruiz-Healy, a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and currently a Los Angeles resident, talked about the reason he thought his real-life diner experience was funny and what he’d ultimately like to see happen to his idea for a TV series.

Stars Diner will screen Sunday, March 9, at 6 p.m. in Austin’s SXSW Independent TV Pilot Program at Rollins Theatre at The Long Center. It also will screen at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin on Thursday, March 13, at 6:15 p.m.

You know, most people who experience bad service at a restaurant don’t find humor in it.

(Laughs.) I mean, we’re all very reasonable, patient people, so we just laughed about it. There were other people in the diner yelling, “This is ridiculous!” We were like, “OK, that person is not having a good time.” But we were having a great time. It was like 3 a.m. We were not in a rush to get anywhere.

I’m assuming there are no active volcanoes in Fresno, right?

No volcanoes, which is why we thought it would be funny for it to take place there.

Did you have any old TV shows in mind when making Stars Diner?

I know one that we kept going back to was Cheers. It’s like the happiest place on earth where you always make friends. Of course, [Stars Diner] is an absurdist version of Cheers that has a spooky sci-fi and disaster twist. The reason it became a TV show and not a short film is because we came up with so many ideas for what could happen in this diner. We were like, “It should be a show where something ridiculous happens in every episode!” Also, there’s no recollection of the last thing that happened because it always gets resolved miraculously.

So, if Stars Diner is picked up by a network and given a 10-episode first season, do you already have 10 disasters in mind?

Oh, yeah. We put together like 30 ideas. There’s a zombie episode. There’s an episode where the diner gets lost at sea and they come back as ghost pirates. There’s one where the busboy gets turned into a killer robot. There’s one where they become Power Rangers adjacent.

I’d love to see something like Comedy Central give it a shot.

Yeah, I hope we can make more episodes of this silly idea. It was just a lot of fun to make. The industry’s been slow, so it was a very low stakes thing that we threw together. We tried to spend as little money as possible. I made a volcano for the first time because I never did that in science class.

Yes, you got to experiment with some animation, which turned out great!

Tyler and I had done some stuff with [animation], but we had never gone this far with it. I think we were just trying to see how stylized we could get. In the [episode], you see that Fresno doesn’t really exist. It’s only portrayed in this miniature town that I built in my kitchen. It was like, “Oh, what if the volcano explosion is cotton balls!?” It’s purposely very silly.

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San Antonio native Fidel Ruiz-Healy screening TV pilot Stars Diner at SXSW

Sanford Nowlin

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