Putting aside for a moment the fact that all this has been done before, let’s talk about that guy who is trying to collect every VHS copy of Speed. Ryan Beitz has been getting a lot of press thanks to a recent Vice story about his mission to get “all of them, duh”—“them” being every extant VHS of Speed. Beitz has even launched a Kickstarter campaign, “The World Speed Project,” to convert a broken-down van he procured from an outpatient clinic in Spokane into a replica of the film’s bus, which he will then use to tour the collection nationally in a series of “gallery showings, county fairs, diy punk basement shows, collector’s conventions, and the like.”
Now word of the campaign has reached Speed screenwriter Graham Yost, who’s currently the showrunner of Justified and an executive producer of The Americans. And because he’s a good sport, Yost says he supports the campaign, even promising to contribute his personal copy of the film. As he told Entertainment Weekly, “Other than world peace and ending hunger, I can think of no greater cause than what this one brave and visionary man has embarked upon.”