Is this successful screenwriter’s first script better than the one he sold for a million dollars??
Genre: Drama
Premise: A former White House chef who’s fallen from grace and is now cooking for a North Carolina prison has his work cut out for him when a death row inmate enters the facility refusing to eat anything before his execution.
About: I was told by someone I trust that this was a great script. It was written by Justin PIasecki, who is best known for his million dollar spec sale of Stakehorse. He actually wrote this script BEFORE Stakehorse.
Writer: Justin Piasecki
Details: 103 pages
The 5 Loglines Showdown is 17 days away (details to enter here). I see that you guys are testing these loglines in the comments section, which I love. It’s taking all of my will power not to look at them. I want each entry to be fresh when it arrives in my Inbox.
Today is a great example of how to write a logline if you don’t have a high concept. If you’re writing a smaller character-driven story or more of a drama, do what Death of an Ortolan does. USE IRONY.
Look at that logline. A White House Chef falls from grace and becomes a prison chef. That is irony at its best and will hook a lot of potential readers. So don’t think you have to have time travel in your logline for me to pick it. Use irony. In fact, if you’re one of the writers coming up with 5 new loglines a day, do a day of just ironic concepts. You’ll learn a lot.
Okay, onto today’s script. Let’s find out if the execution is “cooked” to perfection.
Walter Karrat used to be the prestigious White House head chef. At just 26! The man was a superstar. But after a mysterious instance of pissing off the president, he’s fired. 23 years later and he’s the head chef… at Durham Corrections Department, aka prison.
Walter walks around with a chip on his shoulder. If even a single inmate doesn’t eat their meal, he stalks them and demands they eat it. Strangely, everyone does. Walter is so intimidating, even the prisoners fear him.
Randomly, one day, there’s a catastrophic water leak in another prison in the southern part of the state, which destroys their foundation of the Death Row prison cells. This means that the Death Row inmates will need to be sent to a new prison until they fix it. That prison? Durham Corrections Department.
This change gives Walter’s life new meaning. He encourages these death row inmates to order anything their heart desires for their final meal. And he delivers. It makes him feel like a real chef again.
Except when he meets Jeffrey Reed. Reed is blind (a result of him trying to kill himself) and on death row. He was a hospice nurse who pulled the plug on one of his patients then stole their money. Reed, who’s pickier than every New York food critic combined, refuses to eat any of Walter’s food. And that makes Walter… pissssssssed.
The two trade barbs every day, as we get closer and closer to Reed’s execution date, until it becomes clear that Reed’s resistance is not personal. He’s on a hunger strike to get the governor’s attention. Reed explains to Walter that he didn’t do it. There’s more to his murder that the state suppressed.
At first wary of Reed’s story, Walter gradually begins to believe him. He eventually ventures to the governor’s office to plead Reed’s case, inadvertently placing him back in the political arena he so adamantly resents. When it becomes clear that they’re not going to help him, Walter must rely on the thing he does best for his final hail mary – cook.
In the comments yesterday, one of you brought up this concept of an “easy read,” – that writers have become too focused on writing these easy-to-read screenplays – simple concepts, lots of white space so the eyes shoot down the page, low character count so the story’s easy to follow. It was this commenter’s belief that the best scripts are the opposite of that – scripts that have some complexity behind them.
I was thinking about that while reading Death of an Ortolan. It’s not a fast read. The themes are heavy. The description is occasionally thick. And it takes a while before you know what the story is about. To the credit of that commenter, the script does hit you harder.
This Friday, that Jamie Foxx Cameron Diaz action-comedy (Back in Action) hits Netflix. It is the epitome of an “easy read.” It is, also, not going to hit you like Death of an Ortolan does. So, is our commenter right? Should we be writing more scripts like Death of an Ortolan and less like Back in Action?
From my vast reading experience, here’s how I’d answer that. You must first learn to write an “easy read” before you can write a complex one. The reason being that “easy reads” are designed to make things move quickly. And the quicker things are moving, the less time the reader has to sit around and question them.
Complex reads turn off the big flashy bass-thumping tunes and turn into a slow-dance. The slower your story moves, the better at dramaturgy you must be. It takes more skill to keep readers invested when the plot beats are more spread out. It takes more skill to keep the reader up to speed when you’re cutting between multiple subplots and multiple characters. It takes more skill to build a story around the depth of a character.
So it’s not that you should favor “easy reads” over complex ones. It’s that you must be honest with yourself about if you have the skill level to pull a complex script off. Cause complex scripts written poorly fall apart faster than easy reads do.
The reader who recommended “Ortolan” to me was right. This is a good script. It’s the closest we’re going to get to a modern day Shawshank Redemption. This movie is about friendship at its core. It also has this mystery component of did Reed murder the victim or didn’t he? And it serves both of those plot lines with this fun little side-dish of cooking.
Even though I just went on this entire rant about “easy reads” vs. complex ones, you can still use “easy read” tools in your complex stories. For example, this script has a great ticking time bomb – Reed’s looming execution. This adds our urgency. It adds our stakes. And it also gives us our goal – Walter must convince his political contacts to let Reed go free.
This is basic dramaturgy and it works! It’s a very compelling premise.
My only issue with the script is the same issue I remember having with Justin’s other script, Stakehorse. Which is that the ending got messy. Spoilers follow. Walter is recruited by the newly elected president to cook for her and her team. This pulls him away from the prison during Reed’s execution and uses his big moment to screw over the president.
Meanwhile, Walter’s assistant brings Reed his last meal. I’m not convinced at all that that’s the right way to go. For maximum emotional impact, we should’ve seen Walter make and bring Reed his last meal. We should’ve also shown him watch Reed’s execution. That’s way more important, based on what the movie set up, than screwing over the president.
That seems like a pretty obvious choice to me.
Despite that, I thought the script was really well crafted and it was successful in the main thing it was trying to do – which was make us fall in love with Reed, make us care about Reed and Walter’s friendship, and make us want to keep turning the pages to find out what happened to them.
Here’s the script if you want to check it out yourself! – Death of an Ortolan
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: With endings, we tend to have two options. Deliver the ending that the audience expects, which contains the biggest emotional punch. Or go against the audience’s expectation, deliver a more surprising ending, but lose out on some of that emotional punch. Today’s script went with the latter and I think that’s the wrong way to go. What matters most in an ending is emotional catharsis for the audience. They want to feel a resolution to the conflict that the main characters have endured the whole movie. You should look for an ending that, first and foremost, maximizes that catharsis. Even if it’s a little obvious, the audience will be more satisfied by that than if you use some shocking expectation-subverting choice.
What I learend 2: Don’t take your foot off the gas with your climax. Do the opposite. Slam your foot on the gas as hard as you can and keep it there until the last page.
