Today’s script feels like the movie Tarantino was writing as his final film before abandoning it. That script was called “The Critic,” about a movie critic. I can imagine today’s antagonist being exactly who Tarantino envisioned for his own critic.
Genre: Dark Comedy/Thriller
Logline: A long-suffering sous chef seeks revenge after a chauvinistic food critic’s zero-star review destroys her debut restaurant – and everything is on the menu.
About: Today’s review has more storylines than the Bible. The script comes from amateur screenwriter Michael Wightman. It was originally entered in the Mega Showdown. It did not make the finals. So I recently put it up with four more scripts in the Second Wave Showdown, which gave a chance to screenplays that didn’t make the Mega Showdown cut. What I didn’t know until today is that Michael Wightman is the same writer who wrote “The Best and the Brightest,” another script that didn’t make the finals of a contest but would win some readers over and eventually go on to get sent all over Hollywood. Here’s that logline if you forgot it: “After the president of the United States is poisoned aboard Air Force One, a no-nonsense Secret Service agent reluctantly teams up with a hotshot White House staffer to investigate a flight of high-maintenance VIP suspects and solve the murder before the plane lands.” So now Michael is back writing the opposite of high concept. Let’s find out what that looks like.
Writer: Michael Wightman
Details: 107 pages
In a perfect world, I would only review screenplays from the writers of this site. The reason I don’t do that is because I need at least SOME positive reviews. And whenever I read an amateur script for the site, 95% of the time, it isn’t worth the read.
So, if you want more homegrown scripts reviewed, you gotta bring the heat. You have to be able to play with the big boys, write on par with the professionals. I liked today’s idea. I tend to always like dark scripts about chefs, mainly because that job is one of the most pressure-intensive in the world. We all saw what that looked like in the first two seasons of The Bear.
I’m hoping that this latest amateur script is good because it will allow me to review more amateur scripts on the site.
Chef Kat Winnick is at the culmination of years of hard work. She’s opened her own restaurant. And the first night is going well until 55-year-old New York Times food critic Jonathan Croxton shows up in disguise. He’ll be grading the food on the restaurant’s very first night.
It does not go well. Jonathan’s voice-over of his review plays over shots of the first night’s struggle. And as the review continues, we realize he’s eviscerating the place. After the scene ends, we cut to months later and the restaurant went out of business due to that review. Kat is devastated.
Kat must grovel to get a sous chef job at another restaurant and, by coincidence, Jonathan shows up there too. He doesn’t like the way Kat cooked his steak and so he gets her fired from that job as well. This dude is relentless!
But Jonathan’s life isn’t going perfectly either. The New York Times tells him that he’s close to being a fossil in this business, which doesn’t appreciate written reviews anymore. All food reviewing is online now, a place that Jonathan despises. They tell him he needs to step down.
Jonathan drifts through a series of encounters with the world – a book tour, a mentorship, and eventually partnering with a wealthy backer to open a restaurant.
He’s later poisoned by raw carrots at a random restaurant and presumes it was Kat. He gets the sense that he’s being watched wherever he goes in the city. He comes home to his apartment one night to find his precious bird has been let out of its cage with the apartment window open. And he even comes home another night to find that dinner has been made for him (his favorite, foie gras).
When Jonathan is finally invited to dinner by an elusive ‘pop-up’ chef he’s been desperate to try, he goes there expecting to experience the best culinary night of his life. And he experiences exactly that. Unfortunately, he experiences so much more.
Starcrossed is a strange script. But it’s strange in so many good ways!
There are a lot of unique choices here that help this script stand out. And I want to go over some of the more prominent ones because if there’s one big lesson to learn from today’s script, it’s to make creative choices that don’t always line up with what you’re “supposed to” do. The reason this is important is because the choices that are “wrong” are also the choices that make your script different from others. There’s still the challenge of getting those “wrong” choices to work. But, if you’re a good writer, and today’s writer is, you can make it work.
The first bold choice was to primarily follow Jonathan, the villain of the story, as opposed to Kat, our “good guy.” 99 out of 100 writers would’ve followed Kat. So, just by doing the opposite, the script already has a different feel to it.
The problem that I’ve discovered in the past when writers do this is that we so dislike the villain that we don’t enjoy being around them. But Michael has crafted a really interesting character in Jonathan. He is this pompous a-hole who believes he walks on water and yet he’s also being phased out of the business. So he’s having to face his career mortality head-on.
For many people, especially men, they tie their identity to their profession, especially if they’re successful. So, being told to step down from that profession forces the character to evaluate who they are (if they aren’t their job). And I loved that contrast here. Jonathan is an arrogant self-important prick who believes he’s god’s gift to food criticism who’s terrified that, in a year, he’ll be jobless.
What that contrast does is it creates a level of unpredictability when Jonathan interacts with others. In one scene he’s gleefully tearing down some new restaurant’s signature dish. And in the very next scene he’s watching from afar as the cool new kids at the paper talk about the hot new mysterious pop-up chef they’ve all experienced, a chef that Jonathan can’t seem to get an invitation to no matter how hard he tries.
I love that. I love when a character is unpredictable. It keeps me on edge. The most boring characters are the ones who you know exactly what they’re going to say every scene before they say it.
Another choice Michael made – this one plot-related – was something nobody else would’ve done because screenwriting books tell you not to. Yet it was incredibly effective. He gave us the big scene in the beginning where Jonathan’s review destroys Kat’s restaurant on its very first day.
But then, months later, Kat has to swallow her pride and become a sous chef at another restaurant. And it just so happens that Jonathan comes there for a meal. Kat cooks him a steak. He gets mad at the way the steak is cooked, complains to the restaurant owner and gets her fired.
Wow.
Imagine ruining someone’s career and then additionally ruining their sad Plan B career as well. Normally, screenwriting teachers would say this second ruining was unnecessary. The first one did the job. You’re just repeating a plot beat, which you’re never supposed to do. But this scene was a pivotal one in pulling me into the story. It turned Jonathan from an annoyance to a verified a-hole. An a-hole that I now wanted to see go down.
Once you can pull a reader in emotionally, such as the case here with me wanting to see Jonathan taken down, you’ve got them. That’s one of the most effective ways to connect with a reader.
Finally, I loved the Máximo mystery chef. Because Michael has a tough job for himself here. There isn’t a big narrative engine driving the story forward. Jonathan doesn’t technically have a goal. We’re essentially waiting for the next big strike by Kat. That’s a story engine in a way, but it’s not usually one that can drive an entire movie. You need more.
Michael recognized this and looked for other ways to complement the story engine. Máximo was the perfect way to do this. He’s this culinary mystery man who carefully curates his guest lists and his moving restaurant never pops up in the same place twice. Jonathan becomes obsessed with making the list. And that becomes a sort of minor story engine.
By story engine I just mean anything that creates page-turning momentum. If the reader wants to keep turning the pages to find out what happens, he’s doing so because the writer has created either one powerful, or a series of medium to small, story engines. So, I thought that was really clever on Michael’s end to recognize that issue and plug something in there to make sure we remained invested.
So, if this script is so good, you’re probably wondering why it didn’t do better in the contest. It didn’t even make the main Mega-Showdown. It only made the more recent Second Wave Showdown.
I know the answer to this.
The first scene was not good.
Michael makes a classic mistake which was to use that first scene (where Jonathan’s review of Kat’s restaurant plays over her opening night) as information.
Don’t get me wrong. The scene does a good job setting everything up. But that’s only half of what you’re supposed to do with your opening scene. The other half – and arguably the more important half – is that you have to entertain us.
If I’m your average reader, I am not entertained by this opening scene. I’m more trying to keep up. Trying to keep tabs on who’s who. I’m trying to figure out what this voice-over is about, which wasn’t clear at first. It feels like work. And that’s just a script killer right there. If your opening scene feels EVEN A TEENSY BIT like work to the reader, they’re probably not going to continue reading. And that’s what I suspect happened with the site members who gave this a shot.
Because for those first ten to fifteen pages, I was already thinking about the negative things I was going to talk about in the review. And then everything started to come together and the script got significantly better as it went on.
This is apropos since we have the big First Scene Showdown for the Blood & Ink participants coming up. So those writers need to keep in mind that you don’t get points for your well-written setup. Setup should be a given. It’s the entertainment part that matters most.
This script was excellent overall, though. It kept getting better. And it has a really fun ending.
Script link: Starcrossed
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I don’t know what kind of process Michael went through where he came to the conclusion to follow Jonathan over Kat. But it was the right decision. And I think what aspiring writers need to take away from that choice is that you should always consider following the best character that you’ve written, even if doing so is nontraditional. Jonathan is simply a more interesting character than Kat. If we had followed Kat in her pursuit to take down Jonathan, this script isn’t nearly as interesting. So if a supporting character that you’ve written is unexpectedly awesome, at least ask the question to yourself, “What does this script look like if I make them the main character?”
