In the 1970s, a young Anthony Bourdain found himself in the small coastal town of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It’s where he spent four summers, getting his start in the culinary world as a dishwasher in a local restaurant and graduating to line cook.
Decades later, screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe trekked to Provincetown, retracing the steps of the young man who would become a cultural icon and host of the celebrated shows Parts Unknown and No Reservations.
The duo — pals from boarding school and later Harvard — wanted to write a movie about Bourdain, but didn’t want a cradle to grave story. They had a hunch a few chapters he wrote in his memoir Kitchen Confidential about his summers in Provincetown could be the key.
“The movie started kind of coming together in our minds,” says Howe hours spent in Bourdain’s favorite dive bar Old Colony Tap and other haunts.
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That movie opened in limited release over the weekend, with Tony starring The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa as the chef, who died in 2018. A24 and director Matt Johnson are behind the project, telling the coming-of-age story about a guy who would later describe himself as “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” That’s the kind of guy who makes for an interesting protagonist.
Before their Tony journey, Bartels and Howe established their biopic bona fides writing the Dolly Parton script Dumb Blonde, their first project together. It was strong enough to land on the Black List of best unproduced screenplays in 2022, and land the backing of producers Tim White and Trevor White, whose movie King Richard netted Will Smith an Oscar. Then, it met an unsurmountable hurtle: another producer was already working on a movie with Parton, forcing them to move on rather than battle a competing project.
Recalls Bartels: “We thought, ‘OK, well, now we’re biopic guys now. That was an experiment and we enjoyed it. What’s our next subject?”
Both were Bourdain fans, as was Emily Rose, who would become their manager at Mosaic. She responded with a resounding yes when they suggested it — the kind of encouragement that got their minds working.
Rose had some inroads in Bourdain world, and eventually landed the guys a meeting with Bourdain’s longtime literary agent Kimberly Witherspoon and with Ottavia Busia, his widow and mother of his child. Both are the de facto keepers of his estate.
Bartels and Howe pitched the movie as a love letter focusing on a single summer about a kid who stumbles into a restaurant and finds his calling. “The problem is, we didn’t know what else happened in the movie beyond that it ended in a clambake,” says Bartels. The estate liked the general concept, but said to come back when they had more.
The time to deliver more when the WGA strike hit in 2023. With nothing else to do, the scribes took a shot and wrote it as a spec. Eventually, director Johnson and star Sessa came aboard, with A24 following.
With all the pieces in place, the estate gave its blessing. There has been a lot of talk this year about biopics glossing over unflattering portraits of its subjects, particularly if the estate is involved. Not so here.
“If anything, Kim was, was encouraging of pushing it more,” says Howe. “Tony was very honest looking back on this period in his life. When he wrote about it or talked about it, he would, say things like, ‘I treated the world like my ashtray,’ or ‘I needed a good ass kicking.’”
The film bucked trends in other ways as well. In unusual circumstance for a pair of writers, the duo continued on with the project through its production, with director Johnson and his go-to scribe Matthew Miller forming something of a writers room with Bartels and Howe. All four men are credited on the screenplay, with Bartels and Howe’s earlier script landing on the 2024 Black List.
“We don’t want to be the kind of screenwriters who live in a cave by ourselves, and press send on an email,” says Bartels. “We want make our own movies, direct our own movies.”
They also were on set, earning executive producer credits. There, they got to observe how Johnson and master craftspeople operated, like One Battle After Another cinematographer Michael Bauman and The Holdovers production designer Ryan Warren Smith.
Howe and Bartels have been writing for years, but hit a new stride thanks to Tony. They’ve already worked on another high-profile project, Metal Gear Solid, the upcoming adaptation of the popular video games that have high flying filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein directing.
It might not seem like a natural project post-Tony move, but the biopic helped them land the deal. The directors wanted biopic energy for the project, and the guys treated the assignment as a biopic for protagonist Solid Snake.
But when they were in the running for the job, they’d never written an action scene, so they submitted the climactic clam bake from Tony, as well as a big concert scene from their never-made Dolly Parton script.
“Those were kind of the closest things to action sequences,” Howe says with a laugh. Good enough to show they could handle it, and they landed the job.
They also are developing the true crime podcast Murder 101 at Amazon Studios, with Jon Watts attached to direct and produce, and have a script about the origins of MTV, and another about Jacqueline Bouvier’s whirlwind romance with JFK.
As for Tony, Bartels sums it up: “It was a dream come true, honestly, that we were in a bar in Provincetown four years ago, dreaming up this thing.”
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