“We know that it ends in a clam bake…”
That was pretty much all Todd Bartels and Lou Howe had when the screenwriting duo pitched Anthony Bourdain’s estate on a biopic concerning the late culinarian.
“We have a lot of connection through Bourdain,” Howe told me over a recent Zoom call. “We’re both travelers and foodies, and really looked to him as a role model in a lot of ways, especially [in his capacity] as a writer.”
Agreed Bartels: “People look to him as more than just a cook, or even really a traveler or raconteur. He has become a guru.”
In particular, they saw the project (ultimately titled Tony) as a coming-of-age story based on the “Food is Sex” chapter in Bourdain’s bestselling memoir, Kitchen Confidential, which chronicles the fateful summer of 1974 he spent as a dishwasher and prep cook at a local restaurant in Provincetown, Cape Cod.
It was there that a somewhat aimless Bourdain came face-to-face with his destiny as a rebel with a gastronomic cause. “We knew we didn’t want to do a cradle-to-grave Wikipedia entry,” Howe explained.
They chose to depict this segment of his illustrious after weighing it against two other viable options. “One of them was when he’s in his fame days, globe-trotting on Parts Unknown and Kitchen Confidential,” Bartels added. “The other one is in the ‘80s and ‘90s when he’s a journeyman chef doing a bunch of drugs and all of all that. And then there was this special summer in Provincetown, when he stumbled into his life’s calling, standing over a dish pit. We thought that was unexpected look into someone who people know a lot about.”
Not surprisingly, however, the rights holders (namely Bourdain’s longtime literary agent, Kim Witherspoon, and second wife, Ottavia Busia) told them to come back when they had a little more to work with than a traditional New England clam bake.
To do that, Bartels and Howe ventured from Los Angeles to Provincetown (or P-town by those in the know) where they “spent the better part of two days drinking” at one of Bourdain’s favorite haunts, the Old Colony Tap. Bartels highly recommends visiting the nearly 90-year-old institution, “because it really encapsulates a lot of what Tony loved in general whenever he found a place. [It’s] … a place for people of all shades and stripes. We talked to the bartender there, Jill, who grew up in Provincetown as a kid in the ‘70s, and she said it was a magical place for misfits. And that’s what Tony thought of himself as—a misfit.”
Echoed Howe: “P-town is still full of people who have been there for decades or spent two weeks [there] every summer for 40 years. You meet people and feel that energy. It’s very shaggy; very open and joyful. I think the ’70s P-town specific feeling came from that first research trip.”
In addition to capturing the vibe of ’70s-era Cape Cod, the pair also wanted to answer the question of, “Why and how did he become so beloved especially when he was the opposite of a lovable person by his own admission?” Bartels said. “He wrote in Kitchen Confidential that he treated the world like his ashtray. We thought, ‘This is an interesting, huge transformation for a guy we think of as this beacon of empathy, curiosity, and connection … How did he find that path?’ He was a bit of a blowhard, very interested in his own voice. But I think underneath all of that was this deep vulnerability and desire to connect with other people.”
They subsequently wrote the screenplay on spec, with encouragement from Witherspoon, who instructed them not to shy away from the pricklier aspects of Bourdain’s personality. “Kim was always very supportive of us making the best movie possible,” emphasized Howe. “She was instrumental—both as a as the keeper of the Bourdain legacy, but also as a part of the creative team.”
He continued: “The movie is getting a lot of reaction for how much Tony, the character, gets beaten-up, how much he lies, and all the negative immature things he does. That is true to life. That’s true to how Tony wrote about and described himself. Whenever we tried to soften him, it was Kim who would say, ‘No, he admitted that he was that big of a punk. You guys need to make sure that you show all the warts.’ That was very liberating, for us to be able to paint an honest picture of the real guy.”
The script got a huge boost from veteran biopic producers Tim and Trevor White (King Richard, The Post), who brought Tony to the attention of prestigious talent agency CAA. From there, the movie really began to pick up momentum as Matt Johnson (Blackberry) and Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) came aboard as director and star, respectively.
“The two of them together became kind of a package deal,” shared Bartels. “Dominic has ‘70s teenage angst on lock … and Matt has experience doing unexpected biopics with Blackberry. We developed the script more with Matt and his longtime producing partner, Matt Miller, and that’s when we got the cast: Leo [Woodall], Antonio [Banderas], and Emilia [Jones].”
Along with Johnson and Miller, Bartels and Howe further readied the screenplay for principal photography. According to Howe, the group formed a writers’ room for a year-and-a-half, “with the four of us really brainstorming and just talking through the possibilities and having a best-idea-wins mindset. That’s the heart of the development process between the four of us credited writers.”
Bumping Bourdain’s time in P-town a year later to the summer of 1975, Tony finds its titular subject traveling to Cape Cod on a whim to be with his high school crush, Nancy (played by Jones and based on Bourdain’s first wife, Nancy Putkoski).
His plan to romance her doesn’t quite work out the way he’d hoped—at least not at first—and with no money to get home, Tony ends up sleeping on the back porch of a local chef (Banderas), paying back the man’s kindness by washing dishes and shucking raw oysters in the gourmand’s humble eatery. As the new guy, he’s hesitantly welcomed into the fold by colorful and wickedly funny sous chefs like Sal (Woodall) and Dimitri (Stavros Halkias).
“It’s hard to get food and kitchen culture right on film,” Bartels said. “To actually capture that sort of adrenaline rush and locker room banter and jovial—and sometimes not so jovial—hazing … We really wanted to get that right.”
Howe also stated that Johnson, who encouraged ad-libbed dialogue, “was right off camera, bantering with the boys in that kitchen and improvising; setting up some of those jokes and keeping it very funny; cracking up the crew, with Stav and Leo and Dom.”
What begins as a half-assed nuisance of a summer job slowly softens a pretentious windbag with literary aspirations into a more compassionate human being on a path toward a culinary career.
As Bourdain himself believed, “Food is a Trojan horse for connection,” Bartels noted. “You can see over the course of the film that he talks less and less and starts listening more and more. He really likes the sound of his own voice at the beginning. He starts the film with this long, self-aggrandizing speech about how he’s going to be one of the great literary giants of his time. And by the end, he’s more interested in other people than himself.”
With a screenplay, director, and cast in place, A24 signed on as distributor, while Bourdain’s estate gave the go-ahead, allowing production to kick off in Cape Cod last summer. Production designer Ryan Warren Smith (The Holdovers), costume designer Chloe Karmin (Succession), and music supervisor Mandy Mamlet (Challengers) were among the crew members tasked with restoring P-town to its glory, circa 1975. To use Howe’s appropriate food analogy: “It’s really a beautiful stew of all these talented people doing their thing.”
And what movie set during the summer of ’75 would be complete without a reference to the biggest movie that year—Jaws?
The team considered using the Sidney Lumet classic Dog Day Afternoon (ATTICA! ATTICA!), but knew deep down they were always going to need a bigger boat. That is to say use the first-ever summer blockbuster as a backdrop for a scene where Tony and Sal smooth talk their way into someone’s car at a drive-in theater.
“We all wanted Jaws because it’s a Cape Cod, Massachusetts movie,” Bartels explained. “[It] was even an bigger part of [previous drafts] where he goes and sees Jaws, because it’s opening weekend, and then doesn’t want to go in the water.”
Thankfully, Tim and Trevor White had a direct line to Steven Spielberg after working with him on The Post. “They called him up,” Bartels remembered, “and Steven said, ‘You got it, guys.’”
Much of the culinary accuracy fell to food consultant Christine Tobin, “who really did an incredible job capturing the food of Cape Cod in all of its fried fish glory and Portuguese heritage,” said Bartels. Though a solid cooking foundation already existed in the script, given that both writers had previous experience at food establishments. Bartels worked at a upscale French restaurant in Connecticut, “deveining shrimp and peeling potatoes,” while Howe became “a 16-year-old dishwasher, so I got a similar dynamic to Dom [in the movie].”
Summarized Baretls: “We saw the culture of the kitchen firsthand when we were kids.”
With a near-perfect score on 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Tony is sure to become a staple of cinema’s culinary sub-genre. And if it does, you won’t hear the screenwriters complaining.
“Some of our favorite food movies are Babette’s Feast, Big Night, Tampopo and Anthony Bourdain’s favorite food movie, Ratatouille,” Bartels concluded. “If Tony could be number five on that list, that would be a great honor.”
Tony is now playing in limited theaters nationwide ahead of a wider rollout Friday, Aug. 21. Click here for tickets.
