Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Chevy Chase's pretzel logic
Former SNL comedian gets rampaging ego disease! "Barbie Girl" singer gets breast implants, gets "the creeps when I'm compared with that doll"; Plus: Boo-hoo! Darva and Rick officially call it quits!
By Amy Reiter
[04/06/00]

Nothing Personal
Moneyman's gonna getcha
When your financial advisor is partying more than you are, you should start worrying. Plus: Kelly Preston gives Scientological birth to a girl named Bleu. Quel fromage.
By Amy Reiter
[04/05/00]

Column
Imagination unleashed in all its perverse glory
The Web: Let the Puritans figure out how to jam their mealy corks into the dyke!
By Camille Paglia
[04/05/00]

Nothing Personal
His highness gets down
At least he didn't do the funky chicken: Prince William's disco debacle. Plus: Will Woody, Mia and Soon-Yi kiss and make up?
By Amy Reiter
[04/04/00]

Brilliant Careers
Joni Mitchell
As pure an artist as can be found in the entertainment industry, her confessional lyrics and lilting, soaring soprano have inspired countless musicians.
By Frank Houston
[04/04/00]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

A good writer does the same. Without bringing attention to the writer, his or her plots compel you, his or her simplest words move you. Real people and real emotions are conjured from ink and wood pulp, as if by magic.

But neither operation is in the least bit magical. "Waiting tables is monkey work -- you learn the menu, you fill the drink, you take the money, you play the game," drones Rob McKittrick. "And writing is a pain in the ass. Most days I just sit at the computer pissed off. It sucks."

He should know. He has done both, simultaneously. While singing his way through another off-key rendition of "Happy Birthday" and peddling Tex-Mex Towers and spicy new Firebites at an Orlando, Fla., T.G.I. Friday's restaurant, McKittrick, 27, stumbled upon an El Dorado most Syd Field neophytes find only in their most carnal Hollywood daydreams.

McKittrick's spec script, "Waiting," was recently sold to Artisan Entertainment ("The Blair Witch Project," "Swingers") for a jumbo order of money -- six figures for the initial screenplay, close to six figures more for the rewrites and, to wash it all down, a blind script-development deal that essentially pays McKittrick in advance for a script he hasn't even written yet.

Starting wage at T.G.I. Friday's: $2.13 an hour.

"Waiting" details the all-too-habitual life of a group of young waiters at a chain restaurant called Shennanigans. It's a place where busboys smoke dope in the freezer, dishwashers pontificate on enigmatic psychological imbroglios and steak dinners are hastily plucked off the dirty kitchen floor and deemed "eatable" in accordance with the "five-second rule." (Dropped food that's picked up within five seconds has not officially hit the floor.) McKittrick wrote the script while being hired and fired at several Orlando-area chain restaurants.

To even "get the job [at these restaurants] you have to take this 'personality profile' nonsense -- 100 questions that are basically to see if you have the criminal element inside of you. Like, 'True or false -- I think that people are following me,' and 'True or false -- Sometimes I get really, really mad and just leave.' If you did do that, who the hell would admit to it?"

"Bennigan's, Friday's, Steak and Ale, Roadhouse Grill." He rattles off the names. "The one thing that really struck me was that they're really all the same! Certainly with the customers -- cool customers and asshole customers -- but also with the staff. There's always a sort of standoffishness between cooks and servers, always a cute hostess the guys flirt with, and generally there's at least one asshole manager."

So similar are these establishments, in fact, that each new wait staff McKittrick joined, including T.G.I.F.'s, assumed that it was the sole inspiration for "Waiting." "They'd say, 'Oh, you must've based that on Christy, she's a bitch,' or 'You must've based that on Shelly, she's really hot.' But these are just the type of people that migrate to these places.

"My script is about waiting tables in a restaurant," McKittrick explains. "Thematically, it's also about waiting in life, being in that in-between stage, blindly working towards a community college A.A. degree, not being sure what the hell you're doing. I was certainly that person, and I've known a ton of people like that."

"Waiting" is a film that a lot of people are going to connect with -- a lot of young, frustrated, humiliated, starving-artist-type people serving up jalepeņo poppers and hot pizzadillas until 2 a.m. at exactly these types of franchise eateries. The explosive demographic potential for "Waiting" is exactly why McKittrick and pal-producer Dean Shull's chance flirtation with a cute receptionist (who knew a guy who knew a guy who worked for an agent at William Morris Agency) snowballed into a two-week bidding war in February among Artisan, Sony Screen Gems and MPCA, with Artisan winning out.

McKittrick's story is only the most recent in a long line of kitchen-to-condo spec script parables, many of which double as cautionary tales. In 1996, it was Dave McKenna's "American History X." That script sold for six figures and attracted production company New Line, actor Ed Norton and director Tony Kaye.

McKenna's job before the sale? Waiting tables.

In 1997, it was bartender Troy Duffy, whose "The Boondock Saints" was faxed to Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein page by page as he flew to the 1997 Academy Awards. Weinstein immediately demanded a meeting with Duffy the morning of the Oscars to close the deal. Later that night, after Miramax's triumph with "The English Patient," Weinstein pulled up to Duffy's bar in a stretch limo and cheerily asked what Duffy planned to do with all the money he was about to make. Duffy responded that he'd probably buy the bar. Knocking down a beer, Weinstein impulsively decided to co-buy the place with him.

Of course, "The Boondock Saints," which just came out on video, took longer than an order of grease-free pot stickers. The bizarre Weinstein-Duffy beer concordat, meanwhile, hasn't happened either.

This doesn't faze McKittrick. Before the ink was even dry on the Artisan contract, he "got the hell outta" the Florida food service industry and tucked himself neatly into the glitzy Hollywood hills. "Toward the end of my two years waiting tables, I had my fair share of detractors who were giving me enough shit," McKittrick explains. "'OK, where's your movie, Mr. Movie-Man?'"

"When he found out he was going to Los Angeles, he gave his two weeks," says fellow T.G.I. Friday's waiter Daniel Ruth, laughing. "Then he didn't show up for one of his shifts, and then he just quit."

Next page | "We don't have people hanging from the ceiling exposing themselves"