A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 6
This is the sixth year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. Here’s another one:
Around 1990, writer Stephen Brill came up with this idea: “A self-centered lawyer is sentenced to community service coaching a rag tag youth hockey team.” That eventually became the movie The Mighty Ducks. That seemingly innocuous family comedy grossed $51M, not bad for a movie with a reported $10M budget.
Then came D2: The Mighty Ducks. Then D3: The Mighty Ducks. Then “Mighty Ducks”, a TV series. Then Mighty Ducks the Movie: The First Face-Off, a DTV animated movie. And then came this:
The Anaheim Ducks [formerly the Anaheim Mighty Ducks]. An NHL franchise. A professional franchise worth an estimated $188M.
All based on the fact that one day, a writer was walking around and came up with a story idea about a youth hockey team named the Mighty Ducks.
As I said… in Hollywood, story ideas are worth gold.
Today’s story idea: Five-star chef cooks for the homeless.
When Chef David Garcelon became Director of Culinary at the iconic Waldorf Astoria Hotel, he knew he would be spending his days planning menus for the likes of President Obama and Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie and Michael J. Fox.
But shortly after he took the reigns in 2011, he received a call from Reverend Edward Sunderland. The Reverend was wondering if Garcelon would be interested in serving a different crowd: the homeless.
Sunderland runs the Crossroads Soup Kitchen at St. Bartholomew’s Church. The church and the hotel have stood side by side along Park Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan for nearly a century, each occupying a full city block.
Several Waldorf employees were already volunteering as servers, but Sunderland was looking for help behind the scenes.
“He asked me how to get more volunteers,” Garcelon tells CBSNews.com. “It’s not that easy because it’s a 5 a.m. start. But he made a compelling case, so I said I would myself do it.”
One morning each month, Garcelon rises before dawn, picks up a large black coffee, and joins a crew of four or five fellow volunteers. Over the course of two hours, they prepare a hot meal, from scratch, for 150–200 homeless guests.
Crossroads has a full-time chef, John Neely, who has transformed the meals from canned goods to healthy dishes overflowing with fresh ingredients. The soup kitchen served 84,143 meals last year, on a weekly budget of about $750. It boils down to less than $1 per meal.
Riffing off The Mighty Ducks as inspiration, what if our Protagonist is selfish, egotistical chef at one of New York’s top restaurants. He runs afoul of the law — perhaps he assaults a food critic — and in order to get out of jail time, he is forced to do community service: Work at a homeless shelter for a month in charge of the residents’ meals.
Sounds like a set-up for one of those feel-good stories in which the homeless community transforms the Protagonist into a better, more caring human being. But what if we spun it? What if amidst this homeless crew, the Protagonist discovers a young woman who has a preternatural gift for food preparation. What if she turns out to be a kind of Mozart of the cuisine to the Protagonist’s Salieri?
One thing’s for sure: The mash-up of chef for the 1% crowd with the homeless set makes for a strong FOOW (Fish Out Of Water) dynamic. And putting on my producer’s hat, the success of celebrity chef TV series on The Food Network and elsewhere, as well as the movie Chef grossing $46M on a next-to-nothing budget makes me think a buyer would at least give this story a read.
There you go: My sixth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
Now it’s your turn. What would you do with this story setup?
Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.
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