61 Years. One Summer.

Anthony Bourdain lived a big life. He spent decades working in restaurant kitchens before becoming a bestselling author almost overnight with Kitchen Confidential.

That led to television, travel and a second career that transformed him from a New York chef into an international cultural figure. Along the way, he became one of the most recognizable storytellers of his generation before his life ended tragically in 2018 at the age of 61.

There is an obvious way to make that movie.

Start with young Bourdain. Follow him into restaurant kitchens. Show the breakthrough of Kitchen Confidential. Recreate the television success, the fame, the travel, the relationships. End with his death.

Screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe wanted no part of it.

They have described themselves as “allergic to cradle-to-grave narratives.”

I understand the allergy. I think I have it too. Ninety minutes or two hours simply isn’t enough room for a life.

That doesn’t mean a cradle-to-grave biography can’t work. Some do. But they are notoriously difficult to do well because a life does not naturally conform to a three-act structure. Birth isn’t necessarily an inciting incident. Career milestones aren’t automatically dramatic turning points. Death doesn’t necessarily provide resolution.

Biography gives us chronology. Story requires something more. So when Bartels and Howe began thinking about an Anthony Bourdain movie, they asked a more interesting question.

Instead of trying to tell 61 years, what if they told one summer? What about the summer Bourdain fell in love with being a chef?

A Life Is Source Material

I have written many times that a topic is not a story.

Anthony Bourdain is a great topic. His life is extraordinary source material. Neither automatically gives you a movie. A storyteller still has to find the story.

For Bartels and Howe, that meant going back to Bourdain before the books, the television shows, the fame, the carefully cultivated public persona. They became interested in his formative time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when a young Bourdain found his way into restaurant work.

This wasn’t Anthony Bourdain, the worldly traveler telling us where to eat in Vietnam.

This was Tony. He was young, insecure, ambitious, inexperienced and still trying to figure out who he was. That became the foundation for Tony, the new A24 film directed by Matt Johnson and starring Dominic Sessa.

The filmmakers weren’t trying to show us the Anthony Bourdain we already knew. They wanted to show us the kid who might become him. That is a fundamentally different way to approach biography.

First, They Had to Prove There Was a Story

Bartels and Howe had some experience with this territory. They had previously written Dumb Blonde, a screenplay about a formative period in Dolly Parton’s life that made the 2022 Black List.

When they became interested in Bourdain, they understood the importance of the people responsible for protecting his work and legacy.

Their manager, Emily Rose, pursued Bourdain’s longtime literary agent Kimberly Witherspoon. Eventually, the writers had an opportunity to pitch Witherspoon and Bourdain’s former wife, Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, who were serving as executors of his estate.

What they pitched wasn’t much of a movie yet.

They knew they wanted to tell a coming-of-age story set in Provincetown. They knew it would be a love letter to Bourdain. They apparently even knew they wanted it to culminate with a clambake.

They just didn’t know everything that happened between those points.

Interestingly, that may have helped.

The estate had already heard pitches focused on Bourdain’s later life and the circumstances of his death. Bartels and Howe were proposing something entirely different.

They wanted the beginning rather than the end.

The response was essentially: prove it.  So they did.

When the Hollywood strikes shut down their regular work in 2023, Bartels and Howe wrote Tony on spec. Think about the discipline inherent in that decision.

They didn’t acquire an entire life and then start asking what they could do with it. They identified a specific interpretation of the life and then had to demonstrate that their idea could sustain a movie.

That screenplay eventually attracted producers Tim and Trevor White of Star Thrower Entertainment. Dominic Sessa became attached. A24 entered the picture. The screenplay landed on the 2024 Black List with 15 mentions. The specificity didn’t make the project smaller. It made the project more compelling.

Then the Research Complicated the Truth

The obvious foundation for Tony was Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, particularly the relatively small portion of the memoir devoted to his early experiences in Provincetown.

But something interesting happened when the writers started digging deeper. They discovered that Bourdain had already done what good storytellers do. He had shaped his own life into a story.

Names had been changed. Chronology had been compressed or rearranged. People and events had been heightened.

Bourdain wasn’t writing a deposition. He was writing a book people would want to read. That distinction matters.

Bartels and Howe went beyond the memoir. They traveled to Provincetown. They spoke with people who had known Bourdain during that period. They examined his television work and other biographical sources, including Laurie Woolever’s oral biography.

The more they researched, the more complicated the relationship between fact and story became.

Consider the journey the material had already taken. Bourdain experienced something. Years later, he remembered it.

Then he selected, shaped and wrote those memories into Kitchen Confidential.

More than two decades later, another group of storytellers researched the experiences behind those memories,

interpreted what they found and transformed them again into a screenplay.

Life became memory. Memory became memoir. Memoir became source material. Source material became a movie. At every step, somebody made choices.

That doesn’t mean facts don’t matter. In true-story filmmaking, I believe they matter enormously, but research isn’t simply about accumulating enough facts to reproduce the past. It gives storytellers the understanding they need to make responsible choices about the story.

The Right Actor Helped Unlock the Movie

Director Matt Johnson initially passed on Tony. After making BlackBerry, Johnson was being offered other true-story projects and wasn’t particularly interested in making another one.

Then Dominic Sessa entered the picture.

Johnson had been developing another project with A24 and wanted to find something to make with Sessa after seeing his performance in The Holdovers. During that process, Tony came up. Something clicked.

Sessa wasn’t simply an actor who could imitate Anthony Bourdain. In fact, imitation was precisely what Johnson wanted to avoid.  Everyone knows the older Bourdain’s mannerisms, voice and persona. But the young man in Provincetown hadn’t developed them yet.

Sessa needed to play someone who didn’t know he was going to become Anthony Bourdain. That helped Johnson see the movie differently and reconsider a project he had already rejected.

It is another reminder that development isn’t merely about fixing words on a page. Sometimes a collaborator changes your understanding of the material itself.

The First Good Script Wasn’t the Last One

There is another part of Tony’s development process that I particularly appreciate.

Once Johnson and his producing partner Matthew Miller joined the project, they didn’t simply take Bartels and Howe’s screenplay and move into production.  They kept developing it.

Bartels, Howe, Johnson and Miller spent roughly a year and a half working together in what they have described as essentially a four-person writers’ room. Their philosophy was simple: best idea wins. All four ultimately received writing credit. I think there is an important lesson in that.

A screenplay isn’t finished because somebody wants to produce it. It isn’t finished because an actor signs on. It isn’t finished because a studio becomes interested.

Professional storytelling requires being willing to continue making the work better. The first draft isn’t the final draft, as I preach to my son Charlie. It should get better with each draft, as we cut and reshape and try new things.

That can be difficult for creators. We naturally become attached to our ideas, words and scenes because we remember how hard we worked to create them. “Murder your darlings or kill your babies,” they tell aspiring writers.

But professional storytelling isn’t about protecting your first idea. It is about protecting the story. Making it better.

Cooperation Doesn’t Require Hagiography

The involvement of Kimberly Witherspoon provides another interesting lesson.

Witherspoon wasn’t some distant estate representative. She had been Bourdain’s literary agent and was closely connected to the development of his career as a writer. She was there when his experiences in restaurant kitchens first became valuable intellectual property.

Years later, she helped another group of storytellers transform part of that material again. Witherspoon ultimately became an executive producer of Tony and was creatively involved in the process. What is striking, however, is what apparently didn’t happen.

Johnson has said the estate didn’t pressure him to sanitize Bourdain or turn the movie into a tribute. That matters.

If young Anthony enters the movie already possessing the wisdom, confidence and worldview of the Anthony Bourdain we remember, there is nowhere for the character to go.

Transformation requires a starting point.

Respecting the person at the center of a true story doesn’t require pretending that person was perfect. Sometimes the more respectful choice is allowing them to be complicated, flawed and human.

Finding the Story Inside the Life

Anthony Bourdain lived 61 years. He worked in kitchens. He battled addiction. He wrote books. He became famous. He traveled around the world. He interviewed everyone from restaurant workers to presidents. He changed how millions of people thought about food and travel, and introduced audiences to cultures they might otherwise never have encountered.

There are countless stories inside that life. Tony doesn’t try to tell all of them. That is the point. The filmmakers aren’t particularly interested in showing us what Anthony Bourdain accomplished. We already know that.

They are interested in the becoming. The transformative time.

What happened when a young man who didn’t quite know what he wanted encountered a world that awakened something inside him?

That question can sustain a story.

It is also why I think the development of Tony offers such a useful lesson for anyone trying to turn a true life into a film, television series, book or other piece of narrative media.

Don’t begin by asking what you need to include. Begin by asking what the story is.

Once you know that, you can research more intelligently. You can identify the source material you need. You can recognize what belongs and, just as importantly, what doesn’t. You can collaborate with people who make the story better without surrendering what made it compelling in the first place.

The storyteller’s job isn’t to decide what happened in someone’s life. Life already took care of that. Our job is to find the story inside it.

Anthony Bourdain gave the filmmakers 61 years to choose from. They chose one summer.

Sometimes telling us less is how we understand more.

About the Storytelling for ALL® Newsletter

The Storytelling for ALL® LinkedIn Newsletter is a biweekly publication examining how stories are developed and brought to life professionally in today’s evolving storytelling economy.

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About Ron Watermon

Ron Watermon is a creator, builder, media entrepreneur, filmmaker, and the founder of STORYSMART. He writes about professional storytelling, media entrepreneurship, filmmaking, and the business of turning stories into valuable assets.

Ron is the author of STORYSMART Storytelling for ALL and is currently building STORYSMART STUDIOS, an independent media company dedicated to developing, producing, and owning profitable, enduring original media properties.

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