The Emperor’s Last Chef
andrewclauLogliner
When the Imperial head chef is beheaded for serving uninventive dishes, the sous chef must obtain a magic cookbook in order to execute a dish pleasing to the Emperor before he and his staff are beheaded.
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Thanks dpg!
Now that I understand the context, I can see the potential. Good luck with the story.
Thanks for volunteering your thoughts dpg. Really helpful!
Methinks the revision is too complicated. That is, if you want to cram in all those twists and turns in the script, okay. But there’s not enough word space in a logline to lay out that much detail. So my version for cutting to the chase:
When a master chef is beheaded by the Emperor for serving an uninspired menu, his timid prot?g? must struggle to recreate a legendary recipe or face the chopping block himself.
Another revision – removing the midpoint entirely from the logline:
When his predecessor is beheaded for serving an uninspired menu, he must hunt down a rare species of Phoenix to execute a special recipe before the Emperor?s fortnightly banquet, or face the chopping block himself.?
Still a bit messy but again, just trying to make sure the elements are in place.
Regarding the phoenix – the creature is still an answer outside of himself. So the phoenix escaping will force him to get inventive.
dpg exactly – the cookbook is not the final solution. The chef’s ingenuity would be,.
Nic, I agree with you. I’ve been trying to find a way to fit the “magic” part in but the more I think about it the less this element works for me. Even with Stephen Chow’s the God of Cookery the movie stopped working for me when the Godly, magical, supernatural elements came in to play. Very zany, isn’t really dramatic and random.
The reason why I wanted to work the magic in, was a thematic reason – a timid, insecure chef looking outside of himself for solutions rather than digging deep. He wanted to be magicked out of trouble. He would find the “magic book” and then discover it’s not magic at all. Confronted with the reality he would need to start getting creative and invent something for the Emperor to eat so he and his chef buddies don’t get executed.
Freestyling now:
I have considered that the midpoint would be – he gets to the cookbook as Nic suggested at the mountain. The recipes contained would be of a rare species of “phoenix” (being zany here again) so he would spend the second half of act 2 hunting this special phoenix but at the end of act 2 the phoenix actually escapes and with no time left on the clock he needs to return to the palace to actually come up with a special recipe of his own.
With this in mind here is my revised logline:
When his predecessor is beheaded for serving an uninspired menu, a timid chef must secure a special recipe from an order of mountain-dwelling monks. But when he secures the recipe he discovers he must hunt down a special phoenix in order to prepare the dish before the Emperor?s fortnightly banquet, or face the chopping block himself.?
Slightly inefficient, sloppy logline but trying to make sure the elements are correctly in place.
Or the recipe is like a Chan riddle (Chan is the Chinese antecedent of Zen in Japan); enlightenment comes through the struggle to figure it out, make the recipe work.
Or come to find out the scroll on which the recipe has been recorded has been damaged by time — moths, rats, rot — such that the last ingredient and/or instruction on which the whole recipe hinges has been lost. He’s got to do what he’s never done before in his career: improvise, trust his intuition, his experience. His character flaw is that he has always timidly, slavishly followed orders, worked by the book, the recipe. But now…
I agree – I’m not in love with the idea of a “magic” recipe. What if it was the ORIGINAL recipe for the emperor’s favourite dish? Centuries old … and upon securing it, he discovers some simple ingredient or technique that had been lost as the recipe was passed down from person to person?
andrewclau:
Thanks for clarifying your target audience and genre. Now it makes more sense my Occidental mind. And I like nicholasandrewhalls logline.
But I wonder: what’s so magical about the recipe? What the magic in either/or both preparing and eating the food? That the recipe is secretive yes — I can understand the monastery as the repository of a secret recipe, a legendary recipe. But magical?
And if it’s really a magical recipe then I suggest a working title along the lines of “Food of the Gods” as a more evocative and alluring title.
To where, specifically, must he travel? Mount doom?
Thanks for your feedback Nic, appreciate it. As always your loglines are so efficient! The “must obtain” part was about travelling across the country to find the cookbook/recipes.
Yeah it does. I think you can get away with violence depending on the way it’s handled on screen. And I still can’t get past the pencil trick in the The Dark Knight.
I’d say pretty close … but I’d love some more definition of what “must obtain” entails? Does it mean he has to travel over the entire country to get it, or does it mean besting an old master chef at a cook off? The budget for the two movies would be entirely different, so please clarify.
“When his predecessor is beheaded for serving an uninspired menu, a timid chef must secure a magic recipe from an order of mountain-dwelling monks before the Emperor’s fortnightly banquet, or face the chopping block himself.”
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has a beheading in it, and that’s PG-13 right?
A tough one to get off the ground…
Hi dpg, I was trying to be a bit kooky with this one. The rating would be above the PG13 crowd for sure and the main target market is China. I was going for something eccentric/vulgar/violent along the lines of a Stephen Chow movie like the God of Cookery in which magic, martial arts and a lot of cooking was featured – definitely not for a young crowd. The genre would be a (weird) combination – historical epic mixed with myth mixed with violent black comedy.
Andrewclau:
One strength of your logline is that the stakes are clearly defined. It’s a matter of life and death. But I’m unsure as to your genre and I get a mixed reading as to your target demographic: beheading is an R-rating scene (in the U.S.), but it seems to me that magic is more likely to appeal to the PG and PG-13 crowd. Could you please clarify?
Hi dpg, I agree with you. I was trying to include an intriguing external goal to imply an exciting outer journey in which the sous-chef would get out of the Imperial palace and into culinary action/adventures. My intention is to have the sous-chef pressured to come up with the life saving dish/dishes himself after, finding the “magic book” and realizing that it’s a hoax. Maybe even dropping this towards the end of the second act.
I struggled to keep the logline shorter but it would have read something like this:
When the Imperial Kitchen Chief is beheaded for serving uninventive dishes, his under-confident protege must obtain a magic cookbook in order to execute a dish pleasing to the Emperor. But when he discovers the magic cookbook is a hoax he and his staff must come up with something truly tasty before they are all beheaded.
Your thoughts?
Andrewclau:
Why must the dramatic problem be solved through magic? Why not through character? That is, rather than find the winning recipe in a magic cookbook, the sous chef has to find the winning recipe from within himself, develop the skill and confidence to create the dish.
What makes Remy the rat in the Pixar animation film, “Ratatouille” so appealing? Because he can follow a a magical recipe? No it’s because, like all great chefs, he doesn’t slavishly follow instructions; rather he follows his gut instincts, his palate; he relies on his intuition, on his experience.
Hi Francois, thanks for volunteering your opinion. I agree with you that the logline is long, however your solution removes the inciting incident from the logline entirely – and loglines need to have inciting incidents. 🙂 I’m also missing a flaw for my hero so will need to rework this in.
You could shorten your logline by telling: The chef must obtain a magic cookbook to execute a dish pleasing to the emperor or else he and his entire staff will be beheaded