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.