EAT CAFE

A punk soap/sitcom series proposal by Clark Humphrey

3/11/95

A weekly half-hour comedy/drama series with continuing storylines, set among the punk community of a small Northwest city somewhere outside Seattle.

The pivotal character is PETE SHREVE, a.k.a. Peter Beater, 32, a former musician with an early-1980s punk band in Seattle. He’s returned to his hometown to take over the family business, a working-class cafe on a storefront on the city’s rundown main street.

As one of the downtown’s last surviving retail businesses, it’s been a draw for area seniors and lunching businesspeople. But that wasn’t enough to keep it in business. Pete, however, has quickly brought it close to solvency by transforming it into a hangout for the local punk community, while continuing to serve inexpensive meals to the pensioners.

At night, the rear dining room becomes a performance space, with local and touring bands, solo musicians, and performance artists on a small corner stage. While Pete’s band never attained mass popularity, it was known within the alternative-music community; so he’s able to get relatively well-known acts to pass through town. He puts them up for the night in the living room of the apartment he shares with three other young and old punks, upstairs from the cafe.

The cafe’s building is the last site on its block not yet taken over by would-be developers who want to “restore” the downtown into an upscale tourist attraction complete with the exact same “unique” shops and eateries you can find in any upscale tourist trap. Pete and his ailing widowed mother EILEEN SHREVE are holding out against the development. The city’s politicians, business leaders, radio stations and newspaper are all trying to get the cafe shut down, both to expidite the redevelopment scheme and to quash those dangerous punk rockers.

EACH EPISODE will contain at least three storylines–the continuing storyline of Pete’s efforts to stay in business, and at least two storylines involving the staff and regular habitués of the cafe. Each storyline will be structured in four- to six-week arcs, so there’s either a cliffhanger or a climax or both each week. Each episode will also contain a performance segment.

THE DIALOGUE in the cafe will set the main pace of the show. The cameras will switch between simultaneous conversations at the cafe tables, counter, and prep area. It will not be the kind of shallow, gag-fortified dialogue you get in many modern sitcoms. Instead, it will flow like the dialogue in a good involving TV soap or in the classic comic soaps of old radio. The show will depict Pete, and the punk scene, as bastions of honest communication and community surrounded by hostile forces of enforced blandness. As such, Pete and his friends emphatically do not see punk as a trend, a fad, or as a branch of the bigtime entertainment industry, but as an expression of rage and passion that’s timeless and universal.

THE SUPPORTING CAST should represent a cross-section of “alternative” youth culture, with perhaps six regulars and an ever-changing peripheral group of semiregulars and one-story-arc characters. There are also Pete’s mom; the know-nothing ex-hippie entertainment reporter for the local paper who hates anything that doesn’t sound like sixties music; and one character personifying Pete’s raucous relations with the city fathers (perhaps a politician, a cop, or an executive). As opposed to the media stereotype of rock as a boys’ club, this cast will be at least half female, and will include at least one gay regular.

THE REGULARS

PETE SHRIEVE: Our (anti?) hero is a “comfort” character, just as the cafe serves “comfort” food. A gregarious lovable lug with a beer gut, a broad walk, a tender smile and hair unfashionably up to here that belie the passionate, disciplined noise he made in his old band (imagine Buzz Osborne of the Melvins). What kept his band together nearly 10 years was his knack for sincerely making contacts and friendships (as opposed to LA-style schmoozing). These same skills help him in the cafe, bringing his old musician friends to play there and keeping the core clientele of old pensioners happy while he adds a new clientele of the town’s youth-culture crowd, who previously had no local hangout space. He’s not all that bright, so he needs PAULA’s help keeping the cafe’s books balanced; and the chummy-buddy side of his persona has begun to wear tiresome on Paula, who sometimes feels taken in and used by him.

PAULA and JAMES: Pete’s two roommates in the apartment above the cafe. More specifically, Pete’s ex-girlfriend (and still his assistant manager at the cafe) and her current boyfriend. She’d moved here from Seattle with him. In the first episode, Paula moves out of Pete’s bedroom and tells him she wants to keep living with him, just without sex, at least while she sorts out her feelings for him and the new life he’s thrust her into. In the second batch of story arcs, she brings home James, a leather fetishist and dominator who lets her fulfill her self-image as Persecuted Female while satisfying her desire for the kind of power-sex she could never get from Mr.-Sensitive-Male Pete. If there is any torture in Pete’s life, it’s hearing them have loud violent sex from the next room at night. Pete can’t “let go” of Paula enough to kick her and James out.

ANDREA BOWLES: Waitress. A slender, pale Goth waif. Her high school insult-name was Andrea Bowling Pin, both from her complexion and her waist size. Dresses all in black, uses face and body make-up to look even whiter than she is. Talks all about death, living death, vampires, and macabre/horror writers.

Has never been seen publicly consuming anything more substantial than bottled water, coffee and cigarettes. Pete’s mother takes to her as a stray pup needing extra love, something Andrea loathes.

In one story arc it’s decided Andrea must be an anorexic in need of professional help. Pete and some of the punks sneak into her bedroom and discover a hidden microwave and a mini-fridge full of microwave entrees. Andrea’s real aversion, it turns out, is against being seen while eating. It’s a disgusting sight, the ingestion of solid matter into the body, and if the Queen won’t be shown eating in public neither will she.

Why she works at a restaurant with this loathing, then, is another issue that leads into a new story arc, as she goes into regression therapy and discovers a truly boggling array of past lives, past hurts and self-declared qualifications for victim status.

IVAN: Dishwasher at the cafe. A gay S/M afficianado (though not a leather wearer) and poet of violence. Andrea is in thrall to his poems, especially when they involve explicit descriptions of male muscles in motion. The “brains of the outfit” in this gang. His knowledge of the town’s gay underground, and the closeted business and political leaders in it, will prove useful in Pete’s attempts to thwart the cafe’s enemies.

EILEEN SHREVE: Pete’s aged mom doesn’t get around much these days. She’s had a bad hip injury and currently moves around on a motorized chair/golf cart contraption (later in the series she’ll trade that in for a walker).

In her day she was a determined businesswoman who kept the cafe going on spit and bailing wire while Pete’s father ran around with his drinking buddies’ wives. In one of the early story arcs, Pete recounts by flashback why he rebelled against his parents and ran off to be a punk rocker. He’s reminded of those days because he discovers the family secret: that his mother cheated as much as his father did, but was simply more discreet about it. Eileen eventually confesses this, and in a tender moment reveals some past wild escapades that make Pete’s life look positively poseur.

Eileen and Paula don’t get along that well. Eileen has some very particular notions about how a restaurant should be properly run, even if those notions don’t extend to modern notions of healthy cuisine or timeless notions of cleanliness. A restaurant, Eileen believes, should be more comfortable than home dining; it should be welcoming, familiar, and comforting. This clashes with Paula’s more urbane tastes. If she had her way, Paula would redo the entire place to emphasize lighter fare, including at least some vegetarian entrees made with fresh ingredients.

SYLVIA HARRISON: The town’s mayor. Advocate of all things upscale, bland, and “mellow.” Wants the punks thrown out of town and the cafe removed for redevelopment into a “unique” upscale eatery. Came to town with her second husband nine years ago, quickly established herself as a networker and schmoozer of the first rank, culminating in her winning the mayoralty at the last election. May or may not have caused the accident that got Eileen laid up.

SOME OF THE SEMIREGULARS

STOKER McGEE: The entertainment reporter for the local paper. A middle-aged ex-hippie who prefers never to cease talking about how radical he was in the sixties. Today, his loathing of anything that happened since the sixties fits nicely with the conservatism of the local afternoon paper he works for.

TOMMY BROGAN: The mayor’s son by her first marriage. Not well known in the town; he spent his teen years in Oregon with his father and stepmom. His real mom, Sylvia Brogan Harrison, had come to this town with a new husband and without Tommy.

In the first set of story arcs, he arrives home from college and becomes a regular at the cafe. His feeble attempts to fit in with the alt.crowd are first seen by Pete and the other regulars as the annoying but benign traits of a poseur wannabe. But at first nobody knows he’s in cahoots with his mother the mayor, to set up a phony drug sting that could get the cafe shut down.

In a subsequent story arc, the punks try to discover why Sylvia wasn’t awarded custody of Tommy eleven years ago, when Tommy was 10. They discover a secret in Sylvia’s past (other than her possible, unprovable involvement in Eileen’s accident) that, if local conservatives found out about it, would ruin her political career, but which the punks see as no big deal. Something along the lines of past pot smoking, alcoholism, or premarital sex. Pete and the gang have to decide whether to use the information against Sylvia or to practice their oft-espoused belief in tolerance.

KEVIN: A virginal PC waify boy-man who hangs out platonically with Ivan the gay dishwasher in one story arc. He thinks of himself as gay simply because he’s sensitive and non-macho, qualities that got him labeled as gay in school. He can appreciate much of the gay culture: cabaret music, movies with vamp women in them, outré clothes, and political activism. There’s only one difference: despite his attempts to convince himself otherwise, he’s simply not sexually attracted to men.

REXXX: A 17-year-old “straight edge” punk who wears felt-marker X’s on the back of both hands. He bores/annoys the other patrons with his incessant boasts of how he never drinks, smokes, does drugs, or has promiscuous sex. Like the fundamentalist parents he claims to be rebelling against, he’s adamant about pointing out the faults of other people’s lifestyles. His hair is close-cropped (causing some ignorant types, including the reporter Stoker McGee, to mistake him for a Nazi skinhead); his T-shirts are all hand-painted with slogans like “Read Chomsky.” His entire life is built around his nervous adherence to a prepackaged, fully-defined ideology of indie-rock and anarchism; he has a strong judgement about nearly every issue, and isn’t shy about expressing it.

In one of the second-round story arcs, his elaborate worldview is challenged when he reluctantly and unexpectedly falls in love with someone who’s all wrong by the standards of his philosophy.

JESSIE THE JEZEBEL: High school insult name for the teenage girl ReXXX tries to convert to straight edge, until he ends up falling in love with her despite/because of her high-partyin’, hard-rockin’, sex-teasin’ ways.

REXXX’S PARENTS: As married-in-the-temple Mormons in an historically Protestant town that looks upon Mormons as heretics, they’ve tried extra hard to prove themselves as upstanding citizens and community pillars. They dislike their son’s appearance and his love of punk rock, but support his anti-drug evangelizing. They also are adamantly opposed to Jessie being in ReXXX’s life. Apparently there’s some bad blood between their family and hers; they claim Jessie comes from a line of unscrupulous rogues and wenches going back four generations to the town’s founding; they charge that her dad was a reckless Camaro boy in his youth, and hint that her grandmother was a whore. ReXXX eventually finds the latter allegation to be true, by talking with some old men at the cafe who have fond, endearing memories of the grandmother as a wonderful woman who lived in Room 315 of the old Central Hotel circa 1953.

THE FUNK PIMPS: An all-white-jock funk-rap band appearing in the second batch of story arcs, managed by Stoker and touted by him as the band that will put this town on the national music map. They turn out to be very derivative and borderline-racist, adopting wholesale the media images of black youth as woman-hating, drug-dealing, murderous gangbangers. Pete takes it upon himself to expand their consciousness, to learn to make their own sounds and express their own existence instead of simply imitating whatever’s hot on MTV this month. They evolve into an original, experimental and far less commercial band, infuriating Stoker.

THE EPISODE OUTLINES

Each episode (except the first) will begin with an off-camera MONOLOGUE by Pete narrating clips of the story so far. After that we’ll usually open onto:

ACT I: A scene in the cafe, cross-cutting between several dialogues at the counter and booths, some of which relate to the current stories, some of which seem to be just people saying funny or interesting things (actually, some of those dialogues will turn out to be setting up future storylines). We may also see flashbacks that reveal the resolutions to the previous episode’s cliffhangers.

OPENING CREDITS

ACT II: Returning to the cafe, usually later the same day, we get dialogue scenes that push one or more storylines forward. By cross-cutting and flashing back like this, we can have a continuous flow of action and dialogue that still keeps individual units of activity within the 1.5-2 minute scene length producers prefer these days.

There may be additional scenes in the cafe, the office, Pete’s apartment, or on location.

ACT III: Usually at night, this is when guest bands or soloists perform in the dining room (or in the living room of Pete’s apartment). Right after that we get the scenes that lead up to the episode’s cliffhanger.

CLOSING CREDITS: Over shots of this week’s guest band playing part of another song.

THE PRODUCTION (STUDIO VERSION)

There are only two main studio sets in the series, the cafe (with four areas) and Pete’s apartment (with two areas). Most scenes requiring other settings will be shot on location, including the town’s main street (which could be shot in Bremerton, Tacoma, Kent, Auburn, Centralia, Aberdeen, Mt. Vernon, or Everett).

THE CAFE: A comfortable old main-street storefront diner, with punk and contemporary artworks added onto the traditional decor of cheap paneling and old beer signs. This set has four areas, from right to left:

* The storefront and sidewalk outside;

* The main dining area, with a counter and kitchen area in the rear behind a counter and partial partition (which hides potentially-expensive equipment like a grill and fryer), booths in the front;

* The rear dining room, with a small triangular performance stage in the left corner; and

* A small storeroom-office, not seen in every episode.

THE APARTMENT: The architecture should be similar to the cafe. An entrance-exit door at leaft opens onto a wood balcony, presumably leading from a rear stairwell. At front are an old sofa, chairs, rug and TV/VCR. Along the walls are old punk posters and show flyers, and a stereo system (with turntable) and record/book shelves. At the rear is a small kitchenette unit and dining table. To the right are doors leading to the bathroom and two bedrooms. Only one bedroom set need be built; it can be redecorated to serve as either Pete’s or Paula’s room.

CREW NEEDS: Line producer, assistant producer, set designer, lighting designer, decorator, props, wardrobe, hair/makeup, boom operator, dialogue sound mixer, band sound mixer, three cameras, at least three or four stagehands, videotape operator, TD, assistant director, editor.

THE PRODUCTION (ALL-LOCATION)

The key to producing this on location will be finding a real cafe that meets the needs of the story (or can be quickly redressed to meet them) and is or can be closed one day a week for shooting. My first choice is Lemieux’s on First Ave. S.; it’s a classic comfort-food diner that’s closed Saturday night and all day Sunday, is situated in a suitably rundown-industrial area, has a second dining area, and is spacious enough for efficient production.

A compromise option would be to build a non-audience set in a garage, warehouse or storefront space somewhere, and still shoot it one-camera style.

CREW NEEDS: Line producer (administation), assistant producer (logistics), videographer, lighting designer, assistant director (script/continuity), wardrobe, hair/makeup, props, videotape operator/dialogue sound mixer, boom operator, band sound mixer, a few grips and stagehands, editor. A few of these tasks can be doubled up. Interns and cast members can do some of the grip and gopher work.

Notes 4/1/95:

The town should be fictional, allowing us to create our own high school teams, history, industry, crooked politicians, summer festival, etc. It’s big enough to have two high schools, a community college (with a 100-watt student radio station), a couple of commercial radio stations, a cable-access studio, and a small afternoon paper.

Future story possibilities:

• ReXXX starts a pirate radio station.
• The other former members of Pete’s old band show up with a firm record-contract offer if he’ll rejoin and commit to a tour that would lead him away from the cafe and Paula.
• Sylvia fails to get the cafe closed on drug-abatement from Tommy’s attempt to plant drugs on the place; for her next scheme, she tries to dissuade Paula from the commitment of running the place, realizing that without Paula the business will collapse upon Pete’s managerial incapabilities. She sets up Tommy to woo Paula back to Seattle or preferably even further away.
• During her re-election campaign Sylvia and Stoker’s bosses at the newspaper are in cahoots to discredit the local punks and other opponents of the redevelopment plan, and engage in a classic media smear campaign right at the time Pete and Paula find information that could completely discredit Sylvia with her conservative voting base. The moral problem is that using that information would be stooping to Sylvia’s level.
• ReXXX’s new out-of-control girlfriend leads him into a crisis (preferably not an unwanted pregnancy but something equally troublesome) that leads him into grey areas of responsibility and morality for which neither his Mormon upbringing nor his straight-edge ideology have prepared him.
• Kevin is persued by a real gay boy; but Kevin can’t bring himself to have sex with him. He persues a girl; but finds himself too scared to perform with her either. He concludes that it’s OK that he doesn’t know what sexuality he is yet; maybe he’s just a late bloomer. Andrea, however, persuades Kevin he needs counseling, and sends him to a new age fake-Indian therapist, Eunice Runs-With-Twelve-Dogs Schwartz.

Go to the Eat Cafe pilot script