Variety
Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch for 2026 Include Scribes Behind ‘Being Heumann,’ ‘Clarissa’ and ‘A Different World’
The best movies and TV shows rest on one solid foundation: the script, and Variety has selected 10 of the up-and-coming scribes to celebrate in our Screenwriter to Watch class of 2026. The writers will be honored at a panel taking place at the Santa Fe Intl. Film Festival.
“Tony,” about a pivotal summer for a young Anthony Bourdain — who would go on to become a celebrated chef, writer and TV producer/host — is the first feature that Bartels and Howe have had produced as a team, though their friendship dates back to high school. The duo first collaborated on “Dumb Blonde,” a script for a Dolly Parton origin story that made the Black List in 2022. “We knew we liked working together and liked writing a version of a biopic. So we started talking about who else interested us, and we’re both longtime Bourdain fans,” says Howe about the process of pitching “Tony.”
“Our way of working when it comes to biopics was to find a window that serves as a microcosm for the larger journey, and for Dolly, it was her first eight years in Nashville when she becomes herself,” says Bartels.
“Then we continued that with ‘Tony,’ finding even a shorter window, which was just this one summer in Provincetown [Mass.] when he stumbled into a job as a dishwasher in a clam shack and found his life’s calling,” Bartels explains.
The “Tony” script was informed by some of their own experiences. “We both have spent a lot of time in New England and in kitchens,” Howe says. “My first job as a kid was washing dishes in a fish market on Nantucket, and Todd peeled vegetables in a fancy French restaurant in Connecticut.
“So there’s something about the atmosphere that really spoke to us. And then we love origin stories. We love trying to figure out what makes these fascinating people that we admire and love — how they got that way and what are the seeds that are planted early on that grow into this adult,” says Howe.
Howe and Bartels are now developing a richly varied slate of material: a biopic about a young Jackie Bouvier and her romance with John F. Kennedy; a project about the early days of MTV; an adaptation of the “Murder 101” podcast for Amazon with Jon Watts directing; plus the video game adaptation “Metal Gear Solid” for Sony.
“It was surprising to me that the skill set and the process that we used for these very specific types of biopics, where they’re really zoomed in and trying to tell a whole life’s story through a microcosm of a shorter time period, that this process served us well in doing this giant action movie,” Howe says of working on “Metal Gear Solid.” —Pat Saperstein
By Clayton Davis, Emily Longeretta, Angelique Jackson, Jazz Tangcay, Pat Saperstein, Daniel D'Addario, Selome Hailu