[Prompt at bottom]
Title: A Tale of Two Lattes
Logline:
When Charles Dickens, a peculiar young barista with a compulsion for giving customers wildly inaccurate, Victorian-era names, causes chaos at a Starbucks, he's fired—but not before his whimsical naming habit inspires a viral sensation that launches him toward the literary fame history remembers.
Short Treatment:
Charles, an eccentric young man with a flair for the theatrical and an obsession with 19th-century mannerisms, works the counter at a bustling Los Angeles Starbucks. He has only one flaw: he refuses to write the correct names on customers' cups. Instead, he scrawls things like Percival Thistlewhump, Agatha Widdershins, or Master Silas Porridge-Buttock—regardless of whether the customer said “Jason.”
At first, it’s met with confusion. Then annoyance. Then intrigue. Soon, a TikTok of a woman named “Megan” discovering her cup says Miss Petunia Blusterthwaite goes viral. People begin hoping for a Dickensian name. Customers line up, not for coffee, but for characters.
But Starbucks management is less amused. They cite corporate branding guidelines and customer satisfaction metrics. Charles is dismissed.
Jobless but buoyed by the chaos he's created, Charles finds refuge at a quieter café across the street—a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf with less foot traffic and more leniency. There, he begins to write. In longhand. On ruled paper. His first serial: The Pickwick Papers—inspired, of course, by the weirdos he served daily.
By the end, Charles has moved on. His old Starbucks has framed one of his cups. A small plaque reads:
"To Percival Thistlewhump. May your foam ever rise."
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Charles Dickens works at a Starbucks and has a mischievous and even compulsive need to write whimsical, Dickensian names on the cups, regardless of the customer’s real name. Amusing for a brief while, this starts creating disruption in the store and not surprisingly, Dickens’s tenure in the store is limited. However, through an amusing twist, he manages to convert this to the career we know him for today.Interestingly, he wrote his first novel in a journal at a nearby Coffee Bean & Tealeaf.
