Starbucks Nation: A Novel Book

Morgan Beale is a pop icon and hates every second of it. He begins adapting the latest bestseller, The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag, into a blockbuster movie just before his celebutante wife starts remodeling their Hollywood home, driving Beale to a hotel. Dodging the paparazzi one morning on his way to Starbucks, he spots his writing partner, Luke, who has been dead for over a decade, and who is staring into a mysterious hole in the ground. Driving headlong into the hole, they discover the surreal otherworld of Starbucks Nation, a film set littered with characters from Beale's life and the novel he's adapting, including a talking Chihuahua and an elite commando unit of ethnic cookie-making elves. Mercilessly lampooning our fascination with reality television, celebrity blunders, and mindless infotainment, STARBUCKS NATION brilliantly showcases the absurdities of modern society.

Publishers Weekly

Delivering an exhaustive inventory of L.A. archetypes, this debut by the writer/director of Who is Cletis Tout? fails to offer insight into the media-blitzed circus at which it discharges its big guns. Morgan Beale, a jaded screenwriter of "mythic" stature busy adapting bestselling book The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag for the screen, one day runs into his long-dead writing partner, Luke. Luke quickly entices Beale into a Hearse, and so begins a hallucinatory if largely incoherent trip into an alternate universe where Ver Wiel allows Beale to go about shooting fish in a barrel. Beal targets "chimp" producers, paparazzi, reality TV hosts and contestants, actors, celebutantes, critics ("I hate critics"), TV anchors (and their segment producers), FEMA and his starlet wife-"the whore of the corn." Unfortunately, this reads mostly like a score-settling hit-list than Tinseltown parody, and it rarely rises above the level of a drugged-out diatribe-particularly during a lengthy, surrealist delirium involving a talking Chihuahua. Beale's bilious outpouring makes his Hollywood shooting gallery almost endearing by comparison.
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