His fateful walk from taking tips to ‘Waiting ...’

IF you’ve ever suspected a waitress of spitting in your soda, your worst fears will be confirmed in the film “Waiting ....” From the kitchen staff’s defiling of customer dinners to the waiters’ sexualized antics and unwashed hands, the new food-service comedy contains so many vile and gag-inducing scenes that even die-hard restaurant-goers will want to cook at home.

“All of the stuff in the movie is a comedic exaggeration of what happens. Sad to say for the people who eat out a lot, but it’s not a fabrication,” said writer-director Rob McKittrick.

McKittrick would know. For six years he worked as a waiter in a string of southern Florida restaurants, serving up buffalo wings and cobb salads everywhere from T.G.I. Friday’s to Roadhouse Grill. It’s that experience that led him to write “Waiting ...,” an off-color comedy chronicling the goings-on at the make-believe ShenaniganZ chain restaurant.

“It just sunk in that everybody around me that I was working with at Roadhouse Grill was exactly like everybody around me at Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale,” said McKittrick, who had this a-ha moment four years into his waiting career. “It was the exact same type of people sharing the exact same experience complaining about the exact same type of customers.”

Certain archetypes began to emerge, McKittrick said: “The smokin’ hot hostess everybody flirted with,” “the manager who liked to throw his weight around a little too much,” “the waiter or waitress who’d been there too long and was burned out and pissed off all the time.” So did plot lines: The uneasy relationship between kitchen workers and wait staff, and restaurant workers pushing 30 with nothing to show for it but cash tips.

“At 20, waiting tables is a great job, but at 24 it’s not so great, and at 27, it’s downright sobering,” said McKittrick, who was 24 when he wrote the script.

Now 32, McKittrick has, in many ways, lived the Hollywood dream -- writing, selling and directing his first screenplay, which was filmed on a $3-million budget. Ryan Reynolds, Anna Faris, Justin Long, Andy Milonakis, Luis Guzman and Dane Cook all star in the film, which unfolds over a single restaurant shift.

But back in 1999, McKittrick didn’t think a Hollywood film was even possible. He’d spent $10,000 going the Kevin Smith “Clerks” route -- racking up credit card debt to shoot the film on his own at an Orlando restaurant after hours. He planned to take the independent film fest route when he was finished.

“I didn’t even have the aspiration to make the movie the way I ended up making it. It was just so beyond the realm of plausibility because I was a waiter in a chain restaurant in Orlando,” he said. “I didn’t have any money. I didn’t know anybody in Hollywood.”

It was only through “weird degrees of separation” that the script landed in the right hands.

“My good friend started dating a girl who went to high school with a guy whose next door neighbor worked as an assistant to an agent at William Morris,” McKittrick rattled off, in a line that was clearly rehearsed.

Explanation: McKittrick was at a film festival in Florida when his friend started flirting with a girl. That girl happened to know producer Jeff Balis; she sent him the script.

Balis loved it and put McKittrick in touch with his neighbor. The neighbor helped McKittrick get an agent. The agent then optioned the script to Artisan Entertainment for six figures. And McKittrick moved to Los Angeles.

“It felt incredibly real, and above everything else it’s very funny,” said Balis, who later signed on as one of the film’s producers. “[McKittrick] is one of the more hysterical writers/voices/personalities, and it comes through clearly in his script and in his directing.”

That McKittrick was able to direct his own film is highly unusual. When he inked the deal with Artisan, he was promised an interview for the director position, but he knew it was just a formality. It was only after Artisan (and, following that, New Line) let the option lapse and the rights returned to McKittrick that he was able to re-attach himself to the project. Lion’s Gate eventually picked up the film for distribution.

It turned out that “Waiting ... “ applied as much to McKittrick’s making of the film as to its subject matter.

“I was definitely very lucky, but also I stood the course,” said McKittrick. “I had eight years to get lucky. The good news is I didn’t have anything better going on.”