HUNGRY FOR PROFITS!
A riveting new movie traces the transformation of McDonald’s from a single restaurant to a global food empire
IT’S as American as apple pie, a diner of dazzling efficiency where Big Macs and Happy Meals are speedily dispatched, kids cavort in cushioned play areas and teenagers mingle over milkshakes. But behind the golden arches of McDonald’s lies a darker history – a rags-to-riches tale of a man who ruthlessly turned a single fast-food restaurant into the global corporation it is today.
It’s a dossier of dashed hopes, destroyed marriages and ruthless ambition with a generous side order of pathos. And it’s now being told on the big screen.
The Founder stars Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the fast-talking, down-on-hisluck Illinois salesman who pulled the mat out from under the feet of the original McDonald brothers.
“How the heck does a 52-year-old overthe-hill milkshake-machine salesman build a fast-food empire with 1 600 restaurants and an annual revenue of $700 million [R9,4 billion]?” Kroc asks in the trailer for the film.
The Founder sets out to answer this question – and it’s not a pretty journey.
Viewers are taken back to the 1950s when Kroc is fruitlessly peddling his gadgets across America. He comes across a super-efficient burger restaurant in San Bernardino, California, run by a likeable pair of brothers, Mac and Dick McDonald (played by John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman).
The brothers place an order for eight milkshake machines to add to their frenetic production line, and when Kroc arrives to deliver them he’s blown away by their speedy system of food delivery – “orders ready in 30 seconds, not 30 minutes”.
Dollar signs light up in his eyes. “There should be McDonald’s everywhere. Franchise the damn thing,” he hollers at the slightly startled brothers.
Mac and Dick naively take Kroc into their confidence and he soon manoeuvres his way into the business.
At first the brothers are seduced by Kroc’s blue-sky thinking but they soon become alienated and then quite literally disenfranchised as the shady older man bulldozes his way to ever-increasing profits and ever-more outlets.
“There’s a wolf in the hen house,” one
of the brothers laments. “We let him in.”
KROC is hell-bent on branding and expanding while the brothers’ focus had always been on innovation and a commitment to quality. Their modest dream was to make $1 million by the time they’re 50. Kroc’s dream is to conquer the world.
“Business is like war,” Kroc says at one stage. “It’s dog eat dog, rat eat rat. I want to take the future. I want to win.”
Once he gets going Kroc is unstoppable and brutal. His long-suffering wife Ethel, played by Laura Dern, becomes dismayed at the lengths to which he’ll go to succeed and his marriage falls apart. He then hooks up with Joan Smith (Linda Cardellini), a younger woman seduced by Kroc’s rampant ambition.
Sounds intriguing enough – yet the movie hasn’t been without controversy. Critics have accused it of glamourising capitalism and consumerism, with one complaining that it exemplifies the way in which corporate values have wormed their way into mainstream media and are being touted as entertainment.
“What’s extraordinary about The Founder is that it asks us to empathise with Kroc, an empathy that was impossible for me since Kroc is an amoral chancer . . . There’s no ‘mid-point crisis’, no revelation that he must make a choice between keeping or losing his integrity. We’re just meant to watch his rise to power – and applaud his grit,” writes The Guardian’s Tim Lott.
THIS isn’t the first time McDonald’s has been the subject of a movie. Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super Size Me showed the nasty side of America’s insatiable hunger for Big Macs. For 30 days Spurlock ate nothing but food from McDonald’s three times a day, consuming every item on the chain’s menu at least once.
The film documented the drastic effect this had on his physical and psychologi- cal well-being. Spurlock (then 32) gained just over 11 kg – a body mass increase of 13 percent.
His cholesterol went up alarmingly and he experienced mood swings, sexual dysfunction and fat accumulation in his liver. It took him 14 months to lose the weight gained from his experiment.
The film was a damning indictment of the fast-food industry. In contrast, all the McDonald’s customers in The Founder are portrayed as ecstatic about their burgers and fries.
But the audience’s initial sympathy with Kroc gives way to distaste as his hunger for profits ruins the lives of those who stand in his way. Keaton is well cast, easy to warm to in the beginning – who doesn’t love an underdog? – but then just as easy to dislike as he makes mincemeat of the McDonald brothers.
Love him or loathe him, there’s one thing we can be grateful for, as one critic puts it: at least it was the McDonald’s name he made world-famous and not his. “Otherwise, the planet would be full of children clamouring to go for a Kroc.”
The Founder opens in cinemas on 19 May. place in the world where the arches aren’t golden.
McDonald’s calls people who eat a lot of its food “heavy users”.
Utah resident David Whipple forgot a paper-wrapped McDonald’s hamburger that he bought in 1999 in his coat pocket. When he found the burger 14 years later it had hardly decomposed.
Famous people who’ve worked at McDonald’s include actress Sharon Stone, singer Shania Twain, actor and TV host Jay Leno, actress Rachel McAdams and singer Pink.