The Founder
The Founder is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by John Lee Hancock and written by Robert Siegel. Starring Michael Keaton as businessman Ray Kroc, the film depicts the story of his creation of the McDonald's fast-food restaurant chain, which eventually involved forcing out the company's original founders to take control with conniving ruthlessness. Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch co-star as McDonald's founders Richard and Maurice McDonald, alongside Linda Cardellini as Ray Kroc's third wife Joan Smith, and B. J. Novak as McDonald's president and chief executive Harry J. Sonneborn. The film premiered at Arclight Hollywood on December 7, 2016, and was released theatrically in the United States on January 20, 2017, by the Weinstein Company. It grossed $24 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised Keaton's performance.
1m15s
Well, we were young and hungry. There wasn't a job to be had in all of New Hampshire. So we decided to pack our bags and head west. To Hollywood. I wanted to be in the movie business. And Dick, well, he wanted to be... - Employed. - So we landed jobs at Columbia Pictures driving trucks. - Huh. And after a few years, we had enough saved to buy our own little piece of showbiz. A beautiful little movie theater in Glendora. Which would have been swell. Except for the timing. It was September of '29. One minute we're screening the Gold Diggers of Broadway, and next it's, "Brother can you spare a dime?" - I couldn't. - Nobody in town was making any money, except for one fella, Wylie Reid. Had a hot dog and root beer stand. Hey people still gotta eat, right? So we decide to open up our own little stand, hot dogs and orange juice, in Arcadia. And it went okay. I mean we weren't going gang-busters. There just weren't enough people in Arcadia. Meanwhile, one town over is San Bernardino and we want to relocate, but we got no money for a new stand. And that's when my brother here comes up with one of his brilliant ideas. Tell him, Dick. - Well... - He says, why don't we move the stand we've got. Put it on a truck. Genius, right. Only there's one little problem. On the road between the two towns, there's an overpass. And the building won't clear. Now I figure that's it, we're done for. But then Dick says, "Why don't we saw the building in half?" - Saw it in half...
The Founder
2m42s
- So we've moved the restaurant we're setting up shop. But now we want to do a few tweaks, because now it's 1940. And drive-ins are all the rage. I mean, they are the hottest thing going, and I say, "Dick we gotta get in on this." And Dick says... - "Okay". And two months later we open for business... McDonald's Famous Barbecue. 27 item menu. Uniformed waitresses bring your food right to the car. And it goes gang-busters. We're going great guns. But then sales start to level off. - The drive-in model as we learned, - has a few built-in problems. - Tell me about it. For starters, there's the customer issue. Drive-in's tend to attract, shall we say, a less than desirable clientele. - Teenagers. - Hot rodders and hooligans. Juvenile delinquents in blue jeans. And then there's the service. It takes forever and a day for your food to arrive. - And when it finally does... - It's usually wrong. - Yeah. The Carhops are too busy dodging gropes to remember that you wanted strawberry phosphate, not cherry. - Well, that's if they remember at all. - And then, there's the expenses. The huge payroll. Due to the large staff required. Dishes constantly getting broken or stolen. - Tremendous overhead. - So one day, Dick has a realization. He sees that the bulk of our sales are only in three items. Hamburgers. French fries. Soft drinks. Eighty-seven percent. - So we say to ourselves let's focus on what sells. And that's exactly what we do. Brisket gone. Tamales gone. But we don't stop there. We look at everything. - What else don't we need? - Turns out quite a lot. - Carhops. Walk up to a window, get the food yourself. - Dishes... - All paper packaging. - Disposable. - Cigarette machines, jukeboxes. - Drive out the riff-raff. - Creating a family friendly environment here. - But that's not enough. - All right. See, our whole lives we'd piggybacked off other people's ideas. We wanted something that wasn't just different. It had to be better. It needed to be ours. And that's what brings us to the biggest cut of all. - Which was? - The wait. - Orders ready in 30 seconds. - Not 30 minutes. Mecca. - We looked at each other one night. - You thinking what I'm thinking? - We're going to have to tear down, rebuild. Reconfigure. Rethink the whole dang thing. - We're talking about shutting down a thriving business for months. - People are going to think we're crazy. - We were crazy. - And you are going to love how we did it. Dick, you gotta tell him. - The tennis court? - He brings me out to this tennis court. And he's drawn this line, the exact dimensions of our kitchen. Sink on the right. Extruder on the left. - Extruder. - Bagging and hood. - Hood. - Garnish-garnish. - This is burger finish. - Got it. - And this is burger slide. We could just move those. - Okay. - Multi-mixer, soft drinks. - We bring out our whole staff and we have them go through the motions, making pretend burgers and fries. All right, Steve, anticipate that. You gotta keep the tray level.
The Founder
18.1s
- And Dick is running around with this stick marking where all the equipment should be. - Tuck in. Tony are you going to skip the pickles when we're really doing it? - They do it over and over, hashing it out. Choreographing it like some crazy burger ballet. What's going on over there? - Yes! No! No!
The Founder
28.3s
See all this open space here now? We've rearranged the fry situation. So now it's stage left. The deep fryer stage right. Begin! That's great. - Come on, guys. - We're pretty tied up here. - Watch out, it's the timing of the Lazy-Susan. Those are finished burgers. You can't... Hold it. I-I still think there's a third version. - What do you want to move? - I want to move everything. Back to stage left, please.
The Founder
1m21s
Put your back into it, Seth! And pickles and pickle and mustard! We take the layout to a builder, custom build the kitchen to our exact specs. - Tada! The Speedee System is born. The world's first-ever system to deliver food fast. It's totally revolutionary. - And a complete disaster. - Why? Opening day, cars pull up onto the lot and they start honking immediately because no carhop comes up. You place your order! - We try to explain to them the walk-up window. And they are bewildered. Now they're furious. What do you mean I gotta get out of my car? Most of them just cuss us out and drive off. And the few that stay are mad as heck because they're eating off paper and they gotta discard their own trash. - Why? - You're doing great. Yeah, we won't be coming out to the car, but you can come on up. Welcome to McDonald's! We may have underestimated the learning curve. - So by five o'clock Dick is calculating how much it's going to cost to go back to drive-in. But I am not ready to throw in the towel. I go back to our old Hollywood days, I think to myself, we gotta go big with this. We gotta put on a show. So I say, "Dick, I wanna throw a grand re-opening. A gala premiere that would put Louis B. Mayer to shame." So we rent a bunch of spotlights. Same ones we used to haul around in the Columbia days. We get sparklers, a juggler for the kiddies. It is an event, people show up in droves. - And then... - The flies. They must've been drawn by all the lights. Millions of them. It was like a scene outta Exodus. The Pharaoh would've released the Israelites.
The Founder
53.2s
- Franchise! - Beg your pardon? - Franchise! Franchise the damn thing! It's too damn good for just one location. There should be McDonald's everywhere. Coast to coast. Sea to shining sea. - Mr. Kroc... - Hey, you know I... I got a confession I want to make to you boys. I'm not out here in California for any kind of business meetings. I came out here for you. A few days ago, I got into St. Louis, Missouri. And I was doing some business, and I broke out my map. And I followed my finger on one single highway west. Route 66. - Mr. Kroc... - And something told me. Something told me to get into my car and drive that highway. And you know where it led me? Right here. Right smack dab here. Right to this unbelievable establishment. And when I saw these lines and your whole operation, and tasted your product, I knew what needed to happen. Franchise. Franchise! Franchise! Franchise! Franchise!
The Founder
28s
Five. Three in Southern California. One in Sacramento. And one in Phoenix. And that's all there will ever be. - Why? - Two-words. Quality control. It's almost impossible to enforce standards from afar. Places were a mess, filthy kitchens, inconsistent menus. - Sacramento was selling burritos. - To watch your precious creation be mismanaged like that... Your name... - Put Mac in the hospital.
The Founder