Under the Golden Arches

Time to clock in…

Few parts of modern culture are as ubiquitous as McDonald’s. We all know this. No matter where we live, there’s a McDonald’s somewhere. Love it or hate it, that is pretty remarkable, as is the story behind the founding of McDonald’s, which was sorta recounted in the 2016 film, The Founder.

The movie opens in 1954, when Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) is a traveling salesman hawking Multimixers, which are special machines that can mix five milkshakes at one time. He’s not getting a lot of takers, and when his secretary, June (Kate Kneeland) tells him about a hamburger stand called McDonald’s in San Bernadino, California that ordered eight of the mixers, Ray’s got to check it out.

When Ray arrives at the McDonald’s stand in San Bernadino, he’s shocked to find a gigantic line snaking out from the building. No one seems concerned; one customer tells him, “Don’t worry; it goes fast.”

Fast, indeed. Ray’s got another shock in store for him when he gets up to the window and his burger, fries, and Coke show up in less than a minute. While he eats, he notices how into the food everyone is. It’s a far cry from the usual drive-ins of the time, where customers are rude, waitresses get orders wrong, and it’s all very slow and draggy.

Ray approaches the brothers, Maurice (John Carroll Lynch) and Dick (Nick Offerman) about how they developed the system that allowed them to serve dozens of customers in minutes, but he wants to know if they’re interested in franchising. Maurice and Dick regale Ray with their tale, especially the part about training their staff to be in a certain area at a certain time, which they call the Speedee System, but when it comes to franchising, they’re not interested. Too hard to maintain quality control.

After trying in vain to hawk more Multimixers, Ray goes back to the brothers with another angle: They may not want to franchise their restaurant, but they should do it for America. The McDonalds reluctantly agree, but they have no idea what they’ve let themselves in for.

Ray’s wife, Ethel (Laura Dern) waits at home more or less impatiently. She tries to be supportive, and even helps Ray find people to run the various McDonald’s locations, but by and large, her marriage to Ray is doomed because of plain old neglect and it’s pretty sad. Well, it would be sad if the movie wasn’t hustling us along to the next story point.

Ray is opportunistic to a fault, and he’s not above taking credit for Maurice and Dick’s innovations. The Golden Arches logo? His idea. The Speedee System? Also his idea. He and the brothers butt heads about various details, such as adding a basement in the Midwest restaurants. Ray also makes a lot of decisions that anger Maurice and Dick, such as calling the first franchise location in Des Plaines Illinois, McDonald’s Number One. When Harry Sonneborn (B.J. Novak) sells Kroc on the idea of McDonald’s owning its own land, profits snowball.

In the end, there’s nothing Dick and Maurice can do but watch helplessly as the business they worked so hard to develop is taken out of their hands and becomes a monster they recognize but they don’t. As we know from history, they will not only lose their restaurant but the name of their restaurant, although they get a tidy sum of money. In yet another “Up Yours” move, Ray even builds a McDonald’s almost right next to Dick and Maurice’s original hamburger stand. There are a lot of shots of the characters looking up at McDonald’s buildings, as if they’re only the delivery system for what’s really important.

The Founder is a very interesting film. It’s not heavy on backstory or exposition beyond the McDonalds telling about how they came up with the Speedee System, although they probably should have, because the movie doesn’t really go into why the McDonalds’ invention was so significant in a time when restaurants went through quite a sea change in America. Its pacing is almost relentless, but we do get some time to take things in, and that’s a good thing because the original McDonald’s was painstakingly recreated for the film, as was the OG Speedee System.

Michael Keaton was exactly the right choice for Kroc because he’s nicely charming and intense in the part, with plenty of shark just below the surface. I couldn’t help thinking that when the guy who played Batman tells someone to do something for America, they danged well better do it for America. Keaton’s schmooze game is on point, too, and he even sings “Pennies From Heaven” in one scene. Yes, it’s Michael Keaton’s real voice. It so, so works.

In fact, not a single actor in this film was miscast. I think my other favorite is Nick Offerman as Richard McDonald because he brought some understated humor to the proceedings. After Richard has a dust-up with Ray on the phone, Maurice asks Richard if Ray hung up on him.

“Yes,” Richard says. “Unless we just got violently disconnected.”

I suspect that line has Offerman written all over it. The “violent disconnection” thing becomes a running gag in a few other scenes, too.

For the most part, The Founder is a pretty one-to-one portrayal of Ray Kroc and the McDonald’s brothers’s story. We see how innovative and revolutionary the Speedy System really was and what it took to get it going. We see Kroc’s instinctive business sense, his knack for finding successful franchisees and that he’s almost never wrong. The film, however, doesn’t try to whitewash Kroc too much–they show that he was a pretty ruthless guy who did whatever it took to get what he wanted, including Joan Smith, the wife of one of his franchisees. Only in real life, Joan was Kroc’s third wife, not his second, and from all accounts, quite a remarkable woman.

Yeah, there were artistic and factual liberties taken because there always are. The McDonald’s company was technically already franchised by the time Kroc came along, although it was relatively small-time. While Keaton’s portrayal of Kroc is not exactly sunshine and lollipops, the real Kroc had a pretty violent temper. His relationship with the McDonald brothers, however, was less contentious than it’s portrayed in the film, although Kroc still basically whisked the company out from under them and the whole business was extremely stressful. The brothers didn’t cease all involvement with the company either; while Maurice passed away from heart failure in 1971, Richard McDonald was on hand to eat McDonald’s one millionth burger on November 21, 1984.

What’s interesting is that it took almost exactly thirty years for the McDonald brothers to get any credit. Even today, eight years after The Founder came out, McDonald’s corporate website doesn’t mention the brothers at all. The international McDonald’s sites don’t, either, as they largely focus on when McDonald’s was established in their respective countries (see the UK site here). Only Canada’s McDonald’s site gives any of the real history. Richard was never bitter about it, though, because he wasn’t into the high-rolling corporate lifestyle. He moved back to his home state of New Hampshire, got married, and passed away in 1998.

Love it or hate it, McDonald’s is a remarkable part of American history, even if Ray Kroc was kind of a snake in the grass, and The Founder is a highly diverting experience that may or may not inspire a craving for a Quarter Pounder and fries. Or whatever McD’s delicacy is on the local menu.

For more of the On the Job Blogathon, please see Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-In and Rachel at Hamlette’s Soliloquy. Thanks for hosting, y’all–this was great! Another post is on the way Thursday, so yeah, as always, thanks for reading, and have a great rest of the weekend…

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The Founder is available to own on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.

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