An addendum to the Biopic

We're back!  The year of Covid crawls to a close with a light at the end of the tunnel looking to be coming from somewhere around April 2021.  In the meantime, this is the first year since 1917 that Ohio State and Michigan will not play and we also have cynical power hungry politicians and their sycophants trying to make stupid people angry enough to give them their money because something something need money to stop a steal something something.  Some day there will be a documentary about these times, which will be followed with controversy about how accurately it depicted the situation, what facts are portrayed and the truthfulness of those facts, and most importantly whether or not blame is assigned to the correct people or if blame is even assigned at all.  It will probably be created and produced in another country if what is left of ours is no longer turning out quality entertainment for the hungry masses.  That's why our movie review mission is so important here at the Big Empty!!!  Future anthro-frickin-pology baby!!!!  The US wasn't always a cesspool of conspiracy, stupidity, and a population that was interested in only knowing enough to be dangerous and not one bit more.  We're here to make sure your great grandchildren know it.  Forward we go to the day when humanity figures out exactly when and where it all went wrong.  My money is on the cancellation of The Game.

Now, on to business.  Literally.  I stumbled on something this week that brought back a lot of memories.  Not in a good way either.  It's not entirely bad, but the good part feels like taking that moment to ponder the good memories of time spent with a really bad ex.  The Big Empty Review Biopic Category was closed.  It was history.  But then I saw The Founder, and ironically, it was the biopic that owns a big part of the biopic about me that will never be written.  So I wrote a little bit of it here, the part where Venn diagram of the creators of worlds biggest fast food chain and the worlds greatest collection of movie reviews that nobody will ever read overlap.

I graduated from college in May of 1996.  I had just moved into my own apartment and was delivering pizza for a living.  Looking back on it, it wasn't a bad time to be alive at all.  Other than having the weight on my shoulders of finding a job that would justify my private institution degree, things were looking up.  I didn't have a messy roommate who never paid their fair share of the bills and rent anymore, and my office was literally in my car, where I could just drive around and listen to music.  And it paid enough to keep the lights on and avoid getting evicted.  I worked, then I came home, and everything was where I left it and nobody was bothering me.  But this situation had to be temporary.  I was getting married in less than a year and I needed solid employment with benefits and such.  The scariest thing about that was the thought that I could end up in a situation somewhere where I missed this life, and I'd find myself longing for the days of just jumping in the car and getting paid to drive around with Alice In Chains and Soundgarden blasting from the speakers.  

When I wasn't working or sleeping, I was mailing out resumes and cover letters.  Months of this went on.  Christmas came and went.  I had some interviews, that were followed up with letters thanking me for my time.  Those were considered successes.  Most never responded at all.  Such was the life of a Gen X college graduate in the latter part of the 90s.  Then I stumbled on a brochure at the office of career planning and placement at my alma mater, and had that feeling that something might be a really good fit.  It advertised a career in restaurant management with benefits and an advancement path.  Heck, I already felt like I was running a restaurant when I worked closing shifts at the pizza joint.  I knew the lingo, I knew how to manage profit margins when they are already razor thin, and I knew how to get high school students to be productive, or so I thought.  

I sent my resume.  I was called.   I was interviewed.  I was invited to one of their company owned locations to do an "On The Job Evaluation" or what they called OJE.  I passed with flying colors and was asked back for another interview.  Soon after, I was offered my first salaried position.  One of my pizza pals warned me that McDonald's a'int like making pizzas.  Meh, it'll be fine I thought.  Being on a career path with an international corporation meant opportunity was opening up for me.  

Looking back, I wish the position were hourly.  Or actually, I wish I just would have waited for the next ship to come in.  A couple of months in, I would have given anything to be carrying a filled pizza warmer to my car, firing up the ignition and cranking up the tunes for $5.75 an hour.  Simpler times.  Happier times.  I've had jobs from supermarket cashier to corporate white collar and everywhere in between.  24 years after I delivered my last pizza, I still think pizza delivery is one of my favorite jobs.  If I didn't love the work I was doing now and didn't need the money, I'd do it in a heartbeat.  

But when I clocked out on my last shift at East of Chicago, I was all optimism.  A part of me was going to connect my professional adult experience to a very happy part of my childhood.  When I was in elementary school, I had a paper route, which meant I had more money than most 10 year olds.  I liked to go to McDonalds.  There was something very satisfying about covering my own trip to my favorite restaurant with money that I earned and not having to beg my parents to take me there.  It all gave me a sense of accomplishment.  When I was in sixth grade, my school partnered with that same restaurant in a program that would train us to spend a school day working there.  We spent several days with the restaurant manager who came into our school and trained us on how to do the job.  Then the big payoff was the day we got to go in the restaurant and work.  We all felt like we were the luckiest kids in the whole town.  

The next year, they started their Monopoly sweepstakes.  This was the very first time they did the Monopoly game and I was an avid player.  I collected so many game pieces.  I was so close.  I only needed one more piece in any category and I was a winner!  I kept getting more pieces, thinking one of them had to hit pay dirt.  Anybody else that played that I spoke with had the same experience.  It occurred to me how the game worked at that point.  The hook was making you believe you were getting closer to winning with every purchase, but make the few critical game pieces so rare and obscure that hardly anyone had a chance of actually winning anything.  I never collected game pieces again after that first go around in 1987.  And I never met anyone who won anything.  Of course, now we very specifically know why that was the case.  But even if it weren't a corrupted game, I still don't think the results would have been any different for me or anyone in my orbit.  I'd also gotten so sick of their food as a result of participating in that contest.  And now the cynical way that contest was setup to ultimately make me feel like I would only get close to winning without ever doing it left me with a bad impression of the place that I used to get so excited about going to.  Then something about how people could get addicted to gambling made more sense to my 12 year old self than it did before.  Growing pains I suppose, but I digress.

Now fast forward to 1997, ten years after that first Monopoly contest. I was 22 years old, a few months away from my wedding, and I was going to work for the place that reunited me with my childhood.  For the first few weeks, I trained eagerly like the young fast tracker that I was told I was.  I spent a lot of time being preached the Gospel According to Ray Kroc.  You may be well aware that he is the much revered (at least among the McBrass in Oak Brook Illinois) hero of American fast food.  I saw video after video of how the humble milk shake mixer salesman had a chance encounter with the McDonald brothers and their restaurant in California and he was just so taken with this place that by golly, he just up and bought the company and the rest is McHistory.  When I wasn't watching these videos, I was reading chapters in my training book about St. Ray the Lesser, the milk shake man who saved the planet from a life of slow sub-par service somehow making him simultaneously the Greater.  Ol Ray was so dedicated to his vision that he just worked worked worked.  He never stopped.  Dinner rush is over, gotta get that trash changed out.  Gotta sweep up.  Gotta mop.  Who's leaning?!  Get cleaning for fucks sake!!!!!  You, dear management trainee, must understand that you must give all of your life and all of your energy to making this work.  It's what Ray, God rest his soul would want you to do....needs you to do.  Let's pour it on a little more and throw in a picture of Big Ray hosing down the parking lot at his McDonald's in Des Plaines Illinois just so you don't forget that because he never stopped working you can't either.  

I was in their three month management trainee program which would put me on a path to a 2nd assistant manager.  Within 2 years, I was supposed to become a 1st assistant.  Then 2 more short years and I get to be the captain of one of these ships.  I'd seen this movie already and I know you've seen it too.  

 

Now I was living it.  Something was hiding in the details that weren't in any video or training book. If these McDonald brothers were running such a lucrative restaurant, why would they want to sell it?  And how did a guy who couldn't move a milk shake mixer have the capital to buy it and why would he be the guy they would sell to in the first place?  Another thing.  If the Almighty Kroc was impressed enough by this operation to keep the McDonald brothers name on his restaurant, then how come none of my videos ever talk about those fuckin guys?  Don't they deserve a little credit for anything or did they just say "it's all yours milk shake man....good luck" and walk away from it forever?  Don't ask those questions.  Just stick to your diet of cholesterol and platitudes ("if ya got time to lean, ya got time to clean muthafuckas!!!!") along with the promise that if I just worked myself into the ground, well things would happen.  Nothing happened except for me getting a glimpse into my future, and it didn't look any better than today.  It was the Monopoly game all over again.  Close enough to winning that if you just keep playing, you'll never realize you're losing.  And this was more like the late stage part of earlier referenced gambling addiction, where you're deep in a hole and the more you try to dig your way out, the deeper you get.  The part where learned helplessness can take root.  This time it wasn't my money I'd be losing.  Time, the one resource that you can never get more of, was what I was giving them.  It was the only job I had for less than one year, but I also made sure that when I left, it would be for greener pastures.  When the right opportunity came, I didn't let the door hit me in the ass and I never looked back.

Somehow the fact that Hollywood told the story of the McDonald brothers and Ray Kroc in 2016 totally escaped me until this week. Seeing the preview on Netflix and this series of scenes in particular...

brings me right back to those training days and the feeling that I once had of optimism about a life advancing through the ranks of a fast food empire....How I could take inspiration from Ray the milkshake man and work hard and become somebody all with a feeling of reverence that I had for the beauty of the very efficient system that McDonald's embraced, and how well it could work when the business vison was right and didn't try to overextend itself (which I later learned it always was doing).  I wanted to see this story and especially see the McDonald brothers create their masterpiece (in a series of scenes that are beautiful, fun and nostalgic to watch) and feel the sense of awe that Kroc felt when he first learned about it. And the delicious shamrock shake (always been a favorite) desert of the whole things is that this was the movie that would fill in all of the holes....answer all of those questions that I had when my instincts told me that the sanitized version of events that was shoved down my throat for three months back in 1997 had a dark side that was hidden.  The humble sales man turned benevolent titan is actually more Willie Loman finding his niche and ruthlessly wielding it upon anyone he comes in contact with. The Founder is well written, beautifully scored, and delightfully cast, with the exception of putting Laura Dern in a role that is way undersized for her talent.  That may be intentional, as Dern's portrayal of Kroc's underappreciated first wife actually makes you feel for Ethel Kroc as much as you feel bad for Dern herself reduced to a portrayal of someone broken by her husband’s ambition and doing it extremely well.  

The great thing about The Founder is that it captures the dual reality of McDonald's and the role it plays in American culture.  There's a McDonald's in every town, it's an icon of Americana...a landmark that offers us familiarity everywhere we go.  When people are out of town in a strange place, the golden arches are a temporary sense of home away from home.  I've heard more than one person tell me a story about when they first left home as a high school graduate to start college or a new life in another state, and their feelings of home sickness were given a respite when they saw McDonald's.  It was the thing that reminded them that not everything was unknown in this strange new place.  At the same time, you can't help but feel like you're the one being consumed instead of being the consumer.  You are inundated with their advertising.  If you have small kids, they are begging you to take them to the play land and get happy meal toys.  If you coach little league, you're taking the team there for cheeseburgers and ice cream after the game.  You do everything at their pace and on their terms with little control over any of it.  The McDonald brothers who developed the modern concept of fast food were just the first to be consumed by what Ray Kroc would do with their invention.  We are all Dick and Mac McDonald, where the fruits or our labor, the products of our ingenuity, and our most indispensable resource, our time, are just prey for what Kroc's creation continues to consume.  The most interesting thing about this story to me is that it feels incomplete.  Though it did answer so many of my questions, I still to this day wonder if it ever occurred to Kroc that he was consumed by his own ambition, or if he died believing that he was the only person who could tame the McDonald's beast and bend it to his will.

For all of the years since I left McDonald's, I could probably count the number of times I've willingly gone back to one on one hand.  All I feel whenever I go near one is some strange combination of pity and the false temptation of being wooed by an ex who promises they'll do better this time.....that it will be just like before things went bad.  But I know, under that roof is a mixture of middle age single parents who have another job to go to when their shift ends, high school kids that are determined to do as little as possible while earning a check (and think you owe them something because they almost called off to chill with their friends instead of showing up), and some poor assistant manager who is going to get their ass chewed because they couldn't get this band of merry has-beens and never will-bes to sell enough fountain drinks to justify their minimum wages.  

See here's the secret.  Here's a whole bunch of them.  The profit margin in fast food is in the soft drinks.  The food margin doesn't justify the cost of firing up the lights on the golden arches.  But the bulk soda costs less than the cup they put it in.  Everything they sell to you is about moving the sodey-pop.  The assistant manager is also being told to keep the drive-thru moving, since that's where 2/3rds of the revenue comes from and if it a'int movin, the joint a'int printing money.  They're told that they need to be on their crew's ass like a bad rash for 10-12 hours a day, 6 days a week while getting paid a salary, which means no overtime or extra $$ for all that extra time they put in.  This will pigeon hole them into all kinds of histrionics to maintain some sense of control over the inmates.  They're told when there aren't customers, they have to send hourly help home and do the work of 2 or 3 hourly people because that keeps labor cost down.  Never mind that after you just sent two jerks home early, their jerk friends who were supposed to come in for dinner rush just called off to hang with the jerks you told to punch out during an unexpected afternoon lull.  And for that dinner rush, well guess who just pulled up on the lot?  

The 4 words that will haunt this poor manager in their dreams are "we've got a bus!"  Yep, when the busload of 40-60 hungry exhausted travelers after a long day at the amusement park, zoo, or game all want to be fed in 2 minutes or less, along with the rest of your usual dinner crowd.  In 30 seconds, each of these customer orders on the screen begins flashing, indicating you haven't met the time metric and your Owner Operator or corporate management is going to get a report on how many times that happened.  You haven't even started to feed the bus when you already know a serious ass chewing is coming tomorrow or later this week.  Half way through this rush, one of the customers you served earlier tells you that the toilet in the bathroom overflowed.  Shortly afterward, another one throws a hamburger at you because it had pickles on it and they ordered it without pickles.  

So what do you do the next day?  You're not going to let that happen again.  So you keep your crew people on the clock to prepare for the big rush.....that never comes.  Now you haven't met your transactions per man-hour metric.  Your not selling enough coca-cola to justify paying these kids and there's nothing left to clean.  Now, you've let the boss down twice in two days.  You hate this job, but all you can think about is how you're going to have to beg to keep it because you need to be employed and you haven't found an alternative.  Ray Kroc is the person who set these people up to never be able to meet the standard no matter what they do.

Some poor assistant manager in nearly every town in this country is either hoping they can find a better opportunity, or they've given up all hope.  Since fast food managers are typecast by non-fast food employers as people who will only ever be any good at fast food, and their resumes are passed over; it's more likely the latter.

All over America, a new group of eager future assistant managers is being shown that picture of Ray Kroc hosing down his parking lot and they don't yet know enough to say "when I'm in a position to bring in the kind of coin he was getting when he owned that restaurant, then we'll talk about how that even remotely has anything to do with me."  But if they are the kind of person who watches The Founder and feels inspired from beginning to end, then they're likely do very well.  If they find their initial inspiration changing to something else they just don't know how to articulate before the third act of the movie, they may want to make sure this job is just a stop on their road to finding purposeful and meaningful work; however they define that.