The Founder

The Founder' Director On Parallels Between Trump And Mcdonald's Kingpin Kroc

... shooting “The Founder,” about how Ray Kroc built the Mc Donald’s empire from a small burger chain launched by two brothers, Donald Trump had not yet announced his candidacy for U. S. president. Parallels between the two real-estate moguls did not come to mind during production, he says. But that’s changed. With the film hitting theatres on Friday, the same day as the presidential inauguration, a plethora of articles have emerged comparing Trump and Kroc. Hancock says he now sees the links. “They’re both businessmen, both very aware of branding and the power of a branded name,” he said in a recent phone interview, adding that they both also tried to get “the masses to rise up with populist words.”. “I have to say that it was one of those things where through the lens I’m looking through now, I went, ‘Oh, I do see that comparison a little bit.'”. Michael Keaton stars as Kroc, who is a 52-year-old struggling salesman from Illinois when he meets the Mc Donald brothers Dick and Mac in 1954. The brothers, played by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch, are running a burger operation with an ...

Founder’ Production Designer Had To Reproduce Mcdonald’s Iconic Golden Arches

... first appeared in the January 17, 2017 issue of Variety. Subscribe today. See more. So when director John Lee Hancock asked production designer Michael Corenblith to come up with an original store for “ The Founder ” — the biopic of Mc Donald’s founder Ray Kroc, played by Michael Keaton — the only building with arches that remained was in Downey, Calif. The Weinstein Co. movie, which opens wide Jan. 20, was shot in the Atlanta area, where Corenblith had to build two Mc Donald’s — the Mc Donald brothers’ original San Bernardino “octagon” structure, erected on a parking lot in Newnan, Ga., and another, of the Golden Arches variety, constructed 30 miles to the north in Douglasville, in a church parking lot. The designer spent time researching the look of original Mc Donald’s restaurants. “We did everything in our power to get these things as correct as we knew how,” he said. With the discovery of archival images of Kroc’s first Des Plaines, Ill., store, Corenblith was able to get a ...

Out And About At Wral.com

... operation in 1950 s Southern California. Kroc was impressed by the brothers' speedy system of making the food and saw franchise potential. He maneuvered himself into a position to be able to pull the company from the brothers and create a billion-dollar empire. Split (Suspense/Thriller, PG-13, Starring James Mc Avoy, Haley Lu Richardson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Jessica Sula) - While the mental divisions of those with dissociative identity disorder have long fascinated and eluded science, it is believed that some can also manifest unique physical attributes for each personality, a cognitive and physiological prism within a single being. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone (Comedy, Romance, PG, Starring Nicole Astra, Brett Dalton, Emily Eruraviel, Neil Flynn, Tim Frank) - Gavin Stone, a washed-up former child star, is forced to do community service at a local megachurch and pretends to be Christian so he can land the part of Jesus in their annual Passion Play, only to discover that the most important role of his life is far from Hollywood. x Xx: The Return of Xander Cage (Action/Adventure, Suspense/Thriller, PG-13, Starring Vin Diesel, Nina ...

Weinstein Co. Serves Up 'the Founder' Amid Smaller Film Slate And Shift To Tv

... Weinstein Co. in 2005, raising close to $1 billion through Goldman Sachs. A string of flops led to a debt restructuring in 2010, and gave the investment firm and an insurance company some of the studio’s valuable library of 515 film titles (worth as much as $511 million, executives say). Other ill-fated projects include an investment in the Halston fashion brand and the Broadway flop “Finding Neverland.”. “They spread themselves too thin and lost sight of the fact that they were good at indie films and genre films,” said one former Miramax executive who did not want to speak publicly to protect business relationships. In 2010, the Weinsteins rebounded with “The King’s Speech,” which won the Oscar for best picture and became one of the company’s biggest box-office successes. Dev Patel in a scene from "Lion.". Mark Rogers / Weinstein Co./Associated Press. Dev Patel in a scene from "Lion.". Dev Patel in a scene from "Lion." (Mark Rogers / Weinstein Co./Associated Press). But the hits have become less frequent. In 2015, Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” underperformed domestically while “Woman in Gold” and Dimension’s family-oriented “Paddington” fared better. Weinstein Co.’s ...

John Carroll Lynch On ‘the Founder’ And His Directorial Debut ‘lucky

... Stanton, David Lynch, Ed Begley Jr., Beth Grant, Tom Skerritt and Ron Livingston. If you’re not familiar with The Founder, written by Robert Siegel (Big Fan, The Wrestler) the film tells the true story of how Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), a salesman from Illinois, met Mac and Dick Mc Donald, who were running a burger operation in 1950 s Southern California. Kroc was impressed by the brothers’ speedy system of making the food and saw franchise potential. He then maneuvered himself into a position to be able to pull the company from the brothers and create a billion-dollar empire. The film also stars Linda Cardellini, Laura Dern, BJ Novak, and John Caroll Lynch. Image via Film Nation Entertainment. Watch what John Carroll Lynch had to say in the video above and below is exactly what we talked about followed by the trailer and some images. John Carroll Lynch. Why it’s surprising that the story hasn’t been told until now. How he got involved in the project. On shooting ...

The Founder ’s Trumpian Parallels

... do I eat it?”. Keaton is made for such moments. He has that trick, honed over many movies, of glancing to one side before delivering a line, especially a question, as if all information were secret and the surrounding world were populated by spies. Wartime conditions would suit him nicely. We feel both lured into his confidence and nervous of whatever he is about to propose or perpetrate. In short, he belongs to the Unrelaxers—that club of leading men, staffed by people like John Malkovich and Jeff Goldblum, whose bound duty is to never leave us at ease. So scarily does the Keaton smile flash on and off, with a sudden baring of incisors, that his entire career seems to have prepared him to play a man named Kroc. One lesson of “The Founder” is that there’s nothing wrong with biting off more than you can chew. You can always swallow it whole. Tucked inside the title is a gristly joke. Kroc did not found Mc Donald’s. In 1954, he came upon the concept of fast food, in the enterprising hands of Mac and Dick, took it up, took it over, and ...

The Founder' Is The Fast Food Of Biopics

... actual founders to do it. It’s a rather bleak rise to prosperity, but an interesting one nonetheless, since so much of Kroc’s skill at spreading Mc Donald’s around the country relied on his packaging of a fast-food restaurant as a plain, inoffensive monument to American family values. Unfortunately, The Founder, John Lee Hancock’s new biopic about Kroc’s rise to power in the ’50 s and ’60 s, is as bland as the burgers the businessman hawked. The film had the chance to subvert the typical bootstrap tale of American triumph, but instead it plays right into that easy narrative, trying to celebrate his business acumen without skirting past his darker misdeeds. The Founder ends up feeling extremely wishy-washy, unable to scrub the nastiness of Kroc’s success but also incapable of confronting it. In the end, it feels too close to the movie you’d imagine Kroc approving of—not exactly a hagiography, but a Wikipedia entry in which all the controversial material is squeezed into one small section at the bottom. Related Story. Engineering the Perfect Mc Donalds Burger, and a Marketing Win. Kroc is ...

The Founder,' 'the Red Turtle' And More Critics' Picks, Jan. 20-26

... Jim Jarmusch’s wonderfully serene and beguiling movie is a portrait of a young artist refining his craft , drawing impressions from his everyday existence and coaxing them into a pleasing and provocative shape. (Justin Chang) R. The Red Turtle A prize-winner at Cannes, this immersive, meditative, stunningly beautiful animated feature that is concerned with the rhythms of the natural world and the mysteries and wonders of ordinary life. (Kenneth Turan) PG. Silence Martin Scorsese’s wrenching adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel, about 17 th century Portuguese priests experiencing a crisis of faith in feudal Japan, ponders the dogmas and mysteries of Christian faith with astonishing rigor and seriousness. (Justin Chang) R. Toni Erdmann Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek give splendid performances as a high-strung businesswoman and her screw-loose dad in this magnificently unpredictable comedy from German writer-director Maren Ade. (Justin Chang) R. 20 th Century Women   Mike Mills’ lovingly fictionalized snapshot of his late-1970 s adolescence belongs to Annette Bening and her marvelously suggestive and layered ...

The Founder’ Movie To Open Friday

... had eight Multimixers in one business," Kroc was quoted saying in a BBC documentary. “So, I went out there, and I was amazed. They were serving hamburgers for 15 cents, french fries for 10 cents and milkshakes for 20 cents, and basically that was the menu. And I said, 'That's for me.'”. The movie is based on Kroc’s autobiography, “Grinding It Out: The Making of Mc Donald’s.” The movie is generally faithful to the book, according to History __link__. However, one bone of contention is who actually deserves the title as the founder of the restaurant chain. Richard Mc Donald told the Wall Street Journal in 1991, “Up until the time we sold, there was no mention of Kroc being the founder. If we had heard about it, he would be back selling milkshake machines.”. That was the year the Mc Donald’s Corporation began crediting both the brothers and Kroc for their own contributions. So far, the movie has gotten decent reviews. “The casting's excellent. Keaton's well-known, fast-talking charm is put to fresh and ...