The official version of the McDonald's story runs as smooth and orderly as every one of the fast-food giant's franchise operations is meant to.
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A single burger stand in California gives birth to a global brand. The people who started it, brothers Dick and Maurice McDonald, watch on happily as the man who saw its potential rolls it out across the US. And when Ray Kroc offers them $3 million for full rights to the name and the company in 1961 (a sum worth about $24 million in today's money), everybody walks away from the table feeling pretty damned McHappy with themselves.
Only that's not quite how it played out.
The version of the McDonald's story told in John Lee Hancock's The Founder is rather different from the version you'll find on the McDonald's website, though both place Ray Kroc front and centre. In the official version he is an inspiration and a visionary. But the version of Kroc portrayed so brilliantly in the film by Michael Keaton is also a cut-throat, a drunk and an utter cad.
So, I ask Keaton, when you were offered the role, did Ray Kroc strike you as a heroic character or a villainous one?
"He struck me as an interesting character," he says. "In a lot of ways this is not even a biopic. It's about a thing, a thing that is personified by Ray Kroc. It's the story of the free enterprise system, about capitalism."
The Founder opens squarely in Death of a Salesman territory, with Kroc a struggling travelling rep for a company that sells milkshake machines. They're bulky, expensive, and damned hard to shift. We get scene after scene of Kroc lugging one of these cast-aluminium beasts out of the boot of his car and onto the counter of some rundown milk bar in the middle of that vast American heartland, only to be greeted by the stony indifference of the proprietor. The only thing that stops him throwing in the towel, you suspect, is the fact he owns the company, Prince Castle.
Winners are grinners: Could Keaton's turn as Ray Kroc spell Oscar glory? Photo: Roadshow
It is just the latest in a long line of moderately successful enterprises the thrusting Kroc has thrown himself into, we soon discover. His wife, played by Laura Dern, wants him to settle for what they've got – a big house, dinners at the country club, a place in polite society if only he stuck around long enough to take up the offer. "When's enough going to be enough for you?" she asks him at one stage. "Probably never," he replies.
Kroc's life changes when he gets an order for six machines from one operator in San Bernardino, California. Intrigued, he drives thousands of kilometres to take a look. What he sees there – a fast-food joint run like an auto assembly plant, with the McDonald brothers' patented Speedee system and a workspace planned down to the inch – blows his mind. That the burgers are good, the fries crisp and the milkshakes thick, and all delivered to him seconds after ordering, only seals the deal.
Another day, another zero dollars.
Keaton says it's hard for us to appreciate just how revolutionary this all was in 1954. "I don't think people realise how much McDonald's changed things culturally. The way we eat – anywhere you want. You don't need any silverware, you don't need anything. We don't think about that now, but it really changed things."
There are now more than 36,000 McDonald's outlets globally. The company operates in 119 countries. For many of us it seems always to have been there (the first McDonald's in Australia opened in 1971; today, there are more than 900 stores here).
Keaton knew nothing about the origin story before he read the script. "You just drive by those big arches, that big M, and you think it's just a thing like a tree, a thing I see every day," he says. "I didn't even know there were McDonalds brothers."
Which is probably just the way Ray Kroc would have wanted it.
"That's exactly right," he says with a laugh.
There are many great moments in The Founder, but one of the finest has Kroc producing a business card with the single word "Founder" beneath his name. By the time he's pulled it out of his pocket, we know beyond doubt that he is not the founder – or at least not the founder of the burgers, the fries, the production line, the golden arches, the name or any of the other things we generally associate with McDonald's. But he is the man who saw the potential in all of that, the man who convinced the McDonald brothers – played here with a very straight bat by Parks and Recreation's Nick Offerman and character actor John Carroll Lynch – to let him franchise the concept.
Mac McDonald (John Carroll Lynch) and his brother Dick (Nick Offerman) in The Founder.
To a degree, The Founder is really a meditation on the virtues or otherwise of copyright. Yes, the idea belonged to the McDonald brothers, but if it had stayed with them, its full potential might never have been realised (and granted, a lot of people might argue that would be no bad thing). Yes, Kroc is a bit of a crook, but in seeing and unlocking all that burger stand might become he is also something of a genius.
"It was really the beginning of branding, and Ray Kroc understood branding," says Keaton. "He understood everything the McDonald brothers didn't understand. And they had the chance to jump on, they had every chance in the world to go along for the ride, and when they didn't he said, 'All right, I'm going to go on this ride without you'."
Keaton is deeply ambivalent about Kroc. "What I admire is his work ethic, his determination, his ambition, his hustle, his go-get-'em spirit. That I'll defend all day long."
But, he says, "the choices he makes towards the end after he becomes successful are harsh, man – I mean harsh – and nothing I would ever do, nothing most people would ever do. But that's one of the more interesting things about the movie, if you ask me."
His favourite scene in the movie, he says, "doesn't even have dialogue". It's just Kroc staying behind into the night, after everyone else has gone home, to obsessively sweep and clean the forecourt of his store in Des Plaines, Illinois (the first one opened under his management). "My oldest brother ran a dry-cleaning business and he worked like that," he says.
Keaton was one of seven kids raised by his Catholic parents in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania. In the speech he gave at the Golden Globes in 2015, when he won best actor in a comedy film for Birdman, he said "I don't ever remember a time when my father [a civil engineer] did not work two jobs".
Michael Keaton let it all hang out in Birdman.
Ray Kroc would have been perfectly comfortable with the principles instilled by the parents of the man born Michael Douglas (he changed his name when he took to acting for obvious reasons). "In the household in which I was raised, the themes were pretty simple," he said at the Globes. "Work hard. Don't quit. Be appreciative. Be thankful. Be grateful. Be respectful. Also to never whine. Ever. Never complain and always, for cryin' out loud, keep a sense of humour."
The ruthless side of Kroc doesn't sit so well with Keaton, an avowed Democrat (albeit one who enjoys hunting in the wilds near his home in Montana), but there was never any question of softening his sharp edges for the screen.
"To try and sugar-coat anything, I had zero interest in that," he says. "To be honest with you, I find it kind of cowardly as an actor to always need to be loved, to be begging for sympathy.
"The people I love, like Joaquin Phoenix and Daniel Day-Lewis, the people whose work I like, it never enters their mind. The character is the character. The story is the story. My job is to serve it."
It's fair to say that, at 65, Michael Keaton is enjoying a career renaissance when most people are thinking about retiring. It's not that he ever stopped working: between Batman in 1989 and Birdman in 2014, he made 24 movies, including one as star and director (The Merry Gentlemen, 2008), and a bunch of TV too. It's just that he somehow slid inexorably off that rung reserved for stars and back into the ranks of the jobbing actor (albeit the jobbing actor still getting film roles in Hollywood).
But there's no question Birdman set his career soaring again. With its fading star most famous for playing a superhero, Alejandro Inarritu's film looked like it had been written specifically for Keaton, though it had not. But it certainly reminded the world what it had been missing.
Keaton won the Golden Globe and was hotly tipped to add the best actor Oscar. But while the film won four statues in February 2015, Keaton missed out to Eddie Redmayne (for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything), and the eagle-eyed cringed for him as the camera briefly caught sight of Keaton putting his acceptance speech back in his pocket.
It must have been a bittersweet experience, I suggest.
"It was just a sweet experience," he shoots back. "Sweet, sweet, sweet. Eliminate the bitter. Sweet, sweet, sweet as can be. I just loved it, loved all of it."
There's a growing sense that The Founder may give him another crack; certainly the film's release has been timed for an Oscar run and the buzz around it, and Keaton's performance, is strong. We can certainly expect to see a rash of "for your consideration" ads in the Hollywood trade papers over the next couple of months.
Does that create any kind of pressure?
"It's flattering but it doesn't really affect me," says Keaton. "I mean it affects you because it's bigger than you are, it's a giant international industry, and you'd have to be an idiot to be totally ignorant of the process. But I ain't gonna die one way or the other. I'm gonna keep doing what I do, in my career and in life."
Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin
