Tagline: The truth is hard to swallow.
Don Henderson, a marketing executive at Mickey’s Fast Food Restaurant chain, home of “The Big One”-has a problem. Contaminated meat is getting into the frozen patties of the company’s best-selling burger. To find out why, he’ll have to take a journey to the dark side of the All-American meal.Leaving the cushy confines of the company’s Southern California boardroom for the immigrant-staffed slaughterhouses, teeming feedlots and cookie cutter strip malls of Middle America, what Don discovers is a “Fast Food Nation” of consumers who haven’t realized it is they who are being consumed by an industry with a seemingly endless appetite for fresh meat.
The Recorded Picture Company production FAST FOOD NATION, a character study set in the fast food industry, is based on material from the book of the same name written by Eric Schlosser. Fast Food Nation, published in 2001 and a New York Times bestseller, was an incendiary nonfiction exploration of the industry.
Inspired by the incendiary bestseller that exposed the hidden facts behind America’s fast food industry comes a powerful drama that takes an eye-opening journey into the dark heart of the All-American meal. Richard Linklater’s FAST FOOD NATION traces the birth of an everyday, ordinary burger through a chain of riveting, interlocked human stories – from a hopeful, young immigrant couple who cross the border to work in a perilous meat-packing plant, to a teen clerk who dreams of life beyond the counter; to the corporate marketing whiz who is shocked to discover that his latest burger invention – “The Big One” – is literally full of manure. As the film traverses from pristine barbeque smoke labs to the volatile U.S.-Mexican border, it unveils a provocative portrait of all the yearning, ambition, corruption and hope that lies inside what America is biting into.
It all begins when Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear), the new marketing hot-shot at the fictional Mickey’s Fast Food chain, discovers that nasty contaminants are getting into the frozen patties that form “The Big One” – his company’s best-selling burger and the key to his corporate success. Determined to find out how this could happen, Don sets out on a revelatory investigation into just what goes into the making of Mickey’s meat. Leaving the cushy confines of his California boardroom, Don heads for the ranches, slaughterhouses and cookie cutter strip malls of Cody, Colorado, where he discovers multiple perspectives on a fast-food world he never knew existed – one fraught with hazards, fueled by desperation and misinformation and resonant with deeply human effects.
One out of every four Americans will consume a fast food meal today. But how many people really know what goes into that ultra-quick bite to eat – from the epic struggles of the farm workers who help produce it to the gruesome microbes of the packing plants that process it to the madcap escapades of the marketing geniuses who advertise it?
In 1997 Eric Schlosser met with legendary Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and began an investigation of the fast food industry for the magazine. What began as a two-part article for Rolling Stone became a bestselling book in 2001 – Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All American Meal. Thoroughly documented and compulsively readable, the non-fiction book stripped the veil off an industry that had long operated in secret.
Acclaimed by critics, the book shot to the top of best-seller lists and stayed there for months, compelling readers with its portrait of an industry that appeared to be rife with nightmare working conditions, unsanitary practices and a penchant for disinformation that has contributed to an epidemic of poor American health. So provocative, passionate and alarming were Schlosser’s revelations, that many compared the book to Upton Sinclair’s industry-changing literary classic, The Jungle.
But Schlosser’s book was a work of investigative journalism. Which is why it was so unexpected that Richard Linklater – the iconoclastic director who defined an entire generation with his debut film Slacker and has since become known for such diverse films as Before Sunset, School of Rock, Waking Life, and Dazed and Confused – would turn the factual material into a deeply human and richly emotional ensemble drama.
These production notes provided by Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Fast Food Nation
Starring: Patricia Arquette, Bobby Cannavale, Luis Guzman, Ethan Hawke, Ashley Johnson, Avril Lavigne, Kris Kristofferson, Ana Claudia Talancin, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Wilmer Valderrama
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Screenplay by: Eric Schlosser, Richard Linklater
Release Date: October 20, 2006
MPAA Rating: R for disturbing images, strong sexuality, language and drug content.
Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $1,005,539 (46.4%)
Foreign: $1,162,175 (53.6%)
Total: $2,167,714 (Worldwide)