By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Bite this: processing Fast Food Nation
At SF Chronicle, Joe Garofoli, anticipating Friday’s opening day, talks to Fast Food Nation‘s co-screenwriter (and 2001 source book author) Eric Schlosser about the bark of food processors and the bite of his movie. “As the son of former NBC President Herbert Schlosser, the 47-year-old had grown mistrustful of… the “sycophants” and sellouts of the entertainment industry… Participant Productions (An Inconvenient Truth), which put up 40% of the movie’s budget, offers ways to get involved in the fight against “brutal working conditions, food poisoning, animal cruelty and low wages.” So does distributor Fox Searchlight providing one [of] the strongest connections ever between a film and social action.” A McDonald’s spokesman says the website they’re funding is to counter “Hollywood fiction.” “Whatever happens in the fictionalized movie restaurant called Mickey’s doesn’t reflect the real world at McDonald’s.” … While [Schlosser] envisioned the book as a documentary… veteran British producer Jeremy Thomas (Sexy Beast)… convinced him otherwise. Thomas had been given the book by Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols manager, who suggested it would be a good fictional movie. Thomas agreed… [W]hile in Austin, Texas, on a book tour, Schlosser ran Thomas’ idea past [Richard] Linklater… Schlosser’s major request was that the film “be financed without studio involvement, so there wouldn’t be some kind of committee putting pressure on what could be said and what couldn’t be said… And Jeremy… was great about all that.” Schlosser and Linklater wrote the story together online and in pass-the-laptop meetings in Austin and Northern California. Schlosser took the director to meat-processing plants in Colorado… At the film’s emotional core are the moral compromises made by everybody along the burger conveyer belt. From the environmental activists to the burger company executives to the immigrant workers, everybody refuses to fully challenge the status quo. So nothing changes.” Says Linklater, “This is more about the politics of everyday working life.” From the time of its Cannes premiere, Janet Adamy and Richard Gibson wrote for the Wall Street Journal, “The nation’s largest fast-food chain is also funding TCS Daily, an arm of the Washington lobbying and public-relations firm DCI Group, that is making more pointed attacks against Mr. Schlosser and his work…
TCS Daily launched a Web site called Fast Talk Nation that called his theories “rhetoric” and argued that he wants to decriminalize marijuana, based on excerpts from one of his other books, “Reefer Madness,” about sex, drugs and cheap labor in the American black market… TCS Daily abruptly closed the Fast Talk Nation site two days after its launch. James Glassman, who says he “hosts” the TCS Daily site, says he closed the Fast Talk Nation site because he wanted to pool his resources with the broader industry’s Best Food Nation site…. Mr. Schlosser says he supports some lighter sentences for marijuana possession but opposes legalization. “What bothers me is the use of third parties to attack me when the people who are paying for it aren’t standing up and taking credit for it…”