356- The Automat

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In the shadow of Silicon Valley, San Francisco is home to a futuristic eatery with a virtual cashier putting change on the menu. SPEAKER_17: There was a new restaurant that opened a few years back in downtown San Francisco. SPEAKER_07: It was called Itza. Itza, a high-tech new restaurant where you order on iPads and get your quinoa bowls out of a cubby. SPEAKER_09: And instead of placing an order with a waiter or someone behind the counter, you punch in your order on a screen. SPEAKER_07: It's terrific for those of us who aren't any social. You don't have to actually talk to a person. SPEAKER_12: Just swipe your... where do you swipe your card? And then a few minutes later, you would walk to a wall of clear glass cubbies. SPEAKER_09: It'll go dark for just a second so you don't see the actual food being placed in the cubby. And then when the food was placed, the cubby would glow with your name. SPEAKER_07: You'd tap the glass twice and you could open the cubby and your food order was in there, waiting for you. You tap it, you get your food and you leave. SPEAKER_09: The fact that you can just order on the iPad, pick it out of the cubby and go back to your desk means it's really about the most productive way you can get lunch. SPEAKER_07: You never had to interact with a single person if you didn't want to. You didn't have to tip. It was fast. You could hop in, grab a custom-made quinoa bowl and then go back to work without even pausing your podcast. SPEAKER_20: And I hated it so much. SPEAKER_07: Producer Avery Truffleman. SPEAKER_20: As soon as I heard about Itza, I was like, okay, great. Just what we need to be even more removed from our food. Not only where it comes from, but also the person who hands it to you. Because it's not like it's a completely robot restaurant. There's still people back there, behind the cubbies, slicing your avocados. They're just conveniently placed out of sight so that you don't have to say thank you. Like, ahh! But you never actually tried it. SPEAKER_07: Okay, no. I never went there. SPEAKER_20: So take it with a big fat pinch of salt. And also, know that I hated it because it was very fun to hate. It was like juicers that connect to your phone with Bluetooth. You know? Just like stuff that is so completely lampoonably San Francisco. And so I did what I always do when I'm upset about a stupid thing. I tweeted about it. And instead of getting in a fight, a number of people on Twitter pointed out that this restaurant is not a distinctly modern phenomenon. SPEAKER_07: Something very similar existed at the turn of the century, over 100 years ago. And it was not a San Francisco thing. It was very New York. I grew up in this city. SPEAKER_14: And the city that I grew up in, and the city I'm living in now, ain't never met each other. SPEAKER_20: This is one of the New Yorkiest people I have ever met. Lorraine Deal. Well, I write about New York history, so I'm always fishing around for something that I want to write about. SPEAKER_14: My grandmother lived on 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. I used to meet her under the clock of the Franklin Savings Bank on Saturday afternoons. We would go to Horn and Hardart. SPEAKER_20: Ask anyone who was a kid in New York in the 50s or 60s. They went to Horn and Hardart. It was a popular restaurant chain that was, in many ways, the Itza of the 20th century. It had locations all over New York City and Philadelphia, and it had very solid standard fare. We're talking literal meat and potatoes. What was your favorite dish? SPEAKER_14: Oh, it was Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes. And when Lorraine decided that she wanted to write about Horn and Hardart, she got connected with Mary Ann. SPEAKER_20: People don't always connect my last name with Horn and Hardart, but when they do, immediately stories start to come. SPEAKER_11: Mary Ann Hardart is the great-granddaughter of Horn and Hardart co-founder Frank Hardart. SPEAKER_20: Together, Mary Ann Hardart and Lorraine Deal teamed up to write the definitive history of this restaurant chain. Turns out these two live near each other on the Upper East Side, and they get along like a house on fire. We didn't step on each other's toes. SPEAKER_14: At all. At all. Yeah. No. SPEAKER_07: But Horn and Hardart restaurants also went by another name. A much more famous name. The AutoMat. So what's the AutoMat? SPEAKER_11: So it was the first time that you could go up to a wall, put money in, and get food. Hot or cold. Fresh prepared. Inside a Horn and Hardart AutoMat, it looked like a glamorous, ornate cafeteria. SPEAKER_20: But instead of a human handing you hot food over a steamy counter, you'd push your tray up to a wall of little glass cubbies, each housing a fresh, hot portion of food on a small plate. Maybe it would be a side of peas. Maybe a turkey sandwich or a slice of pie. And you put in some nickels, and then the door to that cubby would unlock, and you could just take the plate that was inside. That food was yours. This place where you could put money in a slot and pick your own food. SPEAKER_11: So for children, you know, the parents would give them some money, they would run up to the windows, they could pick what they wanted, they could put the nickel in and get their own food. SPEAKER_07: It was really cheap. By the way, I hear the B-Stake pie is a magnificent six nickels. SPEAKER_23: And it was pretty good. SPEAKER_07: Don't be a sucker, sister. That beef pie is a wow. SPEAKER_23: You see automats in a ton of movies, ranging from silent films like The Early Bird in 1925 to Whit Stillman's Metropolitan in 1990. SPEAKER_20: I think I'll have a cake. SPEAKER_23: Oh, two nickels. Wait, wait, wait. SPEAKER_00: Seeing a character in an automat tells you they're a certain kind of American. SPEAKER_20: One who wants to go out to eat but doesn't have the budget. My dear, she has no background. SPEAKER_23: Like in this short from 1932. SPEAKER_20: One would hardly want to be seen dining out with her. SPEAKER_20: It opens with a group of people in fancy hats dining like royals. I'd like another cup of coffee. Then the camera zooms out and womp, womp, they're in an automat. And this is also a punchline when Marilyn Monroe sings Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend. But it won't play the rattle on your humble flat or help you at the automat. SPEAKER_07: And none of these movies explain what the automat is. It's just assumed that everyone knew. SPEAKER_14: The Broadway columns in the newspapers are talking about who was seen at the automat. Gene Kelly, when he was doing Pal Joey on Broadway, he and his wife would go over there and Gregory Peck would love their scrambled eggs or something. Counts and Countesses coming in from Europe would say, we've got to try this. And they would sit down next to people who were flat broke. SPEAKER_07: And you didn't have to tip? SPEAKER_20: No. Which is kind of like Itza. And that was the automat 110 years ago. SPEAKER_07: The story of the automat started when Joe Horn met Frank Hardart. Joe had put an ad in a local Philadelphia paper seeking a business partner. SPEAKER_14: And so they got together and they opened a luncheonette in Philadelphia. In 1888. 1888, OK, over to you. SPEAKER_11: No, no, that's it. Just adding a year. 1888. And for a while it was just a normal luncheonette with famously good coffee. SPEAKER_20: Until Frank Hardart went over to Germany. SPEAKER_14: Right. He was going to give himself a vacation. There Hardart encountered some very early German vending machine technology. SPEAKER_20: Hardart bought one of these machines and brought it back to Philly. It was more Rube Goldberg contraption. SPEAKER_14: But no one knows who Rube Goldberg is anymore. Do you know who Rube Goldberg is? SPEAKER_07: With this overly complicated German vending contraption, the food in the windows was a sample display of what one could order. Customers would deposit a coin and wait around while someone in the basement cooked it and then cranked it up in a dumbwaiter. SPEAKER_14: It was a very convoluted way of getting your food, but everyone loved the novelty of it. So they perfected it and then they brought it to New York City. Yeah. And it's New York City about 10 years later. SPEAKER_11: Ten years later. So it was in Philadelphia. The first automat was 1902 and then they came to New York City in 1912. And now, equipped with the glass cubbies, the automat caught on. Fast. SPEAKER_20: But not because of the technology. That was just to get people in the door. The automat part was just this glorious gimmick. SPEAKER_07: People came for the novelty, but came back again and again because it was solid, good food and cheap. The technology was just a mechanical Turk. SPEAKER_14: The only thing that was automatic was when you went in there and looked at this wall. But what was going on behind those walls is very different. SPEAKER_11: Behind the scenes, there were people scurrying around, replacing all the food. Past the vending walls were scores of workers, many of whom were recent immigrants, rapidly replenishing the food into the cubbies and darting out to bus and clean dishware. SPEAKER_07: And as automats expanded to more locations in both Philadelphia and New York, all the cooking itself happened in off-site commissaries. SPEAKER_20: These were separate kitchens and they took up a whole city block. There was one giant central commissary in New York and one giant central commissary in Philly. And both were full of vats of sauces and pies by the hundreds, which dispatched hot and fresh to all the automats throughout the day. The food for the New York locations was slightly different than Philly's. There were little regional variations. SPEAKER_11: For mac and cheese, I think one had diced tomatoes in it and the other one didn't. You know, there were things like that. People liked things spicier. Their taste was a little bit sharper than New York's taste. SPEAKER_11: Our people are sharper, their food was sharper. But all the restaurants were very united in how they looked. SPEAKER_14: Joe Horn and Frank Hart made it their business to make sure that when you walked into these places, they were really quite lovely. I mean, some of them were just art deco palaces. They were beautiful. And that to me is a generosity of spirit because they know they're not getting they're not getting the carriage trade coming in every day, oohing it on and asking for the wine list. SPEAKER_07: There are those rare brands that appeal across economic classes like IKEA and Target. Horn and Hartart was one of them. SPEAKER_20: The automat was a place where anyone could eat in a time when it was nearly unheard of for a woman to go out to eat alone or for people to just post up somewhere all day. And with the automat, they could. Without shame. SPEAKER_14: And people who were just saving face or saving shoe leather, looking for jobs, would be in there nursing a cup of coffee all day and no one bothered them. SPEAKER_11: We didn't even know that people would eat that way. And then as soon as they could, they everyone. And also people could eat as much or as little as they could. You know, they had total autonomy. I just want a cup of coffee. SPEAKER_14: I really just want five pieces of dessert. I want this. I want that. And you didn't have to deal with what you should be ordering or how to order. And it could be quick. It could be leisurely. You were the boss. And because everyone ate there, that's how they could keep it so cheap. SPEAKER_20: It was all economies of scale. That's how they made so much food so fresh and so affordable. It was all volume. SPEAKER_19: Before McDonald's, Horn and Hardart was the largest restaurant chain in America and one of the largest in the world. SPEAKER_20: This is Lisa Hurwitz, a filmmaker working on a documentary about the automat. And by largest, I'm talking about volume. SPEAKER_19: Just stop to imagine that for a second. SPEAKER_20: Somehow everyone knew about the automat. Marilyn Monroe was singing about it. It was in a ton of movies. Horn and Hardart fed more people than any other restaurant in the United States. And it was only in two cities, New York and Philadelphia. SPEAKER_19: For a lot of people, they never could have imagined that Horn and Hardart was ever going to disappear because it was such a big part of the fabric of New York City, of Philadelphia. Today, I can't ever imagine Starbucks disappearing, but it could one day. You never know. I think maybe Horn and Hardart got a little too comfortable and they couldn't imagine what was about to happen. SPEAKER_20: What happened to the automat was the story of the American city. White flight and mass migration to the suburbs. Americans had new homes with new cars and new lifestyles. SPEAKER_07: And of course, this changed how people ate. SPEAKER_19: It became very trendy for women to be stay-at-home mothers, taking care of new homes, using their new kitchens, taking care of the family. And that meant less eating out. SPEAKER_20: So while automats used to be seven-day-a-week, three-meal-a-day operations, they transformed into five-day-a-week, one-meal-a-day operations. And the people who went out to eat for that one meal didn't want 20-cent steaks anymore. SPEAKER_07: If you were on the go, now there was fast food. If you wanted to sit, you wanted white tablecloths and attentive waiters and fancier food that you couldn't cook at home. People had more money to spend. They were more inclined to have maybe fewer meals out, but to have nicer meals. SPEAKER_20: Horn and Hardart's were getting old and looking kind of bedraggled. Customers and city governments were investing less and less in the increasingly neglected inner cities around them. And so Horn and Hardart launches their big comeback ad campaign, in which they dig in their heels and refuse to change at all. If you want something nice to look at when you eat at Horn and Hardart, we suggest you keep an eye on your plate. SPEAKER_19: The campaign was called It's Not Fancy, But It's Good. Although eventually, it wasn't even that good. SPEAKER_07: When Horn and Hardart got less popular, the food turnover wasn't as high, so it wasn't as fresh. But there was something going on simultaneously, which was that the Horns and the Hardarts were being pushed out of the company. SPEAKER_19: And the new people who weren't automat people, they were fast food people. The new heads of Horn and Hardart realized that their greatest asset was not their restaurants, but their real estate. SPEAKER_20: So the really prime Horn and Hardart locations were franchised into fast food restaurants. They were the first Burger King Arby's franchisees in Manhattan. SPEAKER_19: The automat lasted the better part of a century, which is pretty incredible for any business. SPEAKER_07: The last automat in New York, which chugged along pretty much as a gimmick, finally closed in 1991. SPEAKER_20: I will admit that where I felt only disdain for Itza, I was totally taken in by the idea of the automat. Like 100%, sign me up for this place that is both highbrow and lowbrow, where I can eat in a beautiful art deco dining room and have as many slices of pie as I want without judgment. And sure, some of that is just baseless nostalgia and a genuine love of art deco. But I think there's a reason Horn and Hardart was in business for 100 years. And I think it's because it was always a very human experience. It wasn't to-go containers. It was metal flatware and china. Customers stayed in the dining room to eat, so it was always full of people hanging out. SPEAKER_07: And ultimately, humans seem to crave some kind of interaction when they go out to eat, even today. SPEAKER_18: People aren't necessarily looking for an all-robot kind of experience. I mean, when they walk in, they want it to be easy and convenient, and they want to, if they have an issue, be able to communicate to someone who can take care of them. This is Gwyneth Borden, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, SPEAKER_20: which is the trade association for the restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. SPEAKER_18: 2015 was the first year in the U.S. when the Department of Commerce was tracking that people spent more money on dine-out food than groceries. Increasingly, what we have seen is food is the modern form of entertainment. Demand for restaurants is up, which means there's a national shortage of restaurant workers, SPEAKER_20: especially in expensive cities like San Francisco, where the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment is now $3,700 a month. How do you pay for that while working in a restaurant? SPEAKER_18: As labor costs overall have risen, it's harder to find people to work in farming, it's harder to find people to work in restaurants, so you have to pay people more. SPEAKER_07: So restaurants have been trying to get by with fewer people, with self-ordering screens or counter service, where you just grab a number for your table. But this can be taken too far. What we know for a fact is that people will eat in a mediocre restaurant for food, but won't accept bad service. SPEAKER_18: If you look at Yelp or TripAdvisor or whatever, you see in people's reviews that service is a really important factor. SPEAKER_18: In general, yes, people will write things about the food not being great, but what usually drives them to do that is a bad experience where they feel like they were not seen or heard. SPEAKER_20: So rather than hiding the workers in the back and automating the front of the house, like Iza or the Automat, some new automated restaurants are trying to flip it. They want the food to be served entirely by humans, but it's cooked by robots. I went to one of these places in San Francisco. It's a robot burger restaurant called Creator, but where people greet you and guide you through the menu and place your order for you. Solid, one fountain drink, two of the salads, mixed grain salad and winter grain salad. SPEAKER_16: And then clear glass robots assemble your burger in under five minutes. SPEAKER_20: But then a human calls out your name and hands your order to you. And the secret power of this restaurant is not a central commissary kitchen. It's the 40-some-odd engineers working in the office next door. Because whether they automate the front or the back, these businesses are not just selling food. SPEAKER_07: They are selling their technology. And that's true for Iza. They've gone from selling quinoa bowls to selling their service system. SPEAKER_20: Their two locations in San Francisco are now shuttered with no signs of when they'll open again. Iza wouldn't go on record for an interview, but their PR representative told me that now Iza is focused on selling their serving technology to other chains, like a macaroni and cheese restaurant called Mac'd and another chain called Wow-Bow. SPEAKER_07: Even at McDonald's, it's pretty common to order on a screen. And a salad-making robot named Sally is being put in a restaurant chain based in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. There are new iterations of vending machines and faceless delivery and robot chefs popping up everywhere. SPEAKER_20: The point is, yes, horn and hard art restaurants are gone. But more and more chains are becoming automats. SPEAKER_07: Special thanks to Roe Flag, David Bordeaux, and Imuna Hauser and Ira Goldman. You can find out more about Iza Hurwitz's documentary and share your automat memories at facebook.com slash the automat the movie. SPEAKER_07: Coming up, robots that throw food all in an effort to make that food seem more delicious. What's more important, making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time. With annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial, you're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility. 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But it totally changed the way we buy and consume food. Check it out. Mouths are watering, lemons are squeezing, and stomachs are growling. Of all the ads you see on TV or on billboards or on the sides of buses, an overwhelming number seem to be for food. This is our masterpiece. SPEAKER_23: Boarshead oven gold turkey. Eggs and sausage. SPEAKER_03: Hot cakes and butter. Icy Cokes in frosted glasses. SPEAKER_07: Fajitas sizzling on the grill. SPEAKER_01: At Longhorn, what's in season matters. A guy biting into the perfect hamburger on a sesame seed bun. SPEAKER_07: Peak ingredients perfectly cooked. SPEAKER_03: But of course, you know, in real life, these foods don't look like they do in the ads. SPEAKER_02: I'm here with a question from Isabelle M. from Toronto, Ontario. She asks, why does your food look different in the advertising than what's in the store? It's a great question, Isabelle. We get asked that a lot. And if you want to come with me, I'm going to take you across the street and we're going to find out a bit more. Come on. SPEAKER_07: In 2012, McDonald's Canada put out this video about the process they go through to photograph one of their burgers. SPEAKER_02: What I'm going to do is introduce you now to Noah, who's our food stylist. And here I think it's important to note that all the ingredients that Noah uses are the exact same ingredients that we use in the restaurant. SPEAKER_07: The video follows food stylist Noah as he painstakingly selects the perfect slices of onion and pickle. He places them on the burger with tweezers and then precisely melts the cheese just so. I hope I'm just melting down the cheese with my palette knife. SPEAKER_07: Then he picks up a plastic syringe filled with ketchup and applies it with surgical precision. SPEAKER_15: Maybe I'll put mustard, ketchup, actually ketchup, mustard, ketchup. Then they photograph this fancy burger and Photoshop it to perfection. SPEAKER_07: That's nice. They place a picture of a real burger just ordered at McDonald's next to the image of this stylized burger. SPEAKER_05: And the difference is striking. That's reporter Danny Lewis. I would like to eat the burger that Noah styled and dissembled. The other one, not so much. The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact. Real food looks bad on camera. SPEAKER_10: Shooting food and even photographing food has always been fiendishly difficult in advertising. This is Terry O'Reilly. SPEAKER_05: For decades, he was an ad man and he now hosts a radio show about advertising called Under the Influence. Terry says the challenges of shooting food are obvious. First of all, food is boring to look at when it's just sitting on a plate. Because food is generally static. SPEAKER_10: Then when you subject it to the hot lights of a studio. SPEAKER_05: The food starts to wilt. It's just simple science. SPEAKER_10: And so advertisers have had to constantly walk this fine line between enhancement and fakery. SPEAKER_07: Trying all kinds of tricks to get food to look good. For the first half of the 20th century, well after photography was widely adopted, SPEAKER_05: advertisers in magazines and newspapers relied heavily on illustration. The reason illustration was the preferred method was because you could completely control an illustration. SPEAKER_10: In other words, there's no lighting issues, there's no wilting food issues. A marketer could really completely dictate what that food would look like right down to the strand of pasta with an illustrator. SPEAKER_07: Then TV came along in the 1950s and 60s and advertisers faced a whole new set of challenges. I'm going to show you how McDonald's builds a Big Mac sandwich. SPEAKER_07: A lot of them didn't really understand how to shoot food in a compelling way. In this ad, the hamburger just sits there on the counter while the ingredients get piled on. It starts here with a lightly toasted bun. SPEAKER_23: And then a pure beef hamburger. Sizzling hot. Without compelling visuals, there'd often be a voiceover just describing the hell out of the food. SPEAKER_05: Listing ingredients, telling you how good it tasted. SPEAKER_23: And a little more sauce just for good flavor. Crisp dill pickles and the sesame seed crown. SPEAKER_07: These early TV ads relied on relatively static shots. Advertisers would use a wide angle lens mounted on a camera and it might zoom in and pan a little, but that's about it. There were lots of shots of boxes and labels. The food did just normal food stuff. SPEAKER_10: You might see something being ladled out of a pot, you might see, you know, a spoon serving peas at a dinner table or serving creamed corn at a dinner table. So that would be the extent of the motion. SPEAKER_07: On top of the new challenges of television, food advertisers in the late 60s found themselves facing new scrutiny. The Federal Trade Commission was keeping a close eye on TV ads following the now infamous Campbell's soup incident of 1968. They were introducing a new brand of soup that had a lot of vegetables in it, but the problem is the vegetables sink to the bottom. SPEAKER_10: So what they did was put a bunch of marbles in the bottom of the bowls just to hoist up the vegetables. When the FTC found out, they threatened Campbell's with legal action. SPEAKER_05: The event led to a new push for truth in advertising. SPEAKER_07: A lot of the old tricks advertisers had relied on in the past were now off the table. No more using glue instead of milk in cereal ads. No more substituting mashed potatoes for ice cream. SPEAKER_05: But in the 1970s, food advertising took a radical turn. Food started moving. SPEAKER_07: And that opened the door to all the fancy tricks we see in ads today. Shrimp executing acrobatic flips. Lobster claws cracking open in slow motion. French fries bouncing across a table. Food wasn't static anymore. Food was flying. SPEAKER_05: And we've got one man to thank for this new aesthetic. Elbert Beutin. SPEAKER_04: He didn't want anything stagnant. Everything was always moving. He wanted to romance the food or whatever was there in front of him. SPEAKER_05: This is Harry Drennan, who spent years working for Elbert Beutin. That's how he met his wife, set director Jackie Canto. SPEAKER_13: I've been in the film business for 35 years. 40. I don't want to say how long. SPEAKER_07: The ads that Canto and Drennan made with Beutin until his death in 1996 were unprecedented. Working with clients like McDonald's, Burger King, and Coca-Cola, Beutin invented a whole new visual language for food commercials and really pioneered the genre of advertising known as tabletop. SPEAKER_05: Many of the terms and techniques that tabletop directors still use date back to Beutin. For example, the prep shot, which tells the backstory of the product, SPEAKER_07: showing all that goes into making the food. You know the ones. Chopping a crisp head of lettuce, dicing some juicy red tomatoes. SPEAKER_13: He would make these elaborate banquet things of raw ingredients, and that was his look. And crave shots. SPEAKER_05: That's when the camera zooms way in and lingers on some tantalizing bite of food on the end of a fork. Sexy in a way. You know, it's almost food porn. You know, it's made it all real tactile to you. SPEAKER_05: And the hero shot. A last magnificent look at the food on the plate, ready to eat. Usually in the final seconds of the advertisement. SPEAKER_07: Beutin's big breakthrough was that he didn't just describe the food and promise viewers it tasted good. He made them feel actual hunger with his images. SPEAKER_13: His real thing is just food in itself, its essence, is really sensual. You know what I mean? If you see a hamburger commercial, you really want to eat a hamburger. And that's the point of it. And I think that's what he introduced. And you'll never see it any other way now. SPEAKER_05: Canto and Drennan remember working long days, and sometimes long nights, to meet Beutin's high standards. And to achieve his vision of flying food and mouthwatering close-ups, they had to use a whole bunch of crazy tools. Like giant high-speed cameras that would burn through a thousand feet of film in seconds and make a ton of noise. SPEAKER_07: They'd start shooting and it was like, wooooo, it was just this all day long. It was something. SPEAKER_13: These cameras were originally designed for the military to film rocket tests. SPEAKER_07: It was used for ballistics, but we were the first ones to do it with food. SPEAKER_04: Thanks to these cameras, Beutin could achieve super slow motion effects. SPEAKER_05: He'd take a split second of time and luxuriate in it. He'd have oranges splashed through a sheet of water. Condensation would drip down the side of a bottle. In order to get the perfect take, Beutin started designing strange Rube Goldberg sort of machines to help him get the job done. SPEAKER_07: These contraptions were called rigs. They ranged from simple spouts for liquid to machines that would drop pancakes into a perfect stack to catapults that would fling oranges across the studio. SPEAKER_05: And sure, the production team could have just thrown the oranges by hand. But with a rig, they could get the exact same results over and over, which meant fewer takes, which meant less time, and less money spent. It also meant that they could achieve a certain level of precision and artistry. SPEAKER_04: It was so much prettier than other people's work as far as I could see. It was beautiful at lighting. And then once he got into all the movement, he was ahead of the curve. SPEAKER_03: Lights roll, steam. Out, ready, and action. No, I missed it. Try it again. SPEAKER_07: To see how Beutin's techniques are still being used today, Danny went to MacGuffin Films in New York. Okay, so just quick descriptions. MacGuffin does commercials for Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Starbucks, and a bunch of other restaurants. SPEAKER_07: The day Danny was there, they were shooting a chicken sandwich. So they are shooting a chicken sandwich, hero shot it looks like, on a black slate with a little tray of chili peppers and garlic and stuff. SPEAKER_07: A hand model stands near the edge of the table where the sandwich is displayed. And now they're doing the crowning. Crowning means the hand model takes the bun and puts it on top of the sandwich. Just presses it there, alluringly, then takes the crown off. In between shots, a guy comes on with a fan brush to brush any crumbs off the top of the chicken. SPEAKER_06: Then the crown goes back on again. SPEAKER_16: Would you mind just putting the crown back on that sandwich, please? SPEAKER_05: It took them all day to film this sandwich. The whole shoot precisely orchestrated, relying on highly technical tools. Downstairs in MacGuffin's prop room, there are all sorts of rigs sitting in storage, a lot like the ones that Budin developed. SPEAKER_07: But these are way more high-tech. Riggers today use lasers and sensors and pre-programmed motors. SPEAKER_05: And depending on the shot or the rig, there can be some intense physics to take into account. Like if you're trying to slice an onion in two while it's flying through the air. We break down the elements, so we know we've got to get an onion to a certain height. SPEAKER_22: This is Anthony DeRoberts. He's a special effects technician at MacGuffin Films, and he designed a special rig just to get this shot. SPEAKER_05: Everything's computer-controlled, so when the onion's in the right spot, these two sharp knives come through, SPEAKER_22: split the onion and leave you with the slice down the middle. And slices of onion artfully tumbling across a table. SPEAKER_05: Classic prep shot. But while Budin may have introduced rigs and action to tabletop, some directors like MacGuffin's Nick Fugelstadt SPEAKER_07: are trying to get away from Budin's fantastical dreamscapes of flying shrimp and oranges. I think that's a little bit of an older point of view. SPEAKER_03: For Nick Fugelstadt, the idealized images of food that Budin tried to bring to his ads SPEAKER_05: just don't cut it in a world that's now totally saturated with food porn. While Budin's commercials often zoomed in so close to food that you couldn't see the space around it, tabletop directors like Fugelstadt now frame their food in a space that you might see out in the world, like at a restaurant or a barbecue. You know, when you dig into a lasagna, do you want the sauce to go all over the place? SPEAKER_03: We need a taco, is stuff going to fall out? Yeah, so let's shoot that. You know, let the flavors mix. It's all right, it's what tastes good. But the thing to remember is this. SPEAKER_05: On the set of a food commercial, everything, everything is highly orchestrated and contrived, even if the ultimate effect feels somewhat natural. Because a 30-second TV spot by a firm like McGuffin can cost literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. SPEAKER_07: So it's got to do one thing to make it all worthwhile. Sell a lot of food. I would say the number one rule in food advertising is that the first taste is always with the eyes. SPEAKER_10: So you're trying to create a shot that makes somebody salivate. This is Terry O'Reilly again, and he's fascinated by the lengths people go to sell something. SPEAKER_07: He tells a story about working on a commercial for a hamburger company and watching an actor do take after take, biting into a hamburger, and then gazing into the camera with a look of total satisfaction on his face. Then you cut and then there's the spit pail right beside the eye. SPEAKER_10: The pail right beside the actor, and then they just spit it right into the pail. You know, cut. And you watch that happen 40 times or 30 times or 20 times. And it's so hilarious to me. Just the mechanics of advertising. The illusion and the reality of creating it. That's exactly it in a nutshell. SPEAKER_07: This story was produced by Danny Lewis with Avery Truffleman and Delaney Hall back in March of 2016. We have over 350 episodes in the 99PI catalog, just like that one. And most of them are what we call evergreen. So they're just as relevant today as they were when we produced them. So go into your podcast app and just download all the old episodes. Don't worry about the episode title and description. All the topics will seem boring. That is almost the point. But trust me, you will love them. If you go and download all the old episodes right now, I could probably see that in our stats, and that would be really fun to watch. And you will enjoy listening to them too, so it's a win-win. The Autobot Story was produced by Avery Truffleman, mixed in tech production by Sharif Yusuf, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is the senior producer. Kirk Colestead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taryn Maaza, Vivian Leigh, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But you can peruse the full selection of hot and tasty design stories and all the class cubbies. Deposit your quarter in the slot, and then it's all yours at 99pi.org. SPEAKER_21: Sometimes we find what we're looking for. Sometimes we're rolling easy and free. Sometimes one and one makes three. So much to love along this ride. That's why Nationwide is on your side. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and Affiliates, Columbus, Ohio. SPEAKER_08: You've been dreaming about the dress. Come find the one at David's Bridal. 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