How the earliest McDonald's restaurants were recreated for Michael Keaton's new movie

The Weinstein Company

In "The Founder," Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc, a struggling traveling salesman who goes from selling milkshake machines to becoming the mastermind behind expanding the McDonald's fast-food chain in 1954 after coming across the innovative hamburger stand created by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald.

Taking the fast-paced kitchen and golden-arches design the brothers created, Kroc came onto the company as the person in charge of making McDonald's a franchise, and by the early 1960s he was responsible for expanding the company across the US. He ended up buying the company in 1961 in a shrewd deal for $2.7 million.

To accurately portray the origins of the McDonald's empire, "The Founder" director John Lee Hancock called on the services of two-time Oscar-nominated production designer Michael Corenblith to create the first restaurants for the movie.

Corenblith explains to Business Insider how he pulled it off.

"The Founder" is out in limited release Friday and opens nationwide January 20.

"McDonald's No. 2 was built 50 minutes from where I live."

Corenblith began his research a month before production started. While he got his hands on training films, manuals, and reproductions of blueprints of the original restaurant designs that he got off eBay for $25, the last original McDonald's happens to be close to his home.

"It's in Downey, California, and it opened in August 1953 and has remained virtually unchanged in its exterior," Corenblith said. "So I had a working scale template."

Corenblith points out that the movie didn't have the approval or disapproval of McDonald's, so he did all of this under the radar. 

The filmmakers decided early on to create only one McDonald's set, which would stand in for all the locations.

"We took full advantage of the fact that every golden-arches franchise looked like every other golden-arches franchise," Corenblith said. "So we created the illusion that these were all individual restaurants that were popping up coast to coast when in actuality these were all clever reworkings of the exteriors of one built set."

The movie was shot in Atlanta, and Corenblith was tasked with finding a location within a 30-mile radius of its production hub.

"It becomes a needle in a haystack," Corenblith said. He took a month to find the right area. "We needed a location that was two parking lots wide and away from the airport so we're not interrupted recording sound."