America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner

On a cold December night in 1941,

an artist stood on the sidewalk in Manhattan

gazing through the plate glass window of an all-night diner.

He saw a couple at the counter,

a man on the other side,

someone else serving coffee.

What could be more commonplace?

But something struck him as exceptional about this scene.

It expressed a particular kind of alienation.

His name was Edward Hopper.

And his defining painting, Nighthawks,

one of the most admired images of the 20th century.

When Hopper set out to capture a very American loneliness,

he chose to do so in a diner.

Edward Hopper was not alone in seeing the potential in the diner.

Writers, musicians, photographers.

All the greatest American artists have been drawn to it

at some point.

Quentin Tarantino was just one film-maker

to set great epiphanies within its leatherette booths

in his Americana masterpiece Pulp Fiction.

Everybody be cool! This is a robbery!

I'm heading across the States, to find out what it is about the diner.

You know in Westerns

there's always a frontier saloon,

batwing doors, some old cowboy sinking four fingers of redeye?

Well, I've a theory that this place, the American diner,

is a bit like that Dodge City saloon.

It preserves a vital fragment of the American spirit.

I'm going in search of the beating heart of American culture.

Or do I mean a fat-clogged heart?

Either way, on my travels, I intend to eat nothing

but honest-to-God home-cooked diner chow.

-Your blueberry pancakes, sir.

-Thanks.

# Hey nonny ding dong, alang alang alang

# Boom ba-doh, ba-doo ba-doodle-ay

# Oh, life could be a dream... #

My journey begins on the East Coast.

Providence, Rhode Island, is the perhaps unlikely

birthplace of America's best-loved kitchen.

It was here in 1872 that the first ever all-night mobile food carts

served dinner on the kerbside.

Those first wagons dished up a diet of pies, coffee and cigars.

They lined America's stomach for a drive-by blow-out

that has seen off a girth-troubling 22 billion meals to date.

# Oh, life could be a dream

# If only all my precious plans... #

Providence is also where you'll find

the oldest continuously running diner in history.

The Haven Brothers' griddle-on-wheels still parks up alongside City Hall every night.

Since the 19th century, Haven Brothers Diner here

has been selling these hot dogs. Well, not these hot dogs obviously.

But you know, what it reminds me of, chow on wheels,

is the covered wagon that brought food to the men

and women who made the American frontier.

I'll eat to that.

But it's after dark that the kerbside kitchen really comes into its own.

The diner began trading here initially to plug a gap in the market,

catering to people who worked at night,

government employees, reporters, lowlifes like that.

And Haven Brothers is still a kind of beacon

in the lonely American night.

I've been coming here since at least 30 years.

-Really?

-Yep, coming here, you know, late at night-time.

Do you tend to have the same thing?

Yeah, I usually have a chicken sandwich or a hamburger or a hot dog. That's all.

-Is it going to be a quiet night, Officer O'Rourke?

-I hope so,

-cos I'm going home.

-Who's out there to protect us, then?

-Well, the night crew's on.

-OK. That's reassuring.

-Nice to meet you. Thank you.

-OK, buddy, thank you.

Though the diner began as a restaurant on the move,

it wasn't long before it lost its wheels and was grounded.

By the beginning of the 20th century,

diners were no longer small mobile wagons.

They were now static models produced in factories

and hauled to permanent roadside destinations.

# 16 times, what do you get?

# Another day older... #

The diner's low-overheads and not-so-fine dining

ensured their survival throughout world wars,

prohibition, even the Depression.

Not far from Providence is one of the best-preserved examples

of this generation of stationary diner.

The Modern in Pawtucket is a 1941 Sterling Streamliner.

-..Breakfast here.

-OK.

-Whether you're just going to have a sandwich or maybe a platter.

Its biggest fan is diner archaeologist, Richard Gutman.

Oh, now this one really looks the part, doesn't it?

-Why do you like this one so much, Richard?

-First of all, it's one of the Streamliners

-so it's got the bullet-shaped nose.

-Oh, yes.

-It's like a train.

-It is, but it's not going anywhere.

-No.

-Immobilized in the landscape.

-Right.

-But it looks like it's in motion.

-It's got some energy.

-It does.

It's got all the great materials.

Stainless steel back there,

but mostly porcelain enamel

and wood and chrome,

-Formica that shows a number of elbows have rubbed against this counter.

-I would say.

And this is the equivalent of a listed building, isn't it?

This is the first diner that was ever put on the National Register of Historic Places.

-Was that your work or somebody else's?

-I did it, no, thank you very much.

You lobbied away at congressmen?

-I was part of the team that got this listed.

-Right.

-So no developer can come down here with a wrecking ball and just flatten...?

-Exactly.

-Right.

-Check it out.

-Oh, boy.

There's your Rueben.

I'll be right back with your French fries.

My companion doesn't look like a man

who's spent 30 years putting himself outside a long line of turkey clubs.

Clearly, he's someone who cannot rest until his work

is done as the world's leading diner documentarian.

Just round the corner,

Richard's created a museum in the Johnson and Wales University.

It's a 4,000 square foot trophy cabinet of diner memorabilia.

-It's lovely, isn't it. Art deco.

-Yes, yes.

In his time,

Richard's restored more than 80 abandoned luncheonettes.

This is his latest orphaned eatery.

An actual bona fide diner, built in a factory by the Worcester Lunchcar Company in 1926.

Rolled in here on some forklifts.

-They took down the wall of the building and moved it in.

-No kidding?

And who's our friend here?

Larry is our short-order cook.

Excuse me, Larry.

I first was interested in diners because of their architecture

and the vernacular nature of them.

They were built by Italian tile-setters and marble workers,

by German sheet-metal workers, and French-Canadian carpenters.

It was a melting pot of these different cultures

to produce a building that is uniquely American.

They're often family businesses, aren't they?

They certainly are.

If Larry could speak,

he would know that when I walked in, I wanted poached eggs on toast.

But the thing about this democratic counter is that anyone can go in

and sit down there.

It can be a professor, it can be a high-hat, it can be a worker.

A friend of mine in Pennsylvania ate in the diner,

and he's in the middle of two guys.

One guy's the Chief of Police and the other's just some character

and at one point in the conversation the policeman looks over and says,

"Didn't I arrest you last year for something?"

And the other guy says, "Yes, you did. Pass the ketchup."

Americans love the open road.

Like their pioneering ancestors on the frontier,

they've always looked west

and relished the possibilities of travel and expansion.

In the 1950s,

the growth of the Interstate

meant that plenty of aluminium pit stops were springing up

to service this new personal mobility.

The shimmering surfaces

reflecting back the era's defining spirit of optimism.

That aspiration was reflected in the diner's menu.

Diner food has always tended towards the - how to say it? - the filling.

Hello. I'll go for the Monster Burger, with everything.

-OK, thank you so much.

-Thank you very much.

Oh, my goodness.

-That isn't a meal, that's a suicide bid. Are you serious?

-Yes.

-Will you come and check on me in a while?

-I'll come check on you.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

Diner fare like this started out as cowboy chow -

beans and grits, doled out from the chuck wagon.

If you laid the diner menu out end to end,

it would be a great greasy highway of burgers, shakes, French toast,

and eggs over-easy, from sea to shining sea.

And all swilled down with bottomless pots of stewed, watery coffee.

Well, that's Otto's Monster Burger.

That includes half the calories I will need for the rest of my life,

but it's not all bad news. Look - one of my five-a-day.

Mm.

Diner owner, Otto Maier,

is the Dr Frankenstein behind the Monster Burger.

Otto, what would be your top five classic diner dishes?

Pancakes with sausage,

standard eggs over-easy with home fries and toast,

with whatever breakfast meat,

definitely the cheeseburger deluxe

turkey club,

and...one other, meatloaf dinner.

You know, comfort food, food made from recipes

that people's mothers used to make

and that sort of parlayed into the diners. That's...

The diner started years ago for the blue collar worker

and it just expanded over time to be more than that.

It's funny to think that just as the work-wear denims worn by cowboys

became the ubiquitous designer jeans,

it's Mom's good ol' burgers and fries

that have become the defining gastronomy of the world's superpower.

I'm heading to Massachusetts,

to the hometown of one mid-century artist

for whom the roadside restaurant would prove a shorthand

for that very American comfort in abundance.

This place is the Louvre,

the National Gallery of Middle America.

It's the repository of one of the country's most beloved

and popular artists, if not THE most popular and beloved, Norman Rockwell.

He offered the States an idealised,

even sentimentalised, view of the place.

He was the poet laureate of pot-roast.

Rockwell produced nearly 400 paintings in his lifetime,

serving up scene after scene of small town America

in satisfying slices of comfort art.

# Come softly, darling

# Come softly... #

This is an extraordinary vision by Rockwell of down-home folksiness.

It appears to be Thanksgiving or maybe Sunday lunch.

Here's the lovely big plump turkey.

And look at this groaning board.

The gleaming cruet.

The happy faces.

But the most extraordinary detail of this painting is a tiny one.

The date.

It was painted in 1942.

At the time, the war in the Pacific was raging.

But this is Rockwell's message of reassurance.

The troops, our boys, will be coming home.

To freedom from want.

# Come softly, darling

# Hear what I say... #

And if one thing stood for freedom from want

it was the abundant offerings of the diner.

In 1958, Rockwell painted a cover

for America's most widely circulated weekly magazine, The Saturday Evening Post.

The Runaway is, for me,

one of the most intriguing portrayals of the diner.

It shows a young scamp on the lam from home

who runs into a couple of strangers.

It could be threatening,

but Rockwell's version of life on the open road is anything but sinister.

His diner's an inviting place,

with a kindly cop who, instead of busting your chops,

treats you to a slice of pie and a ride home in his squad car.

And if his characters have the look of the guy or the gal next door,

that's because that's exactly who they were.

If you lived in Stockbridge in the '50s,

chances were you'd find yourself immortalised by Norman Rockwell.

For The Runaway, Rockwell painted his state trooper neighbour,

and an eight-year-old from the local school.

They've grown up a bit now,

but the subjects of the painting are still alive and well.

Gentlemen, what are your memories of that day with Norman Rockwell?

Well, I recall a day, I... They had contacted me

and set a date. Mr Rockwell was there, his photographer was there.

Mr Rockwell gave instructions to us

on how he wanted us to sit, or to pose.

I think he had pretty much a firm idea

on what he had in mind, and just wanted to make sure that

that's what was going to appear on paper.

Did he buy you an ice cream?

I got paid a whopping ten dollars.

-Course, you couldn't have been paid.

-Ten dollars.

-You got ten dollars as well?

-Yes.

-Into the police benevolent fund?

No, not really!

OK, we'll draw a veil over that!

What do you think, fellas? Shall we have a go

at trying to recreate this masterpiece?

So, Eddie, you were to the right of Richard.

And we need our friend behind the counter.

Just resting on the counter, that's right.

If you could be looking at Eddie, in a kind of avuncular way?

That's good.

And can you, sort of, slump down in the chair a little bit?

And what about...? You were leaning slightly over this way, Richard.

Yeah. No hat today. Oh, well.

OK. Do you know what? I think that's about it.

Fantastic.

It's art made flesh.

When Rockwell gazed into the diner in small-town Massachusetts,

he saw a place where big-hearted American values were front and centre.

It's cherry pie and good deeds.

'That's nice, but by no means the whole menu.

'I have a hunch that the real soul of the diner is to be found

'in the asphalt jungle of the 24-hour city.'

-SAT NAV:

-'On the right in 0.6 miles...'

A near contemporary of Rockwell's,

Edward Hopper, drank deep from the bottomless coffee pot

of New York's all night diner culture.

And he came up with an image of insomniac urban loneliness,

as well as arguably the greatest American painting

of the last century, Nighthawks.

Hopper grew up in New York,

and spent much of the '30s and '40s

painting the urban landscape around him.

Even now in the city, you see Hopper everywhere.

Hopper-esque describes places that are nowhere in particular.

Hotel lobbies, waiting rooms, the diner.

Places where people are together but alone.

The Nighthawks diner is the most famous diner

the world has ever known.

'And I am a poor moth to its hypnotic neon.

'I want to find that corner where Hopper discovered

'and painted the American condition.'

Excuse me, ladies. I wonder if you can help?

-I'm trying to find this diner.

-No idea.

It was painted by Edward Hopper, it's called Nighthawks.

-Does it look like any joint you know?

-I could Google it?

-You could Google it?

-I could.

-Yeah, that's a good idea, Google it.

Maybe I could try that.

-Thank you very much.

-You're welcome.

Excuse me, sir, I wonder if you can help me.

-I'm trying to find this place?

-No.

-Do you know this?

-I don't know.

No? OK.

No-one seems to know.

'Hopper himself didn't give us much to go on.

'Just "Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet."'

Have you got a second? I'll take that as a no.

No? None of you?

Excuse me, officer, have you got a second?

I'm trying to find this place.

-I'm not familiar with that.

-Have you seen this painting before?

-No.

I have no idea.

I'm willing to tip handsomely. I'm a long way from home and...

Well, Lord knows New York has clasped me to its bosom

and can't do enough to help,

but sadly nobody seems sure

exactly where the original for Nighthawks is located.

# Nighthawks at the diner

# Emma's 49er

# There's a rendezvous of strangers

# Around the coffee urn tonight... #

While I'm trying to place Hopper's diner,

literally, in the landscape,

perhaps one Manhattanite

could tell me where it lies in the American imagination.

'Adam Gopnik is an art critic and writer for the New Yorker.

'He would surely know.'

-Hi, Adam, how are you?

-Good to see you.

-Would you like the all-day breakfast?

-I would love it.

-Or the chef's special?

-I'll take the all-day breakfast.

Adam, when you look at Hopper's Nighthawks, what do you see?

Well, it's a picture about loneliness.

It's a picture about aloneness.

About the poignant reality of being in a diner late at night,

amongst people who are sharing the space

but not sharing the experience.

The oddity of American life

is that it is simultaneously the most hyped-up, amphetamine-driven,

over-energetic form of existence,

and then it has this melancholic underside.

Do you find it a bit alienating?

They look like characters in a fish tank. Or are you intrigued by them?

At first sight, they can be slightly chilly canvases, can't they?

I never feel with Hopper's people that they're complete as people.

They're not like, say, the girls in Vermeer,

who are lonely and isolated, but who you feel have lives.

Hopper's people are much more like the extras in a film noir.

You try to craft an internal monologue for the people who are there.

Yet whenever I look at that picture, what makes it so interesting

is you don't say to yourself,

"Oh, he must be the crook and she must be the whore."

You say, "I don't know who these people are."

In fact, your suspicion at the end is

they're probably completely ordinary people.

If you could discover them outside that magical setting,

they would be nobody in particular, they'd be you and me.

So it's sort of the way that the environment lends them

the glamour of melancholy and sadness and danger, criminality,

is part of what makes that picture magical.

It's that same mixture of wonder

at this giant city that has grown up around us,

and at the same time, the knowledge that these insane agglomerations of people

finally break down to these little atoms of loneliness.

That's what Hopper saw and it's a fundamental American truth.

Hopper's caffeinated night birds

seem all the more exposed by the diner's harsh strip lighting.

That blinding coldness feels like the shockwave of a terrible explosion.

And in one aspect, it is.

'The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.'

Hopper created his masterpiece in December 1941,

in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor.

As great a body blow as the United States had suffered to date.

I'm not the only one on the trail of Nighthawks.

There's a blogger here who trades under the name

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York,

who's clearly invested many man hours trying to find the joint.

He's been through government records,

plans, maps, newspaper archives.

At one point he writes despairingly, "The diner remains a ghost to us."

His underground, slightly secretive blog,

other twilight searches for Nighthawks,

finding the diner is like a film noir in itself.

Hopper's biographer quotes him:

"I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger.

"Unconsciously, perhaps, I was painting the loneliness of a large city."

It's not only the coffee drinkers who seem isolated.

There's no doorway into the Nighthawks diner.

Did Hopper leave it out, I wonder,

to make us, the onlookers, feel further removed?

To heighten our sense of peering into a giant fish tank?

Are we, perhaps, the real outsiders of this lonely scene?

According to Hopper's biographer,

the most likely location for the Nighthawks diner is here.

Mulry Square,

where Seventh Avenue and West 11th Street meet.

Most believe that Hopper's Nighthawks

brooded over their coffee on this site,

long since torn down.

It's now a disused parking lot,

and an impromptu shrine to those who died just a few blocks away on 9/11.

In one sense, it's a fitting coda to the story of Hopper

preparing his painting on the same corner of New York City after Pearl Harbor.

But whether or not Hopper's insomniacs were reeling from the shock of war

in an actual restaurant doesn't matter.

The Nighthawks diner is not so much a place as a state of mind.

Hopper's potent image of urban isolation has resonated ever since.

It comes through, curiously enough,

in one of the most popular dance songs of the 1990s.

# I am sitting in the morning

# At the diner on the corner... #

American folk singer Suzanne Vega wrote a simple a capella ballad

about a diner on the Upper West Side.

It was remixed by British dance combo DNA

who propelled it to global stardom.

I had a date to meet Suzanne Vega

at the original Tom's Diner.

-How are you? May I join you?

-I wish you would.

-Thank you.

Now you had this, one of many smash hits

with a song that was at least in part inspired by where we're sitting now.

I was sitting at that counter over there one morning,

and I started to imagine different scenes of someone sitting in a diner

in which they felt alienated from everyone around them.

I thought, I'll call it Tom's Diner, because...it's actually a restaurant.

-But it doesn't scan so well.

-It doesn't sing so well.

So I thought, OK, we'll call it diner.

It's a strange place, a diner.

It can seem a place for lonely people, and yet,

it's the comforts of home. You know, the ketchup and the coffee.

-Curious.

-It's sort of a midway point between the street

and a private area. So you can sit, talk about things that are intimate,

or you can do business deals, or you can break up with your boyfriend...

Have you ever done that, Suzanne, in a diner?

-Dare we pry?

-I'm not going to tell you that!

Why do you think the song took off like it did?

Well, some of it is the melody.

Also, everyone loves the idea of the diner,

and you can interpret the song according to your own visions of it.

-Right.

-The great irony is

it's a song about alienation, sitting at a diner, feeling lonely and disconnected from humanity,

and I've sung it to 10,000 people who all sing # Do-do doo-doo... #

..in unison, with everyone cheering and throwing hats in the air.

And being united.

# I am sitting in the morning

# At the diner on the corner

# I am waiting at the counter

# For the man to pour the coffee

# And he fills it only halfway

# And before I even argue

# He is looking out the window at somebody coming in

# I open up the paper

# There's a story of an actor

# Who had died while he was drinking

# It was no-one I had heard of

# And I'm turning to the horoscope

# And looking for the funnies

# When I'm feeling someone watching me

# And so I raise my head... #

At this point, the audience usually joins in.

-Bravo.

-You know, I just realised a technical issue with this song.

It starts at the counter but it ends over here, looks through the window.

-But that's good, isn't it?

-I guess so.

-It gives you a real 360 sense of the thing.

-Yeah, thanks for that.

No, it was wonderful. Thank you very much.

The diner has come a long way from Rockwell's cheery hearth.

Through the decades, the way it's been seen has mirrored America's prevailing mood.

Leaving New York, I think of the opening scene

of one of the most affecting novels of the 20th century.

John Updike's 1959 small-town epic, Rabbit Run.

Despairing of his life of conformity, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom

flees his young family and drives into the vast unknown.

He pulls into a roadside diner.

It is here that he has the great epiphany of his life.

He has nowhere to run to. He's never going to fit in.

Updike writes,

"Somehow, though he can't put his finger on the difference,

"he is unlike the other customers.

"They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes.

"He had thought, he had read,

"that from shore to shore, all America was the same.

"He wonders, is it just these people I'm outside, or is it all America?"

Rabbit bottles it and turns back for the safety of home.

One like-minded soul who ran away but, in his case,

kept going, is photographer Stephen Shore.

Shore started his career in the '60s in Andy Warhol's Factory in New York.

In 1972, he left the city to record the experience of the open road.

Its ordinariness and its sudden moments of beauty.

I was keeping a visual diary of certain categories of objects.

Residential houses, store windows,

toilets, the food I ate, signs.

Sometimes I would see myself as an anthropologist

using photography to explore the American culture at the time.

So instead of penis gourds it was stacks of pancakes?

Something like that!

At the time, Shore's road pictures were reviled for their snapshot aesthetic,

but he's now considered one of the most significant photographers

of the 20th century.

-What was it about diners you liked?

-They seemed important to me.

If I am going to examine American culture, it didn't have to be

just the peaks of it that stood out,

but what was everyday life.

It's in everyday architecture.

It's in what a plate of food looks like.

It's in what people's homes look like, in everyday moments.

And that could include having breakfast at a diner.

Shore's pictures chronicle the stuff of holiday snaps,

and yet they have the chilly detachment of crime scene photographs.

Like Hopper, Shore appears to eavesdrop on a wider, darker human narrative,

while at the same time remaining at one remove from it.

I think there is, in some of my work, an aloneness.

I was alone a lot.

I was travelling for two or three months in a car, just being out there in this vast country.

I found that after three days on the road,

I get into a particular focused state of mind.

It becomes almost a meditative activity. A very active, alert kind of meditation.

I'm heading away from the gentrified East Coast into America's heartland

to see another side of the diner.

# I must be under your spell

I'm under your spell... #

In the 20th century, the diner established itself

in the cultural landscape of America,

but it also played a significant role in another aspect of life here.

Believe it or not, the griddle of the humble diner

became the crucible in which great change was forged.

In the American South,

the diner became the battleground in the Civil Rights war.

In the 1950s, segregation flourished here in Nashville, Tennessee.

Black Americans were barred from using white-only schools,

buses, drinking fountains,

and the in-house diners of department stores like Woolworth's and Walgreen's.

African Americans were perfectly entitled to walk in,

browse, make purchases.

But they were forbidden from sitting alongside their white neighbours

at the counter and ordering a meal.

I'm sorry, management does not allow us to serve niggers in here.

# Woke up this morning with my mind

# Set on freedom... #

In February 1960, a group of college students, following the principles

of Martin Luther King, staged a sit-in at the lunch counter.

Among them were brother and sister Matthew and Maxine Walker

and their friend King Hollands.

The code we were abiding by was very simple.

Maintain a non-violent attitude.

We were supposed to look straight ahead, not talk back,

not hit back, of course.

We were trained to cover up, protect ourselves

so you couldn't get kicked or hit in the face.

-Were you served?

-No, of course not.

-You were allowed in the building, allowed to the counter, but not served.

-That's correct.

That was the order of the day, segregation.

You didn't enjoy the privileges that the majority population took for granted.

Their presence at the lunch counter soon drew a crowd, and the unfolding events were all caught

on this astonishing piece of film.

Maxine is clearly visible in it.

Can you bring yourself to repeat the things that were said?

Nigger, get off this chair, coon, I'll kick your...whatever.

Leave us alone. All kinds of things the toughs would say.

The students kept to their code of non-violence,

and then the thugs struck.

It was Maxine's white friend, sitting silently alongside her,

who bore the brunt of the violence.

He was beaten rather seriously, pulled off his chair.

And of course, I, following the rules, was unable to help.

I just had to sit there and look forwards.

We had been trained to expect something similar.

But this actual fight was just something that I'd never seen.

The things that were most upsetting to people

was when they would try to put a cigarette out on one of the ladies in the group.

-Your rules were, don't get involved?

-You had to sit there.

That's terrible. They were extinguishing cigarettes on women?

-Yes.

-What did the store people or the police do? Did they just let this carry on?

For a while, then WE were arrested, the white people were let go.

The ones who perpetrated the violence.

-On what grounds were you arrested?

-Disorderly conduct.

Disorderly conduct, just for sitting there, wanting a hamburger or whatever it was.

Despite the violence and arrests, the sit-ins continued.

Three weeks later, another protest was staged at the lunch counter

of a bus terminal.

This foray took place on March 16th.

-We went and we were served.

-That's you in front, is it?

-Yes.

-You must have felt quite elated about that.

-Yes.

We were the first black people to be served at a lunch counter in Nashville.

-But not without cost.

-What was the cost?

-My two front teeth.

As we were eating, a man came from the kitchen.

He had a large butcher's knife in his hand.

As you can see, there's a surprised look on my face,

on a couple of other people's faces,

cos we were looking at this fellow with a two-foot butcher's knife coming towards us.

He put it down, but took a swipe at me,

I fell, hit my head on the counter, and that's how I lost my teeth.

The students' demonstrations not only rocked the segregated South,

they gave rise to a nationwide campaign to end racial oppression.

And it had all begun at the diner counter.

I have a dream...

..my four little children will one day live in a nation...

Four years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act,

prohibiting segregation throughout the United States.

At first sight, it's extraordinary to me that the homely old diner

should get itself mixed up with these big political issues.

And yet, maybe it's not so odd after all.

All humankind comes to the diner, or at least it can do now.

And what is the essence of this place, its business,

if not people sitting down and breaking bread together?

It's the stuff of democracy, the stuff of life.

The point isn't lost on politicians.

They don't bother kissing babies any more.

No, their laughing gear is seen to better advantage negotiating

a plate of chow at the diner.

In terms of spin-doctoring, the meatloaf is the message.

But the big irony is that while the diner was moving to the social

and political heart of America, its own survival was under threat.

The '60s saw the Golden Arches go up, as well as other

globe-straddling franchises.

They took the guesswork out of kerbside grazing,

but also much of the charm.

If the diner was going to survive,

it would need its champions.

I'm about to meet one of America's most popular artists,

and I bet you've never even heard of him.

It's funny because in his own way, he's as big as jeans or Coca-Cola.

# Welcome to my world

# Won't you come on in? #

John Baeder is a master of what's known as photorealistic painting.

-Hello, John. How are you?

-Very well.

-Nice to meet you.

-Come on in.

During a three-decade odyssey documenting the American roadside,

John has painted over 300 diners, and they can fetch a small fortune.

This is from an old roadhouse in Kansas. It used to light up.

Here's the, what I call not just the studio,

-but the playroom, sanctuary.

-Yes, the den.

I'm working on this painting right now, it's about halfway done.

-May I sit here?

-You certainly may. I'll join you.

-Where are we looking at?

-It was in a city called Boonton, New Jersey, around 1977.

It has so much going for it, the eye moving from the liquor store to the signage, to the diner,

you've got the horizontals and the verticals which create a lot of tension.

Back in the day, John was a successful, well-paid advertising executive.

The Don Draper of the South.

But in 1972, he had a road-to-Damascus moment

and quit his glamorous Mad Men role to paint hot dog vans.

British viewers see Mad Men now. Was it like that in your day?

It was exactly like that and it was more than like that.

Three Martinis for lunch and then maybe...

-Not only that, it was lunch and stingers afterwards.

-Stingers?

-Yeah.

Advertising came easy to me and it was kind of fun.

The greatest part about advertising was the people.

-Meeting some terrific people.

-It all sounds very exciting and glamorous.

-Why did you give it up?

-Self-respect.

I got tired of doing expensive lies.

I always wanted to paint.

So I left the business in 1972 and started painting.

I was enamoured with motels, gas stations, tourist camps and diners.

Why were you so fascinated by them?

They reminded me of temples of lost civilisations.

That was like an overview.

As I started painting them,

I got more involved myself in a spiritual and psychological level.

I learned more about the diner

as an object that represented the hearth, the home,

the unconscious feminine side that all men have,

that most men don't want to admit to.

And so it became a really important part of my life.

Why don't you paint McDonald's or Wendy's or Taco Bells,

wouldn't there be an aesthetic interest in that?

None. None. They have no interest at all. They have no character.

You know, we live in a new America,

and...it's fortunate that we lived in the old America,

the America that was,

and that's what I'm trying to keep - the America that was.

I consider myself more of a preservationist than painter.

This is my outlet for preserving our American culture.

John's paintings have piqued the appetite of his fellow Americans.

He's persuaded them that they need the diner.

CLATTERING

Excuse me, John, I think they're all right. They're OK.

It's OK, they're plastic.

Yeah. They caught my eye though.

They look a bit Buddha-like.

For John, it's about preserving an aesthetic and an entrepreneurial spirit.

But I suspect it goes even deeper than that.

The diner is irreplaceable,

because it has come to embody the spirit of America itself.

My road trip across America ends in LA -

home of the art form that I believe comes closest to telling us

what both America and the diner are really all about.

From the 1940s, the diner's been used as a 20th century

equivalent of the Wild West saloon.

Give me a cup of coffee and a doughnut if that's enough for it.

In Sullivan's Travels, it is the anonymous edge-of-town eatery

where the down-and-out hero encounters Veronica Lake's sultry seductress.

-Give him some ham and eggs.

-Yes, ma'am.

-That's very kind of you, sister, but I'm not hungry.

-Hey!

-Yeah?

You go round the other side of the counter.

-What?

-You heard me.

And in the great film noir The Killers, the peace of a cosy small-town diner is shattered

when two hired guns come looking for their prey.

Better go around, bright boy.

And the diner also plays a key role in one of my favourite B movies,

the Steve McQueen chiller, The Blob.

When the good people of Pheonixville are terrorised by a giant amoeba of space goo,

they flee to the last symbolic refuge of humanity. Yes, the diner.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

-What happened?

-It's all over!

In Heat, the dining booth's used as a neutral space

where Pacino's cop and De Niro's robber suspend

their chase and go mano-a-mano with their minds.

You are going down.

# I was born in a barn

# My mamma died and my daddy got drunk... #

To really get to grips with cinema's relationship

with the pre-fabbed cafe, I'm meeting a seasoned film critic.

John Patterson has sat through more movies than I've had hot chilli dogs.

In the movies, the diner is a special kind of space. They're a mythic place.

And it's a zone of escape. People are in flight,

the kinds of characters you might meet at the booths, you know,

criminals on the run, hired killers, who knows?

Divorcees with rambunctious kids and a father in his car, ten truck stops back in pursuit.

Things like that.

-Coffee, black.

-The same.

-I'll have some pie.

-Some of that lemon meringue...

Guys, guys, I'm sorry, we're closed.

I said COFFEE!

If you think of movies like The History Of Violence where

there's an extremely violent murder scene...

SHOTS FIRED

The fact that it's in a diner...

a placid, calm, small-town place, in this instance,

is set against the violence, and makes it that much more shocking

that it happens in such a quotidian, mundane place.

This sweet and sour combo of folksiness and violence

was irresistible to director Martin Scorsese.

In Goodfellas, he used his trademark point-of-view film style

but combined this with a camera trick that allowed him

to do something exceptional with his diner scene.

'So I met Jimmy in a crowded place we both knew.

'I got there 15 minutes early...'

Scorsese uses a technique that Hitchcock uses in Vertigo -

dollying in with the camera whilst zooming out.

which causes a complete distortion of space,

while keeping the central figure in the frame absolutely still.

You can see it in Jaws...

Usually the habit was to do it very fast,

but Scorsese does it very slow...

'He was jumpy, he hadn't touched a thing.

'On the surface, of course, everything was supposed to be fine.'

It's only halfway through the scene, you go, "What the hell is going on with the space in this place?"

And if you watch the cars in the background, they bloat and get bigger and distort,

and it really adds to the extreme gathering paranoia of the two guys, eye-to-eye like this,

pretending everything's normal as the world just goes...bong.

'That's when I knew I would never have come back from Florida alive.'

There's one film-maker who saw the diner as such a loaded metaphor

he wrote an entire film about it.

# Somewhere, beyond the sea

# Somewhere, waiting for me

# My lover stands on golden... #

Before he made Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam, Barry Levinson

started his career with this tale of a bunch of guys hanging out

in a Baltimore diner at the end of the '50s.

What do you want? What are you majoring in? Still...?

LAUGHTER

Levinson rooted the story in his own life experiences.

You know, it was a lot of useless hours hanging around,

shooting the bull about anything under the sun.

And here's how nuts we were...

Say we were with a date and we used to ride by the diner,

you'd see what cars were there and if certain cars where there, we would drop off our date

and get to the diner cos it would be a much more interesting night.

It seems crazy. We would be there till 4 or 5 in the morning on the weekends.

You dropped off your date and went over and started talking about one subject and whatever...

And this is pre-Google...

So you could be arguing about something forever.

Nowadays, "No, it was 1948!" That conversation is over.

-Google's ruined all that!

-It killed that whole kind of arguing over things.

Watching that movie, Barry, you do sense all the years you clocked up,

they weren't wasted, because there's loving detail in there.

Yeah, well, you'd see all those things - how they'd deal with the ketchup bottles,

one is three quarters gone and the other's had just a little.

They'd put one on top and let it drain into that one,

so that's full and get rid of the other.

And plates, they had that spring-loaded thing to drop 'em in. Always be at that top level.

They were very specific things that used to go on, like rituals.

-Come on!

-Eddie's getting married.

It's crazy. I mean, with him it was nuts, but with Eddie, it's lunacy!

Hey, marriage is all right!

'The friends are on the eve of a new decade, but also of settling down.

'For them, the diner is the repository of adolescence.

'It is everything that they are about to lose.'

-Tell him.

-Eddie's giving Elyse a football quiz, if she fails, the marriage is off.

Football quiz?! Come on, you putting me on?

There was a great naivete certainly,

and a real lack of understanding about women.

The Eddie character was giving his wife a test about football, which was true.

Um...you know, to see if she'd pass and that'd be the deciding factor to see if he'd get married.

That kind of behaviour was very much what played out in the '50s

in terms of male bonding.

I keep thinking I'll be missing out on things, you know.

That's what marriage is all about.

I never did a lot before, you know.

What?

I never did a lot of...

..screwing around.

Some, of course, a little.

A little?

A little.

You son of a bitch.

You're a virgin, aren't you?

Technically.

-You made Diner in the '80s, it's set...late '50s.

-'59.

In terms of American history, what do you get

if you're looking back from that distance at that age, do you think?

It was certainly a time before the age of cynicism happened in terms of government.

There wasn't the darker aspects that came with the Vietnam War,

or Watergate and many of the things that played out after that.

Terrorism would have been non-existent,

crime in general wasn't particularly pervasive.

So, it was thought of as a period of innocence,

but it was the bubbling up, you know, of many things to come.

Over the ensuing decades,

while the nation shuddered under the blows of social upheaval,

the diner became the place where America's innocence was preserved.

It's America before the fall.

# Say a word for Jimmy Brown... #

My trip across the States has come to an end,

but I have one last pit stop to make.

# ..Not the shirt right off his back

# He ain't got nothing at all... #

Well, I finally made it to the frontier, to the desert,

and guess what, there's a diner here...

the Last Chance diner, just like the last chance saloon in those Western movies.

Actually this isn't a real diner at all, it's a movie set itself.

Knocked up back in 1990 for a Dennis Hopper thriller, this set

has backdropped countless B movies and pop promos.

Diners come and diners go, but the diner itself goes on forever.

And I think that's because it's such a great symbol of this place,

both to people who live here and those of us who don't normally.

I think that's why writers, artists, photographers,

film-makers continue to be drawn back to the diner.

In a sense, as long as there's still a diner in business,

you can still see the soul of America.

We've always got the diner.

Yeah, we always got the diner.

MUSIC: "Holly Holy" by Neil Diamond

# Sing a song

# Sing a song of songs

# Sing it out

# Sing it strong... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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