"The Road to Wellville" (1994)
Directed by Alan Parker, Screenplay by Alan Parker, Based on the novel "The Road to Wellville" by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Produced by Alan Parker, Armyan Bernstein & Robert F. Colesberry, Music by Rachel Portman, Cinematography by Peter Biziou, Edited by Gerry Hambling, Starring Anthony Hopkins, Bridget Fonda, Matthew Broderick, John Cusack, Dana Carvey, Lara Flynn Boyle, Traci Lind, Michael Lerner & John Neville.
A staunch advocate of healthy living, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg opens a sanitarium that promotes his progressive, if eccentric, ideas about optimal well-being. Among the clients who arrive at the facility are the opportunistic Charles Ossining, who is keen on marketing Kellogg's cereal, and the wealthy Will Lightbody and his wife, Eleanor. This comedy is inspired by an actual spa run by Dr. Kellogg at the turn of the century.
I find the love and affection that is showered on films that are actually dull, clunky and bloated confusing at the best of times but when I read that the film "The Road To Wellville" seems to have acquired a reputation of being a turkey that is best avoided... I have to wonder why... Because it flopped at the box office? Citizen Kane flopped at the box office! The Wizard of Oz flopped at the box office! This film is tragically overlooked.
It is not perfect and it is no Citizen Kane but it is an original comedy drama with a truly stellar cast. My main grumbles are it is about 20 min too long and has some pacing issues but to me that just means it would fit right in with 95% of all films made in the last five years.
This film is a satire of medical quackery and lampoon's capitalism as well as exploring America's history regarding race and the class system and the worshiping of brand names in their society.
People did not "Get" this film or did not want to "Get" this film especially in 1994.
I saw this film on VHS at a friend's flat in 1997 I had never heard of it and I think he had bought it I think because he liked anything with John Cusack in it and I remember him saying "This is supposed to be weird" I loved it.
Alan Parker was first sent the manuscript of T.Coraghessan Boyle’s novel, “The Road To Wellville”, in July of 1992. He was immediately drawn to the three interwoven stories and the outrageous, eccentric world that the author had parachuted the reader into. The following month Parker secured the film rights.
Before embarking on writing the screenplay Parker decided to immerse himself in research to dig deeper for the references needed to recreate the unique world of Dr. Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium. He visited Battle Creek, in the southeast corner of Michigan where he saw piles of faded photographs and preserved memorabilia. Parker really got the benefit of the late Doctor’s penchant for documenting everything he also had a real nose for publicity Dr Kellogg was one of the first to master the “photo op”. After his visit Parker had over two thousand photographs and technical drawings to work from.
I realise while reading what I have written back that if you haven't seen the film this whole Sanitarium and Dr Kellogg talk maybe a bit random so here is some historical context.
"The Battle Creek Sanitarium" started out as "The Western Health Reform Institute", founded by the religious group, the Seventh Day Adventists, in 1866. The Adventists had adopted vegetarianism into their creed due to one of their leaders Sister Ellen White, who claimed the notion of rejecting consuming the flesh of animals in a vision from God she also preached enough Biblical references to justify it.
The Western Health Reform Institute initially had minimal success. What was needed was medical credibility to match its religious bonafides. So Ellen White paid for a young member of their Adventist sect, John Harvey Kellogg, to Bellevue Medical College in New York to gain a medical degree. In 1876 the now Dr John Harvey Kellogg took over the Institute and began to reform the institution along "legitimate" medical lines.
First thing he expanded the original, rather tame, regimens of drinking acorn coffee, ice cold hip baths and exercising by swinging wooden clubs to adopt new ideas from around the world as well as treatments born from Kellogg's extraordinary imagination.
By the 1890's Kellogg had renamed
"The Western Health Reform Institute"
to "The Battle Creek Sanitarium"
Kellogg coined the word ‘Sanitarium’ due to the common name ‘Sanitorium’ becoming synonymous with establishments specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis. The Battle Creek facility became known in society as
"The San" and rivaled the great European spas such as Karlsbad, Vichy and Baden-Baden.
By the turn of the century "The San" grand lobby was as busy as a bus station, buzzing with the rich and famous of American high society. Henry Ford, Teddy Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller were all regular guests .
At times up to 1000 guests would be staying and "The San" which had over 1000 employees tending to them. The staff oversaw and coached the guests in the good Doctor’s philosophies of “the meatless life” and “biological living” in their search for a cure of their “peristaltic woes”.
Guests would be fed granola, stewed raisins, cereal coffee, cabbage salad, okra soup, shredded carrot, baked onions, stewed figs, Kaffir tea, hot malted nuts, bean tapioca, nut steaks, corn pulp, gluten mush and squash pie. That menu accompanied with Kellogg's absolute obsession with everyone having their bowels cleaned out with daily enemas must have been very "Cleansing":
“I assaulted the bowel with sterilized bran and paraffin oil from above, and hosed it out with torrents of water from below”. Dr Kellogg.
Dr John Harvey Kellogg.
He was particularly fond of Bulgarian yogurt, which Kellogg administered to his patients via both ends of their anatomy.
He invented 75 different kinds of foods, most famously cornflakes and he honed the method of making peanut paste and created what is now known as peanut butter.
The doctors patients/guests were always keen and willing to use or be strapped into kellogg's quack medical inventions, vibrating belts, vibrating chairs and vibrating beds, electric blankets, his ultraviolet and infrared electric light baths, the sinusoidal current baths and "The San" had a selection of 200 kinds of baths, douches & scrubs.
"The San" sat in 400 acres of farmland which guests could walk or cycle across and the land were a functioning farm which grew The San’s vegetables, fruit and dairy products. they also had huge greenhouses growing up to 2000 heads of Chinese cabbage.
In the evening guests/patients could relax in the luxurious Palm Court listening to The San String Orchestra or even dance but only ‘The San Waltz’ a dance that did not involve touching because Kellogg believed that standard dancing was dangerous because it,
“Aroused hidden pleasures in a woman”.
This all seems eccentric and relatively harmless but Dr Kellogg was also performing daily surgical operations on guests, removing large chunks of their intestines willy nilly. A good thing about Kellogg in the operating theatre was his suture work was very skillful something he put down to being taught needlepoint as a child by his mother and in the cultish circles of "The San" having A "Kellogg scar" was much admired.
The San dining room.
Kellogg was a consummate showman and tireless self-publicist, he always dressed from head to foot in white he claimed it was “to more beneficially receive the sun’s rays” and i'm sure the fact it made him stand out in photographs was just a bonus.
He dictated continuously to his secretaries constantly while he roamed his San kingdom. He dictated while he bathed and even during his five daily enemas.
He orally dictated over fifty books in his lifetime which denounced everything from meat eating to dressing in the latest fashions and all sexual conduct. He believed almost every societal ill from violent crime to poverty, he blamed on unhealthful foods and sexual behavior.
Sex was such an issue with Kellogg that he proudly set the example of a celibate life.
His wife, Ella Eaton Kellogg looked after their 42 adopted children and spent nearly twenty years concocting imaginative methods and recipes to make the San’s menu more edible. Some of the fayre on offer at The San was compared to
“like eating a slab of shoe-maker’s wax” and getting through a plateful of his more fibrous products was described as “trying to swallow a whisk broom”.
Dr Kellogg lectured daily using colorful and threatening language: “The meat eater is drowning in a tide of gore”. He preached his own take on history, attributing the genius of the likes of Pythagoras and Isaac Newton to their "vegetarianism" I'm pretty sure they were not.
He even went as far as to claim that “Rome’s collapse was well underway when slaves were thrown into the eel pots to increase the gamey flavor of the eels when they came to table”. The guests hung on his every word and lapped it up.
The success of the Doctor’s food inventions were causing nothing short of mayhem in the small town of Battle Creek in the shadow of The San. Breakfast food companies sprung up everywhere.
Someone remarked that "Battle Creek had 21,647 inhabitants, and all of them seemingly engaged in the breakfast food business."
It was a kind of breakfast food "gold rush" powered by the entrepreneurial optimism of a young country entering a new century.
Hello-Bito, Malt-Ho, Try-a-Bita, Oatsina, Foodle, Krinkle, Fush, were just a few among dozens of others families poured their life savings into these endeavors, sometimes based on merely a catchy name, produced in ramshackle factories with dubious recipes.
It was the younger brother of Dr Kellogg, Will Kellogg who had identified that the invention of the corn flakes flaking process could turn a 60-cent bushel of wheat into $12.00 worth of breakfast cereal was the one who took the Kellogg Corn Flakes to market.
Will K. Kellogg, had run the administration side of "The San" for many years and his older brother was only paying him a miserly six dollars a week he once went seven years without a vacation so it should come as no surprise he dumped his brother and set up on his own in 1911, eventually making his fortune. The two brothers rarely spoke after that. It is Ironic that Will’s own name, W.K. Kellogg whose signature was on every box became the name the world associated with the cornflake.
Sister Ellen White
The San had become so successful the Seventh Day Adventist grew very concerned at the dramatic transformation of their establishment which had become more “Kelloggian” than Adventist.
It seemed that under Dr Kellogg “Foodism” had become its own religion. Sister Ellen White pronounced that “The Lord is not very pleased with Battle Creek” and had another one of her visions, foreseeing a “sword of fire” over the San.
Sister Ellen was rarely wrong about such things it seems, and the giant wooden structure that had so hurriedly mushroomed in all directions over the years mysteriously burned completely to the ground in February of 1902.
Undaunted, the Doctor rebuilt an even bigger San, within the year, on the same spot.
The front section of the 1902 "The Battle Creek Sanitarium" still stands today.
Now that you know the real life weird world that this film is set we can talk about the film.
After Parker had finished the screenplay his first task was to find a location, a building to double as The San that closely matched the Kellogg original this involved him visiting period buildings in fifty different states.
Eventually they discovered The Mohonk Mountain House perched high in the mountains of the Shawangunk Ridge at New Paltz, ninety miles north of New York City.
This enormous hotel had survived with many of the period details intact and was still owned and operated by descendants of the Smiley Brothers who had established it over one hundred years previously. Being strict Quakers the Smiley family were not that motivated to modernise their facilities but simply relied on the beauty of the setting on the Lake and the surrounding countryside to attract visitors.
It also had a close resemblance to the wooden structure of the original ‘San’ as its unique, eccentric architectural development seemed to echo "The San" with its 238 verandas and turrets and balconies popping up as it was added to over the decades motivated by necessity, over having an overarching architectural design.
They also had to recreate the town of Battle Creek, which now is unrecognisable as the Battle Creek of 1907 so the production built the interior sets and the exterior streets at a movie studio in Wilmington, North Carolina. Which was convenient because labor laws in North Carolina allowed Parker to use his own crew made up of English and LA based technicians without falling foul of any Union restrictions but the small studio was located in between a big scary prison and a sewage plant and was far too close to an airport much to the frustration of everyone especially the sound department.
This film also threw up a massive task for parker due to his script featuring 56 speaking roles. and he began casting in New York City, Los Angeles, Upstate New York and in North Carolina.
Anthony Hopkins was Parker's first choice to play Dr. Kellogg and Parker had to woo Hopkins over a few months before he signed on to the project.
Hopkins tells a story that during a dinner with Parker in a restaurant Los Angeles in May of 1993 Hopkins agreed to play Kellogg just to stop Parker from pathetically begging him to do the part he said yes just so the two could actually enjoy the rest of their meal. Parker said that even though Hopkins is a great mimic he felt that possibly his impersonation of Parker, on his knees and in tears is closer to a National Theatre performance than the reality of the situation in the restaurant.
Parker wrote about Hopkins, "I think he rather enjoyed the challenge of playing a more extroverted role, which is somewhat different to what audiences have come to expect of him in recent films. His Kellogg is flamboyant and outrageous, and it also allowed him to play a quintessentially American character. John Harvey Kellogg’s language had been described as 'King James Bible English with a little Mark Twain thrown in', I sent Tony some archive early recordings of Teddy Roosevelt who had a clipped, almost English twang and Tony adapted this to his own particular Kelloggian solution: to portray the showman of health, as he strode the shores of the alimentary canal, expounding his beliefs with the resolve of an evangelist and the guile of a snake oil salesman."
By the end of August 1993 Parker had finalised the main cast who made up the main ensemble.
Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller himself) is William Lightbody our guide through the madness of
Bridget Fonda plays Eleanor Lightbody, a “Battle Freak” who arrives at the San with a shaky marriage and who, with a little resolve and excessive distraction, finds her way to fulfillment, representing as she does, the women of her time who were bravely tip-toeing into a hopeful, emancipated new century.
The San being douched, scrubbed, fried, poked, prodded and purged to try and cure his stomach complaints.
Dana Carvey of SNL and Wayne's World fame completed the ensemble George Kellogg, Dr Kellogg's spurned, renegade adopted son made up with yellowed & broken teeth, greasy hair and face sores. Dana commented “It’s the only film I ever did where the make-up department are pleased if I stay up all night”.
John Cusack plays Charles Ossining a young entrepreneurial, gullible hustler who is pursuing his fortune by jumping on the Corn Flake bandwagon and is being railroaded by the less than noble Goodloe Bender who is played by actor Michael Lerner.
Something that stands out in "The Road To Wellville" is the quality of every single cast member no matter how small the role some real standouts are,
Camryn Manheim who plays patient Virginia,
Traci Lind is the beautiful Nurse Graves,
Lara Flynn Boyle as the sickly Ida Muntz.
Legendary actor John Neville plays the eccentric Enymion Hart Jones & Colm Meaney plays the pervert vegetarian Dr. Lionel Badger.
By November of 1993 all 56 speaking parts were cast as well as the hundreds of hand-picked extras, orchestra & brass band members and opera singers.
The production had made or sourced 1,200 different period costumes for the film. Authentic original clothing came from costumiers in Rome and London as well as yards and yards of lace, linen, wool and other period fabrics bought from suppliers and even flea markets which was then crafted by an army of seamstresses and assistants into a colossal wardrobe department.
The production also had the task of recreating the eccentric quack medical machines.
Due to the retention of Dr. Kellogg’s meticulous documentation they had plenty of reference material to his devices. I feel the production designers and prop builders took a fair bit of creative license when building these wacky machines.
The interiors of the San were all built in the studio in North Carolina, but they were able to transform a large meeting room at the Mohonk Mountain House into the elegant San lobby, by adding loads of mahogany and brass trim, adding a central reservations desk, milk bar and stained-glass windows.
Mohonk is also the location for the dining room. where if you have seen the film the "Chew, Chew, Chew song is sung.
On sound stages at the studios in North Carolina, They built a massive set to incorporate the milk and mud baths, hydriatic percussion, sinusoidal baths, changing rooms, mechanical rooms, surgical offices, Fecal Analysis Room, corridors and the San bedrooms.
The reason I'm going on about the production is that making a period film of this kind is very involved and expensive but Parker and his team made this film for $25m ($55m in 2024)
They really stretched that budget and had ambition far beyond their means but the film looks amazing and like the novel drops you into this very weird world.
Filming began in November of ’93 and finished in February of the following year. It took 62 shooting days to complete.
The film did not perform well at the box office anywhere grossing a little more than its modest budget which obviously is a loss.
On its release the film received mixed to negative reviews, A lot of criticism targeted the scatological nature of the film. People also wrote negatively regarding Hopkins' portrayal of Dr Kellogg but it's a case of you either get it or you don't.
This film is sophisticated and blends satirical humor with broad sex comedy all set in a weird yet tangible historical setting. Parker deftly weaves the three storylines of Dr Kellogg running his world and facing up to his shortcomings as a father, Mr & Mrs Lightbody and their relationship drama and the Charles Ossining plot of him trying to become a breakfast food tycoon.
As with so many films of quality that didn't hit at the box office it was available on VHS and had regular showings on TV and a DVD release did happen in 2001 but it had a truly terrible cover but it has become a cult classic and finally got a good Blu-ray release in 2020 on the Shout! Factory label.
The film is currently available to watch for free on the Freevee streaming service you can pick up the Blu-ray online but it is about £20.00
End of Part Five
