I Used to Be a Pizza Hut, Ask Me Anything

(Courtesy of Urtext Films)

Slice of Life The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts. A documentary film by Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker Urtext Films, 2024

IT’S FUNNY. YOU CAN TAKE ordinary footage, put a wistful soundtrack over it, and somehow it feels like it means something. Maybe sometimes it does.

That’s what I wondered as I watched the third feature documentary from Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker, the small team behind Slice of Life: Can a truly slice-of-life film add up to something more? The documentary profiles the owners of six businesses, each housed in a relatively unmodified former Pizza Hut building. The owners and customers alike recognize, even respect, the old building and its conspicuous outline. There is a theme that runs through the film’s eclectic chatter: on nostalgia, on continuity, on transformation, on how one generation’s bland, brand-centric architecture can accidentally become the raw material for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

But these themes shimmer over the film’s surface rather than making up its core question, at least, not as much as a built-environment/suburbia/architecture nerd like me would have hoped. Unlike many documentaries, the filmmakers impose little by way of a story or narrative or even ultimate point here. But then again, it’s Slice of Life, and it’s certainly true to its name.

Salleh and Tucker promoted the documentary on Reddit, I found a couple of threads they participated in while just googling the documentary, and sure enough, this was more or less their intent. One of them wrote:

All our films have been ‘tapestries’ that show a diverse group of people brought together by a single factor (in this case, running out of old Pizza Hut buildings). We thought it would be such a great mechanism to look at America through. People from across the country doing their thing, but all doing it in the exact same building!

What might appear as a naïve approach to technique or editing is an impressionistic intent. Even recognizing this aim, it’s striking how frequently the interviews with owners and customers go long and range far afield from anything to do with Pizza Huts, or even with the businesses they’re running.

A karaoke bar owner almost cries as he admits he used to be a racist. (Awkwardly, after this heartfelt moment mulling racism and respect, the film introduces a marijuana dispensary segment with a stereotypical reggae soundtrack.)

A transgender oyster shucker notes that oysters change their sex, so perhaps we’re not so different. (If that hasn’t left Pizza Hut behind, the oyster segment extends the oyster subplot with a visit to an oyster farmer!)

A lesbian minister at an LGBT-affirming church in a former Pizza Hut, complete with custom trapezoidal stained-glass windows, alludes to an experience with her college roommate that clarified her understanding of her sexuality.

A hippie in Colorado talks about empathy and coming together, opining that humans are “just a bunch of hairless apes with anxiety” who should help each other out more.

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The humanity may be the focus here, but at times the interviews feel a bit too loose and unedited. Bits and pieces, however, work superbly. (And those fragments help you appreciate how much must go into a film for such considerations to be invisible to the viewer.)

For example, the interviews with the curator of the Pizza Hut Museum (located in the same building as the very first Pizza Hut restaurant), the blogger behind the internet-famous “Used to be a Pizza Hut” blog, and Pizza Hut co-founder Dan Carney are excellent, rounding out and contextualizing the other commentary we hear wonderfully.

And some of the commentary from the occupants of former Pizza Huts is delightful, too. The operator of the marijuana dispensary explains how he painted his building’s distinctive roof green while also joking that “we have our own salad bar with our own type of lettuce.” A bartender at the karaoke bar observes, “I think it’s cool when architecture gets saved, even if it’s a Pizza Hut.” The general manager of a French restaurant-cum-oyster bar notes that the building, still standing after many decades, is time-tested: “You’ve got a great frame. Why change it? To be able to make something fresh and something new out of something that was nostalgic to people is pretty cool.”

(Courtesy of Urtext Films)

The owner of a boutique building-restoration company, one of whose projects is a taqueria in (you guessed it!) an old Pizza Hut, explains that, “What we’re looking for is anything that smells like cat pee. Smells like opportunity.” While these old buildings may look like junk, they’re actually resources. Against the alternatives of more dramatic, larger-scale redevelopments or new suburban sprawl, the act of breathing new life into old, sometimes kitschy buildings like this is truly a way to build something meaningful.

These are the magic moments in Slice of Life: where “show don’t tell” is operating perfectly, and where the everyday humdrum suddenly crystallizes and the meaning becomes clear. The nostalgic push-and-pull of a thing changing yet remaining what it is; of growth and innovation and simply change that nonetheless recognizes its roots? You feel it. The curious process by which a faded corporate behemoth like Pizza Hut, which itself began as a scrappy entrepreneurial effort, seeds the American landscape with a sort of architectural public domain: an architectural karmic cycle of death and rebirth? You get it.

Painting a roof green isn’t just a cheeky way to say “we sell weed”; it stands in contrast to the iconic red roof and builds on it. The church’s stained glass, made to fit windows designed by a restaurant chain, exists in continuity with that old use (just as they do in continuity with ecclesial use). For that matter, the name “Pizza Hut” itself was partly determined by this kind of spatial path dependency: the sign that came with the first Pizza Hut building fit a limited number of letters. Once “pizza” was decided on, only three letters were left. (Oh, and even the first Pizza Hut oven was a hand-me-down, a cast-off from an Italian restaurant.) From that humble beginning, this corporate, brand-centric building arose that, perhaps against the odds, still provides a shared set of references and memories. You may think, how poor we Americans are for that to be our shared culture. But it doesn’t make it any less real.

The best way to take Slice of Life’s loose, meandering nature is to see it as a mirror of the very process it documents: the way people do what they can with what they have; how the same basic thing happens in infinite variations.

At one point in the film, Jesús Ochoa, the taqueria owner, is asked what the American Dream means to him. Part of it, he says carefully, is having opportunity. But part of it is choosing to go after it. For him, that opportunity was grueling hours as a restaurant worker, and then, courtesy of an old Pizza Hut building, ownership and self-employment. The whole thing is the story. The whole thing is the point.

There is a, not quite fully formed, call to humility here. What most observers would see as corporate jetsam turns out to be, once again, a cheap space for entrepreneurs to get a foothold. (One Redditor commented that they always look for restaurants in old Pizza Huts, because they’re almost always small, independent establishments.) The buildings are adaptable and rather generic, after all, they’re just boxes with a roof and exterior ornamentation.

The bigger point is that not only is one man’s urban trash another man’s architectural treasure; one business’s cast-off is another business’s opportunity. Like that first Pizza Hut oven, the nation’s vacant Pizza Huts, or the historic cities bulldozed for urban renewal, or aging suburbs littered with America’s corporate detritus might well turn out to be greatly underappreciated places. They’re places central enough to attract interest and investment, but at the same time cheap and neglected enough to be accessible for people with ideas and gumption but not a ton of money. The tricky thing is that the space’s transformation, its rebirth, has to occur first, before the landscape’s previous value will seem obvious looking back.

In other words, Slice of Life calls to mind the small-c conservatism of trusting people, distrusting big, top-down plans, and letting slow, organic, incremental change work its subtle magic. It does not end with, but it always starts with, what already exists. Shades of Hayek’s spontaneous order and economic individualism, crossed with Burke’s conception of society as a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

But, truth be told, if you’re one for human interest, the film will probably work for you, whatever its technical shortcomings. The philosophical-political musings are just the icing on the cake, or, perhaps we should say, the pepperoni on the pizza.

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