Meals on reels

Five Easy Pieces

The eating place of choice for a nation on the move has always been the American diner, which takes its familiar rectangular shape from the horse-drawn originals of the post-Civil War years. These slightly garish places with their rows of fixed seats alongside a long counter, banquettes of four-seater tables and exteriors of shiny stainless steel and neon fascia, have figured in more movies than any other eateries and many have been designated national treasures. All have restricted menus, some of them very rigid too, and it's in one of those that the most celebrated diner sequence takes place, illustrating the conflict between a generation of Sixties rebels and a deadening national conformity.

In Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), malcontent drop-out Jack Nicholson, his dim girlfriend Karen Black and two hippie hitchhikers stop at a roadside diner while driving beside the Pacific. Nicholson's Bobby Dupee wants a meal that isn't on the menu and an inimitable dialogue ensues:

Waitress: I don't make the rules.

Bobby: OK, I'll make it as easy as I can. I'd like an omelette plain and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast. No mayonnaise. No butter. No lettuce, and a cup of coffee.

Waitress: Number two, Chicken sal san, hold the butter, the lettuce and the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee. Anything else?

Bobby: Yeah. Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, and give me the check for the chicken salad sandwich and you haven't broken any rules.

Waitress: You want me to hold the chicken, huh?

Bobby: I want you to hold it between your knees.

Waitress: You see that sign sir? [Pointing to a notice demanding courtesy from customers] I guess you'll have to leave. I'm not going to stand any more of your smartness and sarcasm.

Bobby: You see this sign. [He sweeps everything off the table]

The screenwriter Adrien Joyce got this famous 'no substitutions' sequence from seeing a pugnacious young man doing the same thing in a Hollywood restaurant. She later came to know him as Jack Nicholson.