Lara Flynn Boyle in a scene from The Road to Wellville (1994)
It’s a movie about corn flakes. Sort of.
Dr. John Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes and granola, conceived them as health foods in an era when there were insufficient standards about bacteria in fresh food.
A man named C.W. Post was once a patient at John Kellogg’s health retreat in Battle Creek, Michigan. Kellogg was quite open about the process of creating flaked cereals, and Post was impressed with what he saw. He realized the commercial potential of toasted flakes, and developed a major food company based upon Dr. Kellogg’s processes. When Post first marketed Grape-Nuts, he used to include in each box a small brochure he had written based upon John Kellogg’s theories. The name of that brochure was “The Road to Wellville.”
Meanwhile, Will Kellogg was quite upset that his brother had not kept the flaking process a secret, and decided that the Kellogg family should be reaping the benefit of John’s invention. At first the Kellogg brothers worked together to form a company to market toasted flakes, but the brothers came to disagree on product extensions. John wanted to market solely healthful items, while Will saw the commercial potential in adding sugar and using the resulting delicious taste as an additional selling point. Will broke off from the brothers’ original venture to form what was eventually to become Kellogg’s Cereals.
(The brothers feuded. As time went on, John Kellogg, the genius who patented the process of grain flaking, was prohibited from using his last name to market his own cereals because his brother had the sole right to sell “Kellogg’s cereals.”)
I’ve actually gone off the track. Very little of that is in the movie, which centers on Dr. Kellogg’s sanitarium, and is essentially a satire of American life at the turn of the century, symbolized by a Battle Creek full of charlatans of every description, possessing none of Dr. Kellogg’s expertise or good intentions, trying to hustle the wellness tourists. My female roommate, who grew up in the USSR, loved the movie, and said, “It doesn’t seem that America changed much in that past century.”
The film is about 90% fictional. It does include nudity from four different women, so in this case I approve the fictionalization, because Dr. Kellogg’s sanitarium was actually NOT a co-ed facility, and I like to look at naked women.
My wife and I really looked forward to the movie of “The Road to Wellville.” But aside from the costumes and set design, I’d rank it as the worst movie translation ever of a book we both really loved. It made Brian DePalma’s version of “Bonfire of the Vanities” look like a masterpiece.