Why did Harold & Kumar go to White Castle? The inside story from the Columbus burger chain

Harold and Kumar (and the screenwriters who created them) had no Plan B. They were never going to go to Wendy's or McDonald's. Pizza Hut? Subway? Not a chance.

It was always White Castle — come hell, high water, horrible coworkers, racist bros, flatulent sisters, rabid racoons, flat tires, amorous tow-truck drivers, bad cops, jail, stolen weed, Neil Patrick Harris , cheetahs, errant hang gliders — or bust.

So it's a good thing Jamie Richardson, White Castle's marketing vice president, returned a call to the number on a pink while-you-were-out slip that laid on his desk one morning in April of 2003. He thinks it was a Thursday. He's certain it was around April Fool's Day, because he wasn't quite sure the whole thing was for real.

As he soon found out, it was, although the pitch sounds almost as far-fetched as the plot itself. The writers and would-be producers of a movie about two stoned 20-somethings making a star-crossed fast-food run through New Jersey wanted permission to make their destination a family-owned burger restaurant so tightly controlled that it processes all of its own beef, bakes its own buns, doesn't sell stock and doesn't do franchises.

Twenty years after "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" hit theaters nationwide and further cemented the Columbus-based burger chain's place as the last stop of the night, here's the real story of how White Castle and "Harold & Kumar" got to each other.

Did White Castle actually agree?

"He didn’t say anything, and that was intimidating," Richardson recalls of his meeting with White Castle's then-CEO Bill Ingram, when he sought the official go-ahead for the project. Richardson was five years into his tenure with the company and already had climbed two rungs up the corporate ladder, from regional marketing supervisor to assistant marketing director to director of marketing.

The Ingrams: Meet the Ohio family behind White Castle's famous sliders

But even with a down-pat pitch and the safety of family ties — Richardson's wife, like Ingram and current CEO Lisa Ingram, are descendants of White Castle founder Billy Ingram — he panicked when he stepped into the boss' office.

"I lost it. I said, 'Uh, it has sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Other than that, it’s great for us,'" Richardson recalled. "Bill said, 'Have a seat. What are you talking about?'"

It had been a couple weeks since the call from Cassandra Barbour at Entertainment Clearances Inc., a Los Angeles company that handles intellectual property licensing for movies, TV and other projects. Two young screenwriters had written a script about, as Richardson remembered the description, "two likeable underdogs who spend an evening of misadventure and eventually come to White Castle."

Would White Castle get on board and allow its name, imagery and products to be used?

The script arrived by FedEx the next day, and Richardson tucked it into his bag as he left the office for the weekend. He started reading it early one morning after getting a fussy child back to sleep and was struck by two things. First, he said, "Harold & Kumar" was a classic man-versus-man, man-versus-nature, man-versus-society and man-versus-himself story of two people on a quest for their object of desire.

Second: "Cassandra failed to mention this was rated R. I'm going through it thinking, 'Wow this is really great!' Then, 'Oh boy!'

"But I thought this could be kind of cool for us and kind of fun," Richardson said.

An internal debate at headquarters

Before the pitch to Ingram, Richardson said, folks at White Castle's corporate office had the types of discussions one would expect of a company that, even if small by fast-food standards, still expends much effort crafting and protecting the image it wants to portray to the world. The white tiles and stainless steel of its earliest restaurants in the 1920s were chosen to emphasize cleanliness at a time when people were suspect about food-safety standards.

From November 2019: White Castle moves into new headquarters

Why would White Castle want to be part of a film that would carry advisories for strong language, sexual content, drug use and crude humor, some on the inside asked. Would White Castle's name in the movie's title be an implicit encouragement of its characters' behavior?

Richardson suspected some at the company might have had bad memories from a scene in the dark disco-era film, "Saturday Night Fever," in which one of the characters with a mouth full of burger jumps onto a White Castle table, barks like a dog and startles customers.

There was good internal dialogue and "not complete agreement," Richardson recalled. "It got to the point in those conversations where basically the thought was, 'If you’re willing to talk to Bill Ingram, more power to you.'"

Ingram wanted to know one thing when Richardson stood before him: Did the movie make fun of White Castle team members? He told the CEO that "Harold & Kumar" portrayed them in a positive light. Ingram gave the OK.

Harold and Kumar were never going anywhere else

In an interview with The Dispatch, screenwriters Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz said they wrote White Castle's role into their movie from the very beginning. Hurwitz's parents grew up in the Bronx and went there for burgers when they were young. When the family lived in Pittsburgh for seven years, he said, his grandparents would pack 100 sliders into dry ice before driving from New Jersey for visits.

When the high school friends decided to write a stoner comedy, they said, the quest for fast food felt like a good premise for a late-night adventure and a slice of their own lives at the time. And few other places required a true quest. Twenty years after "Harold & Kumar," the company still has just 345 restaurants in 15 states. McDonald's, on the other hand, has 13,529 restaurants across all 50 states and all but two U.S. territories.

"It was the naivete of two young screenwriters where we thought of that as a no-brainer," Hurwitz said of securing White Castle's involvement.

"We really didn't want to go there in our minds," Schlossberg said of the possibility White Castle might have said no.

The writers did strike out with another real-life chain that was in their original script. Remember Goldstein and Rosenberg, the friends Harold and Kumar spot toward the end of the movie enjoying the object of their own late-night food quest? Krispy Kreme backed out a few days before filming began, so it was replaced with the fictional Hot Dog Heaven.

Here's what White Castle changed

White Castle didn't give Hurwitz and Schlossberg carte blanche with its brand, either.

Here are three changes the company requested and received:

● Their desire for sliders begins early in the movie when Harold and Kumar, played by John Cho and Kal Penn , are smoking marijuana in their apartment and a White Castle commercial comes on the television. All good so far, but the script called for Kumar to wear a T-shirt that said, "I Like the Pope. The Pope Smokes Dope."

Richardson worried it would offend Ingram family members who are Catholic, so he asked Hurwitz and Schlossberg to use something else. Viewers probably were offended more by the shirt Kumar wore instead; it carried a crude reference to the name of then-President George W. Bush. "Yeah, that was a lot worse," Richardson chuckled in retrospect.

● When Harold and Kumar pull off the highway in New Brunswick, they find a Burger Shack where they were told a White Castle would be. The Burger Shack employee at the drive-thru, played by a scene-stealing Anthony Anderson, waxes eloquently about White Castle sliders before rampaging through the kitchen of his own restaurant.

Originally, though, the main characters were to find a White Castle that had been closed down. Since the company was expanding at the time and didn't like the imagery of one of its restaurants boarded up, Richardson asked for a revision.

● In an animated dream sequence after he's thrown off the back of a racing cheetah, one of Harold's visions was supposed to be a dog lifting its leg and urinating Coca Cola. "We’ve been a Coca Cola partner since 1921; that just doesn’t seem right," Richardson told Schlossberg and Hurwitz. Their response, he recalled, "was, 'Eh, that’s kind of a relief. That would have been hard to pull off.'"

"We didn’t get fussy," Richardson said of White Castle's review, which was limited to scenes that referenced the company. "We didn’t say, 'Hey, do you think you can change the behaviors of Harold and Kumar?' If we had come in being overly protective, it wouldn’t have been the right fit."

Said Schlossberg: "Every company is scared of its own shadow. We were lucky someone like Jamie Richardson was there."

Fallout? What fallout?

"Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" was released in theaters on July 30, 2004, and White Castle braced for negative reaction. Richardson pledged to himself that he would take on whatever fallout might come the company's way.

The emails and calls totaled just 25. He called each person to explain. He didn't win everyone over, he said, but some at least appreciated the effort.

Here's where "Harold & Kumar" did have an impact, though. Through July 2004, White Castle sales were up barely 3% over the previous year, but they shot up 30% in the week after the movie's release. A similar boost came when the DVD was released in January of 2005.

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"Upon the film’s release, we were instantly introduced to a whole new generation of 'Cravers' — both in our drive-thrus at the restaurants and with new customers who bought our six-packs from their local grocer’s freezer aisle to microwave at home. We knew we had a hit on our hands," Lisa Ingram, who succeeded her father as White Castle CEO in 2015, said in a statement for The Dispatch.

Ingram called it "mildly awkward" for her fellow fourth-generation family members to watch the movie with their parents, aunts and uncles at a Columbus premiere the company hosted at the former Arena Grand theater in the Arena District. "But I’m pretty sure some of them were laughing pretty hard when we weren’t looking," she said.

"'Harold & Kumar' — or as my father refers to it, 'the greatest film to not win an Academy Award' — is an epic for the ages."

Richardson sees "Harold & Kumar" more deeply than its salty language, scatological humor and credits for characters such as "I'm So High Kid" and "Giant Bag of Weed." In the same way characters in the movie describe White Castle as a foundation of the American Dream, the White Castle executive (he's been a vice president since 2008) describes the movie in Shakespearean terms of heroic quests.

Surprised a company so concerned about image that it used to handle the washing and pressing of employee uniforms would embrace a title role in the stoner road-trip movie of an entire generation? You shouldn't be.

"We’ll put a competitor's name in there, and if a competitor would do it, we’re probably not interested," Richardson said. "'Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle' put us into people’s psyche in a way that made us even more magical, even more desirable.

"It turned out to be a fun ride."

rvitale@dispatch.com

Instagram: @dispatchdining

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Why did Harold & Kumar go to White Castle? The inside story from the Columbus burger chain