The director of Iron Man got Bill Murray into The Jungle Book by flying him a homemade brisket. That movie made $966 million, and Jon Favreau only knew how to smoke a brisket worth flying because of Chef, the little movie he made after almost wrecking his career. Some context on the career part. In 2011 he directed Cowboys & Aliens with Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig. It cost $163 million and made $174.8 million worldwide, which sounds okay until you find out a studio movie usually needs about 2.5 times its budget just to break even. Critics hated it, and he didn't put out another movie for almost three years. So he went small. He wrote Chef in about two weeks, by his own count, and shot it for $11 million. It's about a chef whose boss keeps making him cook the same old menu, who blows up at a food critic online, quits, and starts over with a food truck and his kid. Favreau has said pretty openly that Carl walking out of that restaurant is him walking away from big studio movies. The food truck part came from a real guy. Roy Choi spent years cooking in fancy hotel kitchens and then got laid off. Back in 2008 he and some partners got a beat-up used truck, started selling Korean barbecue tacos around LA, and tweeted wherever they'd be parked that night. People lined up around the block, and Newsweek ended up calling Kogi the first viral eatery. If you've seen Chef, that's the whole subplot where the son blows the truck up on Twitter. Favreau had actually eaten Kogi years earlier, when Gwyneth Paltrow had the truck feed the Iron Man 2 crew. Favreau brought Choi on to consult, and Choi ended up a co-producer who oversaw every dish in the movie. Favreau went to French culinary school and worked shifts in Choi's kitchens. Those Cuban sandwiches are Choi's recipe. And the guy pulling a brisket out of butcher paper in that Austin scene really is Aaron Franklin. He started Franklin Barbecue out of a trailer in 2009, it's sold out of brisket every single day since, and a year after Chef came out he became the first barbecue guy to ever win a James Beard award. Which brings it back to Bill Murray. Before Chef even hit theaters, Disney had Favreau lined up for The Jungle Book, and he wanted Murray for Baloo. Murray famously doesn't have an agent. You leave a voicemail on a toll-free number and hope he calls back. Favreau's story is that he smoked a brisket and flew it across the country to make his pitch. Neel Sethi, the kid who played Mowgli, remembers the recording trip to Martha's Vineyard as playing touch football with Bill Murray while Favreau worked the grill. The Jungle Book did $966 million. Disney handed him The Lion King after that, and it did $1.66 billion. He and Choi even turned the whole thing into a Netflix show, with a full episode back at Franklin's pit learning how to trim a brisket. Pretty good return on a movie people still call two hours of Favreau eating sandwiches.