The restaurants were cool—I'm pretty sure I ate at one when my parents took me to Manhattan around 1968. The documentary suffered from using the same images over and over, through conversations about how to shoot the movie that had nothing to do with the Automat, and with the preponderance of interviews with politically correct people who used their time to talk about politics and added very little information of interest. Mel Brooks was the feature celebrity, and he was fine and sometimes amusing.