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In 2023, Rose Tucker and Matthew Salleh, a Brooklyn couple who make documentary films about seemingly ordinary subjects (dogs, barbecue), were throwing out ideas for their next project when they remembered a long-running blog they liked, Used to Be a Pizza Hut. The conceit was simple: photos of businesses that had moved into and retrofitted former locations of the pizza chain.

The visual joke worked because Pizza Hut, with its two-tiered red roof and trapezoid windows, has such a distinctive design, and because after the company transitioned in the late 1990s to a “delco” model — industry jargon for delivery and carry out — a lot of the dine-in locations closed, leaving them as orphaned real estate.

Many became other restaurants, often Mexican or Chinese, and not a few pizzerias, but the businesses varied widely: a flower shop; a liquor and tobacco store; a used-car lot; multiple funeral homes.

Inspired by the blog, Salleh, 42, began to wonder, “Who are the people that converted these buildings? Was this their dream? A thing of opportunity?”

Said Tucker, 40, “We thought we could dive a little deeper.”

In “Slice of Life: The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts.,” which came out last year, the filmmakers meet the members of an LGBTQ-friendly church in Florida, the husband-and-wife owners of a Colorado marijuana dispensary, the employees of a Texas karaoke bar and others who transformed a space for which multiple generations carry a warm nostalgia. Consider it a portrait of American life as refracted through humble chain architecture.

Or perhaps not humble. “People walk into these buildings and straightaway know it’s a Pizza Hut” from the windows and roof, Salleh said. “What an amazing achievement of design to make a building that owns a common shape.”

Each new tenant tried to make this familiar inherited architecture their own. The weed dispensary went for a green roof instead of red and, as the owner noted in his best Cheech &Chong, “Now we have our own salad bar with our own type of lettuce.” The church filled the odd-shaped window frames with stained glass and painted the exterior a heavenly-cloud white.

And then there was Eddie Nero, the namesake proprietor of Big Ed’s BBQ, in Waukegan, Illinois, who gutted the empty former Pizza Hut he rented in 2015, just as the architect who rented the building before him did. Nero’s wife was against the move (she hated the trapezoid windows and low ceilings), but he saw in its ample parking and location on a well-trafficked road a dream spot to grow his business.

“It was a lot of work transforming the old Pizza Hut into what it is now,” Nero says in the film, before adding with a head shake, “But even people who come in now, they’re, like, ‘This is the old Pizza Hut, right?’ Those damn windows.”

The damn windows date to the 1960s, when Dan and Frank Carney, who founded Pizza Hut in Wichita, Kansas, hired a local architecture firm to create a branded building for their growing chain.

To attract motorists’ attention, the name of the game in midcentury roadside architecture, the architects came up with the red roof topped with a cupola and trapezoidal windows, rumored to be inspired by pizza slices.

Philip Langdon, an architecture and design writer who appears in the film, said in a recent interview that Pizza Huts were “conspicuous, noticeable and standardized, but they weren’t as garish as many other chains had been.” And the design was enduring, going unchanged for 40 years and worming into the consciousness of pizza-eaters worldwide.

“Slice of Life” is about the virtue of reuse, of course. As Abel Baldazo Jr., the bartender at Yupp’s karaoke bar in Fort Worth, Texas, tells the filmmakers, “I think it’s cool when architecture gets saved. Even if it’s a Pizza Hut.” But perhaps most moving is seeing the way these discarded buildings can give birth to someone’s entrepreneurial dreams.

Nico Romo, a chef from France, had cooked for a decade for a local hospitality group in Charleston, South Carolina, but it wasn’t until a business partner offered him a former Pizza Hut outside the city that he had a restaurant of his own.

He was initially unsure: Could an upscale French seafood house work in a space where diners once munched on personal pan pizzas and breadsticks? Add to that, Pizza Hut kitchens were not built for the prep work fine dining requires.

“We ripped out everything,” Romo said. “We kept all four walls and added 500 square feet to the back of the building. That’s where I put the kitchen, walk-in cooler, a small dishwashing machine.” He also installed an oyster bar and a wood-fired oven in the old dining room and flattened a former arcade room to create a large outside patio and bar. He painted the exterior white and added modern signage and a line of palm trees, to create the very popular NICO Oysters + Seafood.

Romo has since opened three more restaurants around Charleston — and wins the unofficial award for fanciest former Pizza Hut.

Still, he took conspicuous pains to honor what came before: For the patio, he devised wood-slatted screens shaped like V’s to match the Pizza Hut windows. “People come in, sit down, start having drinks, turn around and say, ‘Is this a Pizza Hut?’ ” Romo said. “Yes, it is. I didn’t want to lose that.”

Tucker and Salleh, who both grew up eating at Pizza Hut in their native Australia, likened these buildings to hermit crabs — a ready protective shell where a new business can be nurtured and grow.

“I don’t think it’s anyone’s dream to start their restaurant in an old Pizza Hut,” Salleh said. “But it’s where they built their dreams.”

After nine years in the former Pizza Hut, Big Ed’s BBQ moved to a new location last year. The family business, which includes Nero’s wife and sons, became so popular and prosperous it outgrew its shell.

“We really got to the point where we were losing business because there was nowhere to sit and the line would snake through the restaurant,” Nero, who bought an 18,000-square-foot former banquet hall a few miles away, said in a recent phone interview.

Nero finds it hard to drive by the old location, which sits empty, a common reality for many former Pizza Huts. It’s where his ambition to run his own restaurant and serve people delicious food was realized; the Big Ed’s sign still looms over the parking lot, he said.

Indeed, Big Ed’s was so successful it may have done that rare thing — overshadowed its famous predecessor. “The hardest part for whoever takes it is that building will be known as Big Ed’s as much as the old Pizza Hut,” he said.

This article originally appeared in .

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