As a renowned music video director, photographer and illustrator, Mahurin has worked with a lot of difficult and charismatic stars — everyone from Sting to Metallica — but he never met his match until he started filming an endearing version of the Soup Nazi. Kenny Shopsin runs a hole-in-the wall restaurant in New York (first immortalized in a Calvin Trillin New Yorker article) where he dishes up exotic pancakes and 900 other specialties, stirring in his down-to-earth philosophy about morality, butter, sex, waste disposal, and child-rearing. Shopsin is the hot-tempered master of this off-kilter universe, and regulars fear banishment at every turn. Mahurin, a master craftsman working alone and on a modest budget, throws us into Shopsin's deep fryer, and we're transformed, emerging with nothing less than a robust version of what's important in life.

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