Spurlock

Morgan Spurlock exploded on the American pop culture scene as the star, writer and director of the humorous documentary “Super Size Me” in 2003. In that film, he ingeniously shined a spotlight on the epic of obesity and the rampant fast-food eating habits of Americans by deciding to eat and drink nothing but McDonald’s products for 30 straight days and documenting the results.

Basically, Spurlock’s body went haywire, putting on nearly 25 pound sin a month while sending his body fat, blood pressure and cholesterol levels skyrocketing. The media response was immense, as was the public’s, since “Super Size Me” quickly became one of the ten best documentaries of all time, and snagged an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature to boot.

So, Morgan Spurlock became the flip side to Michael Moore, since he was making films that had a point but didn’t beat people over the head with their message, and since people were actually surprised when he wound up getting fat. He went on to make an insightful documentary series on the FX cable network called “30 Days,” in which people had to experience something they’d never normally endure for a month in order to understand others better.

For instance, Spurlock and his wife tried to live on minimum wage for30 days and found it impossible to make ends meet. In another episode,a devout Christian agreed to move in with a Muslim family for 30 days and see if he could come to understand them better.

Meanwhile, Spurlock flopped hard with his followup film, “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?” It was a classic case of a concept being too catchy for its own good, as Spurlock headed into the Middle East With a camera crew to search for the al-Qaeda leader and instead found nothing, despite pre-release hype that led some to believe he has actually gone toe to toe with the terrorist. The result was instead a feature-length plea for understanding of the Middle East and Muslims That fell flat and repetitive.

Some might have wondered if he could come back after “Where in the World” earned just around $100,000 at the box office. But Spurlock has come back swinging with what might be an even greater concept and film than “Super Size Me,” as his new movie “Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” takes on the world of product placements and over-the-top advertising that has overtaken so much of modern life. He centers the film on an utterly ingenious concept: offering companies the chance to place their products in his film in exchange for paying a share of the budget – and scoring enough deals that the entire film was literally bought and paid for without his having to ask for a dime from Hollywood. For instance, he’ll blatantly use Ban brand deodorant in the movie in exchange for the company giving him$50,000. For $100,000 he’ll repeatedly eat a particular brand of pizza. And Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice bought the rights to have their name in the title for a cool million dollars.

The result is funny as well as fascinating, and harbors a sincere underlying plea for us to take a step back from the madness and consider how much advertising is too much, and whether we need to preserve some sacred quiet space in our minds as well as in society. Spurlock sat down for a discussion of his new film at the Andaz Hotelon the Los Angeles Sunset Strip during the week of the film’s opening.Even that location was ironic, as the Andaz is owned by the Hyatt Hotel corporation – a major sponsor of the film.

Q: Do you believe in guerrilla marketing?

SPURLOCK: I think it works. I came from before I started working in the film business, I worked for a grass roots events marketing company. I think guerrilla and grass-roots marketing are great ways to get ideas out there, get people talking about things and build buzz and excitement. I learned more than that time from one of my mentor than I did through years of film school.

Q: In the film, you show how the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, has almost no publicity at all anymore. I knew it was like that in Cuba, but notthere. It’s surprising since this is a capitalist system in Brazil.

SPURLOCK: I think they wanted to deal with serious problems. SaoPaolo was a very dangerous place for a long time. Even when I wasthere in 2003 (to promote “Super Size Me”) people were gettingkidnapped, I was being driven around in a bulletproof car, and therewere guys stationed at the end of each block in some neighborhoodswith machine guns to protect the people who lived or traveled inbetween from gang warfare. It was a very sketchy place. One of thethings they wanted to do was to address these problems, so they saidtake away the advertising and the pollution it causes, take away thedistractions and the noise and force people to look at the city headon, and look at the people they interact with and look at theirneighborhoods. Crime’s gone down, the quality of living has gone upand the only jobs affected were the people who actually put upbillboards. Everybody else’s businesses have had to focus on makingbetter business, customer service and quality products. For me it’s afascinating example of where do we draw the line. How do we stop? There’s an idea called the broken-window theory. If you see a brokenwindow, one will lead to more broken windows. You see an imperfectplace and it keeps sliding. Now by doing it this other way, they’re pushing to a much more perfect identity and place just because of theway people responded to it. I interviewed 80 people in that city, and not one said “man it would be so nice if there were more posters on bus stop ads.” If it’s a political thing about why you’re getting rid of this, every business owner would push against it. And that’s not happening. It’s not like there’s a dictator running the country putting his picture up everywhere instead. It’s a referendum by a city council that was voted on and passed. It’s a remarkable thing that they pushed through, and it’s pretty inspiring.

Q:It’s one thing to make a movie about product placement, and another to show how strongly you think about it. How did you get the inspiration to make such a meta, self-referential movie?

SPURLOCK: Once we started talking about it, and we got the idea for the film after a terrible episode of “Heroes” where Hayden Panettiere Is given a Nissan Rogue by her dad and he said “Nissan Rogue” 6 times while showing the car and it cut back to the car again. We thought it would be a great way to explore this world of advertising, marketing and product placement, and get companies to actually pay for it and to make this film be the journey. We didn’t realize how interesting it was gonna be until we started shooting, getting into the rooms and the pitch processes. It was fascinating. People always say ‘Nobody wants to see the sausage get made’ but in this movie to see the sausage get made is amazing. You see conversations and negotiations in roomsyou’ve never been in before. It was an amazing thing to see and I’mdumbfounded still every day that people even gave us the money to makethis film.

Q: How did you decide on this one out of all the massive problemsAmerica has right now?

SPURLOCK: It all comes down to the idea, and if it speaks to me and myproducing partner, Jeremy. I really thought this would be a greatstory to tell and a unique way of telling the story. We’ve beenthinking about this ever since working on the ‘Simpsons’ anniversaryspecial.

Q: What was the company that surprised you the most for being in it?And for turning you down?

SPURLOCK: The company I was most surprised was in the film was Hyatt.Hyatt is traditionally an incredibly conservative company and theymade a point of trying to change the perception of who they are. We’restaying in a Hyatt – the Andaz is a Hyatt. But just like with theirboutique hotels, they’re always looking to do something different. Butit was also great for me because what their coming on did was it madea lot of other companies say, “Well, if Hyatt is doing it,” here’sthis Fortune 500 company with a blue-chip name with brand identity,then why not them?The company that most disappointed me was In-N-Out Burger. I wanted afast food partner so bad, we wanted to make a doc-buster – a documentary blockbuster. If you’re gonna make a doc-buster, you gottahave a happy meal, you gotta have a kids’ meal. We called McDonaldsbut they didn’t call back. We called Burger King, they called and said thanks but no thanks.’ We called Taco Bell, Jack in the Box, every fast food company you can think of and they all said no. I stalkedIn-N-Out, called them every week for weeks and weeks and weeks and said ‘it’ll be great and amazing, we can make an Un-Happy Meal, we’ll make the box covered in how marketing and advertising works and why you bought it’ and they said ‘no, it doesn’t sound amazing at all for us.

Q: Since you have a grass-roots marketing background, did anything you learned about marketing with this film surprise you?

SPURLOCK: You don’t understand the influence the brands will start to have on the creative process until they’re involved in the creative process. You have them say ‘shoot here,’ ‘talk about us like this in the film or say these certain things,’ ‘we expect a certain amount of screen time in the film.’ When you’re expected to deliver on all these metrics of expectations, you start to realize ‘wow I’m potentially going to lose control of the film I wanna make.’ At what point do you push back so it doesn’t become a commercial? What made it work really great for this film, because it did start to steer the course of the narrative, when I go pitch Pom and here’s the commercial we want to make and they say “no! We want you to make it like this,’ which is basically everything we want you to say about our company. For me, I love that because it does fall under the idea of truth in advertising.It’s one of my favorite parts of the film. For me that’s it. I thought there would be a way to push the brands back and not have them influence the decision-making process, but that doesn’t happen. Once-they’re in, they’re in.

Q: Are you afraid of backlash, like with McDonald’s in “Super Size Me.”Were you afraid of dealing with these companies in making this film at all?

SPURLOCK: You’re always afraid of backlash. There’s always a chance that someone will pull out saying they don’t wanna do this after all,or you might get a big scary letter from a lawyer like the new Volkswagen sent us but on a different scale as someone who you’re already in a contract with. There’s always a chance of that, but I made a point of making them all feel they were a part of this while maintaining our creative control. Q: The eventual DVD or Blu-Ray release – what kind of features?

SPURLOCK: We shot 375 hours. There were so many amazing scenes we shot, the interviews we shot with Nader, Chomsky and all the great directors we spoke to were an hour each. There was a great scene where we took kids shopping and talked about how kids will basically buy anything once you slap a character on them. We had a great scene where we put Iron Man on motor oil and put Spongebob on a box of Tampax and Spider-Man on a package of Trojans. The kids started going down the aisles,grabbing these things simply because the characters were onthem. It was a remarkable scene that just didn’t make sense in themovie, but it’ll be great on the video.

Q: At the end of the film, it says nobody had final cut. How did youmake that happen especially when earlier in the film there were allthese insane contracts where they’re demanding final approval?

SPURLOCK: We’d push back and push back. They would want more, we’d sayno, so what we agreed to with most brands was three things: we’d givethem creative consultation where we would call them and talk about howwe’d include them in the movie. They all got non-disparagement clauseswhere we agreed not to disparage their products. We will disparageyour competitors all we want, but we promise not to disparage you. Thelast one is that they got the right to see the film prior to itstheatrical release. Once the Sundance announcement happened aroundThanksgiving, they said ‘we need to see this movie before Sundance,immediately. Come to our boardroom and show our lawyers.” But weweren’t done yet, and the last thing you want to do is sit in aconference room with their lawyers and executives who are looking atthis film with narrow tunnelvision, dissecting every second theirbrand is shown and its minutiae. We said ‘you should come to Sundanceand see it there.’ They said that’s a release, and we said no it isn’tit’s a little tiny festival. Out of the 15 brands we have on board, 11of them came. And it was fantastic, the film played through the roofand all of them were ecstatic because now they saw themselves as partof a bigger whole, and that they were being treated equal as everyoneelse in the film. They also got to see everyone else who helped makethe movie happen, and that they were part of something larger.

Q: Do you feel with the finished film that you maintained the goal youset out to accomplish by making a film about advertising?

SPURLOCK: I think the fact that we were able to maintain creativecontrol of the film was huge. That enabled us not to sell out but tobuy into how these Hollywood films are made, and that you need thesepromotional partners to get a larger reeleases, attention or buzz. Wedid make the film that dissected the process, what goes on behind thecurtain. The film works on a lot of levels, but the biggest is thatafter you watch this film, you’ll never look at a TV show or movie thesame way again. And I think that level of awareness is a great thingto have. What it also does is that once you leave the theater, youbecome even more hyper-aware of all the marketing and advertisingthat’s in your life. Everything you see outside, even if it’s on abillboard or poster – this will make you ask the question that SaoPaolo asked: where do we draw the line? How much is too much? Do wereally need to live in this world where everything’s brought to us bysome sponsor? Or is there some place that is sacred, and what the filmshows is that we live in a time where nothing is sacred and everythingis for sale.