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 epidemic 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.
[youtube T4Ng2P3zxfM nolink]
—–
Basically, Spurlock’s body went haywire, putting on nearly 25 pounds in 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 biggest 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 for 30 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 had 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.
Some might have wondered if he could regroup 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 Hotel on 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 mentors 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 not there. It’s surprising since this is a capitalist system in Brazil.
SPURLOCK: I think they wanted to deal with serious problems. Sao Paolo was a very dangerous place for a long time. Even when I was there in 2003 (to promote “Super Size Me”) people were getting kidnapped, I was being driven around in a bulletproof car, and there were guys stationed at the end of each block in some neighborhoods with machine guns to protect the people who lived or traveled in between from gang warfare. It was a very sketchy place. One of the things they wanted to do was to address these problems, so they said take away the advertising and the pollution it causes, take away the distractions and the noise and force people to look at the city head on, and look at the people they interact with and look at their neighborhoods. Crime’s gone down, the quality of living has gone up and the only jobs affected were the people who actually put up billboards. Everybody else’s businesses have had to focus on making better business, customer service and quality products. For me it’s a fascinating 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 broken window, one will lead to more broken windows. You see an imperfect place 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 the way 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 or 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 Panattiere is given a Nissan Rogue by her dad and he said “Nissan Rogue” six 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 rooms you’ve never been in before. It was an amazing thing to see and I’m dumbfounded still every day that people even gave us the money to make this film.
Q: How did you decide on this one out of all the massive problems America has right now?
SPURLOCK: It all comes down to the idea, and if it speaks to me and my producing partner, Jeremy. I really thought this would be a great story to tell and a unique way of telling the story. We’ve been thinking about this ever since working on the ‘Simpsons’ anniversary special.
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 they made a point of trying to change the perception of who they are. We’re staying in a Hyatt – the Andaz is a Hyatt. But just like with their boutique hotels, they’re always looking to do something different. But it was also great for me because what their coming on did was it made a lot of other companies say, “Well, if Hyatt is doing it,” here’s this 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 a fast food partner so bad, we wanted to make a doc-buster – a documentary blockbuster. If you’re gonna make a doc-buster, you gotta have a happy meal, you gotta have a kids’ meal. We called McDonalds but 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 stalked In-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 McDonalds 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 one 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 on them. It was a remarkable scene that just didn’t make sense in the movie, but it’ll be great on the video.
Q: At the end of the film, it says nobody had final cut. How did you make that happen especially when earlier in the film there were all these insane contracts where they’re demanding final approval?
SPURLOCK: We’d push back and push back. They would want more, we’d say no, so what we agreed to with most brands was three things: we’d give them creative consultation where we would call them and talk about how we’d include them in the movie. They all got non-disparagement clauses where we agreed not to disparage their products. We will disparage your competitors all we want, but we promise not to disparage you. The last one is that they got the right to see the film prior to its theatrical release. Once the Sundance announcement happened around Thanksgiving, they said ‘we need to see this movie before Sundance, immediately. Come to our boardroom and show our lawyers.’ But we weren’t done yet, and the last thing you want to do is sit in a conference room with their lawyers and executives who are looking at this film with narrow tunnelvision, dissecting every second their brand is shown and its minutiae. We said ‘you should come to Sundance and see it there.’ They said that’s a release, and we said no it isn’t it’s a little tiny festival. Out of the 15 brands we have on board, 11 of them came. And it was fantastic, the film played through the roof and all of them were ecstatic because now they saw themselves as part of a bigger whole, and that they were being treated equal as everyone else in the film. They also got to see everyone else who helped make the movie happen, and that they were part of something larger.
Q: Do you feel with the finished film that you maintained the goal you set out to accomplish by making a film about advertising?
SPURLOCK: I think the fact that we were able to maintain creative control of the film was huge. That enabled us not to sell out but to buy into how these Hollywood films are made, and that you need these promotional partners to get a larger releases, attention or buzz. We did make the film that dissected the process, what goes on behind the curtain. The film works on a lot of levels, but the biggest is that after you watch this film, you’ll never look at a TV show or movie the same way again. And I think that level of awareness is a great thing to have. What it also does is that once you leave the theater, you become even more hyper-aware of all the marketing and advertising that’s in your life. Everything you see outside, even if it’s on a billboard or poster – this will make you ask the question that Sao Paolo asked: where do we draw the line? How much is too much? Do we really need to live in this world where everything’s brought to us by some sponsor? Or is there some place that is sacred, and what the film shows is that we live in a time where nothing is sacred and everything is for sale.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.