Sometimes an idea comes along that is so beautiful in its simplicity, so perfect in execution, that the entire movie community -- industry professionals, critics, audiences -- is reduced to blubbering adulation. In November 2002 Morgan Spurlock, a New York film-maker, had such an idea.
Spurlock, 33, whose eclectic career has included stints as a corporate spokesman for Sony Electronics, an award-winning playwright and a beach volleyball commentator for America's leading cable sports TV station, was watching the news at his parents' home in West Virginia when an item came on about two teenagers from the Bronx who were suing McDonald's for making them obese. "I was stuffed with Thanksgiving turkey, watching this story, when it hit me," he recalls.
What hit Spurlock was this: for a whole month he would eat nothing but McDonald's food. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. There were three other ground rules: He had to eat every item on the McDonald's menu at least once; he could only eat what was available over the counter (no special orders); and he had to "super size" his meal whenever a counter assistant offered him the option.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
He would record the state of his health prior to his new diet and afterward. If nothing else, the experience might shed light on the teenagers' claims that fast food can seriously damage your health.
"I immediately called my friend, my director of photography Scott Ambrozy, and told him the idea. He laughed and said, `That's a really great bad idea.' By the time we got back to New York we were already in pre-production."
The outcome was Super Size Me, a 98-minute documentary that follows Spurlock from pre-McDonald's health, cheer and good sex life to a post-McDonald's pit of dire health, spiritual listlessness and borderline impotence.
He was tested beforehand by three doctors and deemed to be an above-average human specimen. In the first week he put on over 4kg. After the month he'd added a total of almost 12kg. His cholesterol level rose by 65 points (one-third higher than when he started).
Most shocking of all, his doctor, who begged the film-maker to abandon the experiment after three weeks, concluded that the constant intake of fast food was causing serious liver damage, akin to that of Nicolas Cage's character in Leaving Las Vegas. In the film's postscript, Spurlock notes that it took him 14 months to return to his former physical condition.
Spurlock's film is much more than a medical journal. Spurlock is an engaging screen presence, with a nice line in self-deprecation and perfect comic timing. In one scene he is filmed eating his first "super sized" meal in his car. It begins with him gleefully rubbing his hands at the gargantuan size of the portions -- and ends with him vomiting out of the car window.
His story is filled out by a procession of food industry spokesman, lawyers and overweight Americans, whose self-incriminating platitudes, legal battles and fast-food addictions are skillfully spliced between the star's food binges. Best of all is Spurlock's girlfriend, Alex -- a vegan chef, of all things -- who watches with increasing horror as her beloved sets about destroying his health, noting mournfully at one stage that their hitherto energetic love life is not what it was. "He can still do it," she says, "but he gets tired very quickly and I have to do most of the work."
According to which critic you believe, the documentary is "a sobering experience for the french-fry junkie in all of us" (Chicago Sun-Tribune), "the perfect documentary" (Reel Film Reviews) or "the ultimate contemporary horror story" (Palo Alto Weekly). The cliche of current America cinema criticism is to describe Spurlock as the "new Michael Moore."
The film debuted at this year's Sundance Festival, where it won the best director award and triggered a bidding war. It sold for a reported US$2 million -- cheaper than a McDonald's happy meal in Hollywood terms. In the five weeks since its limited release in the US, Super Size Me has taken more than US$5 million and is number 10 at the box office.
The Big Mac-buying public clearly loves it. Scan movie-related chatrooms and websites and the superlatives pile up; funny, wise, shocking, ingenious, definitive, subversive, gross, outrageous, scary, fascinating, caustic, sobering.
Super Size Me is all of these things, but more than anything else it is McDonald's worst nightmare -- the most scathing critique of American corporate behavior since, well, Michael Moore's Roger and Me.
What has separated Spurlock's film from Moore's has been its practical impact. General Motors never reopened its factories in Flint, Michigan. McDonald's, on the other hand, has buckled in the face of an independent movie that cost $65,000 to make.
Eric Schlosser, author of the bestselling Fast Food Nation, describes McDonald's as one of the "nastiest and most litigious" corporations on earth. "It's a great, great film," he says of Super Size Me, and Morgan Spurlock should be commended for being brave enough to take on McDonald's in such a head-on way."
Like everyone else who has written about the legal tactics of the world's biggest fast food company, Schlosser might have been forgiven for thinking that Super Size Me was certain to land its director in court. In fact, there has been no lawsuit so far -- only a peevish press release claiming the movie "makes no contribution to the important dialogue taking place today on nutrition and balanced lifestyles."
It claims: "Our customers are smart. They know what's best for themselves and their families... This movie is about one individual's decision to act irresponsibly by consuming more than 5,000 calories a day -- twice the recommended level for adult males -- and by purposely limiting his physical activity... McDonald's is working closely with real experts on nutrition and fitness; scientists, government leaders and educators. Morgan Spurlock is late to the national dialogue. By shocking instead of informing, he has missed an opportunity to be part of the solution."
Schlosser believes the company took a calculated decision not to pursue Spurlock through the courts. "Clearly McDonald's came to the conclusion that this would only lead to more publicity... [because] there is nothing libelous in this movie. Morgan Spurlock did not set out to conduct a scientific experiment, he was trying to make a point about fast food."
The director insists the film was never intended to be a direct attack on McDonald's. "It's an attack on the food culture we live in. The reason I picked on McDonald's is that they're the biggest. They are the ones, in my opinion, that could easily institute change. If they make a change, then everyone else will follow," he said at Sundance.
Not even Spurlock, one of life's optimists, could have expected to see his theory put to the test so quickly. Six weeks after Sundance, McDonald's made a staggering announcement: "super sizing" of meals in its restaurants was to be phased out. "Super Size Me had nothing to do with (this decision)," company spokesman Walt Riker said. "The super size issue was vetted in 2003. Documents went out at the end of 2003 to our owners about the phase-out."
Maybe so, but the timing of the announcement -- just as the film was picking up pre-release buzz -- was mightily coincidental.
Credulity was further stretched with the launch of the first-ever McDonald's "Happy Meal for Adults" -- an all-singing, all-dancing affair featuring Oprah Winfrey's personal trainer Bob Greene. The Go Active! Happy Meal comes with salad, a booklet packed with exercising tips and a Stepometer (in the film, Spurlock uses a pedometer to make sure he doesn't exceed the 2,000 steps taken by the average American in a day). The GoActive! Happy Meal was launched on 6 May. Super Size Me opened on 7 May. "Just another amazing coincidence," Spurlock said.
Despite McDonald's insistence that it has not changed its nutritional approach in a direct effort to combat Spurlock's film, a look through the company's press releases over the past year suggests at the very least a change in marketing, with far greater emphasis on the healthier foods served at McDonald's. One example -- cited on the film's website -- is in the menu to tie in with the Athens Olympics.
Last year's press release gave prominence to the "Greek Mac Sandwich," a two-burger concoction which comes wrapped in pita bread and smothered in yogurt sauce. Another press notice, issued last month, makes no mention of "Greek Mac," focusing instead on the company's plans for Go Active! activities at the games.
Larry Kamer, a San Francisco-based PR consultant who advised Nike on how to deal with a 1998 documentary showing that children in Indonesia were making the company's shoes, believes McDonald's is indulging in some judicious crisis management. "Part of the price of being as successful as McDonald's is that you become the target for all kinds of activists, agendas and stories. The difficulty for McDonald's is that ultimately Morgan Spurlock had a very good story. But the truth about crisis management is that it all rests on how well a company conducts itself while in the spotlight."
Thus far, Kamer believes McDonald's has done a pretty good job. "They fully understand that when you play in the big league you have to take your shots once in a while. But the point is that McDonald's has an opportunity, an obligation in fact, to tell people they should not be eating cheeseburgers all day long, seven days a week. It's my belief the company has a good story to tell -- it's now a question of getting out there amongst the public and telling it."
If this PR onslaught should fail, McDonald's need not lose all hope. Help is at hand in the shape of Soso Whaley, a Washington DC-based animal trainer who has been attracting publicity for her own Spurlock movie. For the past 30 days Whaley -- who insists she is acting independently of McDonald's -- has been recording the effects of her own "McDonald's only" diet. By eating "healthy choices" available in the company's dinners she has lost almost 5kg and dropped her cholesterol by 40 points.
"I find it offensive that people like Morgan Spurlock can eat like a pig and then present the results as some kind of serious comment on society," she says, before trotting out a phrase much used by the fast-food chain's PR department in recent months. "This film is nothing more than junk science."
Whaley's movie, as yet untitled and unfinished, promises to be one animal trainer's hard-hitting defense of a billion-dollar global corporation. It is not expected to be a smash hit at next year's Sundance Film Festival.
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