MORGAN SPURLOCK
(7 November 1970 - 23 May 2024)
Morgan Spurlock was a documentary filmmaker who constantly questioned the ethics of the US food industry. Although he made more than twenty films and documentaries, he will be best remembered for Super Size Me, the film he made in 2004 for which he lived on a diet of McDonald’s for a whole month to see what effect it might have on his body. Sadly, he has died only aged 53 from complications with cancer. It is difficult not to question whether his lifestyle detrimentally affected his personal health. Later on, he opened his own chain of fast food outlets to determine whether the industry had changed. He certainly had an effect on McDonald’s, who dropped their super-size practice and introduced less fattening foods.
Morgan Spurlock was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, to father Ben who ran a car repair shop, and mother Phyllis, an English teacher. After his parents divorced it was his mother who encouraged Morgan to question everything in life. He failed to get into UCLA but instead studied at the New York Tisch School of the Arts. He wanted to make films and got to be personal assistant to both Woody Allen and Luc Besson. He wrote an award-winning play, The Phoenix, for the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999. On TV he had a game show reminiscent of Woody Allen’s What’s Your Perversion? called I Bet You Will, encouraging contestants to do ghastly things in public.
Spurlock created Warrior Poets, a production studio for his documentary films. Super Size Me came about in 2004 with Spurlock’s investigation of the spread of obesity in the US which had reached epidemic proportions. During his experiment, Spurlock gained over 24 pounds in weight, some 13% increase in his body mass, as well as pushing his cholesterol level way up. The film led to a lawsuit for overweight girls suing McDonald’s for their obesity. The film was nominated for an Academy Award and also by the Writers Guild of America. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance where it had premiered. The film led to a sequel, Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! in 2017.
Spurlock made further documentaries including What Would Jesus Buy? on consumerism, materialism and Christmas, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? about terrorism in the modern world, a send-up of advertising and product placement in POM Wonderful Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope about the cultural influences of comic conventions, and One Directions: This Is Us, ostensibly about the boy band and their phenomenal lives. He worked with other filmmakers and distributors and appeared on TV in both the US and the UK.
His reputation became somewhat tarnished with the #Me Too movement as he admitted to sexual misconduct, cheating on wives and mistresses and sexual assault in college. He resigned from Warrior Poets and that was the end of his career as a filmmaker. He had three marriages: to the actress Priscilla Sommer, the vegan chef Alexandra Jamieson and the company manager Sara Bernstein (they all ended in divorce). He has a son, Laken, from Jamieson and another son, Kallen, from Bernstein. In his time Morgan Spurlock was a successful filmmaker and activist who cared about the state of America and where it was going wrong. He may not have been the greatest of human beings, but he made his mark in the way he found suited him and his early death robbed the US of a positive thinker who cared about his country.
MICHAEL DARVELL