Documentarian Morgan Spurlock has died at 53.
I had a problem with the project that made Spurlock famous in the first place, “Supersize Me,” where he ate nothing but McDonald’s food in its largest portions for every meal for a month. At the end of the experiment, he had gained weight, developed liver problems, and become lethargic. It seemed like a damning tale of the impact of fast-food on all Americans, but my skeptical mind saw some red flags.
When I discussed the movie with Spurlock in 2004, we talked about how his then-fiance was a vegan chef who cooked for them at home, so introducing all of that beef and fried food into his diet would naturally screw up a metabolism that wasn’t used to it. That’s a point he didn’t include in the movie, which seems relevant. We also discussed personal vs. corporate responsibility about what goes into our mouths. He also responded to criticism from Soso Whaley, another guest of mine who also ate at McDonald’s every day for a month and ended up losing weight.
I did enjoy some of Spurlock’s other work, including the “30 Days” series he did for FX (which I discussed with him in 2006), particularly one episode in which he embedded himself with a coal mining family in West Virginia and went down to work in a mine every day to show what that life was like. He did another where Spurlock and his fiance tried to live for a month on nothing but minimum wage jobs. He produced some interesting work along the same lines on his CNN series, “Inside Man,” and made an entire movie about product placement called “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.” The man knew how to create reality-based entertainment.
But Spurlock stopped making documentaries and stepped out of the public eye in 2017, when — in the midst of the #MeToo movement — he admitted his own sexual misconduct, settled one harassment allegation, and revealed he had cheated on all of his wives and girlfriends. At the time, Spurlock had finished a sequel to “Super Size” called “Holy Chicken,” in which he tried to run his own fast food restaurant. The doc was shown at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival before Spurlock’s announcement, after which the production company decided not to release it to theaters. It was eventually released via video on demand two years later.