Morgan Spurlock, Super Size Me filmmaker, dead at 53
Morgan Spurlock known for his seminal doco where he ate only Macca’s for a month has died. There was a crucial detail he left out of the film.
The award-winning filmmaker whose documentary Super Size Me changed the way many people thought about fast food has died aged just 53 years old.
Morgan Spurlock, who was nominated for an Academy award for the 2004 film – which saw him eat nothing but McDonald’s for a month – died on Thursday, his family said.
“It was a sad day, as we said goodbye to my brother Morgan,” Craig Spurlock said in a statement.
“Morgan gave so much through his art, ideas, and generosity.
“The world has lost a true creative genius and a special man. I am so proud to have worked together with him.”
According to the entertainment magazine Variety, Spurlock died from complications of cancer.
He married three times and is survived by sons Laken and Kallen and his wife Sara Bernstein.
Spurlock battled alcoholism, and admitted to once being accused of rape and paying to settle a sexual harassment case.
In Super Size Me, Spurlock used himself as a guinea pig documenting the effects of a diet wholly consisting of fast food to shine a light on obesity and poor food choices in America.
The name of the film came from fast food outlets’ encouragement for customers to ”super size,” their meals far beyond what was recommended.
Three times a day, Spurlock would dine at McDonald’s in the US consuming vast numbers of Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets and soft drinks. He claimed to have eaten every item on McDonald’s menu.
“It’s a great way to take the edge off a very preachy subject,” he told The Guardian in 2004.
Every day he ate 5000 calories at Macca’s – or the equivalent of more than nine Big Macs.
During the experiment, Spurlock gained 11 kilos and he was warned by his doctors to end the project so as not to put his health at risk. He said he experienced illness and mood swings as well as weight gain while his blood pressure and cholesterol increased.
However, Spurlock later admitted he had also been drinking during the experiment.
McDonald’s said Spurlock’s eating habits were “unrealistic,” and no one ate at Macca’s three times a day. But it did scrap its super size servings soon after the controversy caused by the film.
Super Size Me won best documentary from the Writers Guild of America and Spurlock best director at the Sundance Film Festival.
A sequel, Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! came out in 2017.
Spurlock would go onto to direct numerous documentaries including Where in the World is Osama bin Laden about the US conflict in Afghanistan where he went searching for the now dead terrorist. He also directed a One Direction concert film and the 2011 documentary POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
He was nominated for an Emmy for The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3-D! On Ice! which came out in 2010.
‘She believed she was raped’
In the midst of the MeToo movement in 2017, Spurlock said he was “part of the problem”.
“As I sit around watching hero after hero, man after man, fall at the realisation of their past indiscretions, I don’t sit by and wonder ‘who will be next?’ I wonder, ‘when will they come for me?’” he wrote in an essay posted on social media.
He said he had cheated on “every wife and girlfriend I have ever had”.
He also said that a woman had accused him of rape at university during a one-night stand but there was no police charges or investigations.
“We began fooling around, she pushed me off, then we laid in the bed and talked and laughed some more. We took off our clothes. She said she didn’t want to have sex, so we laid together, and talked, and kissed, and laughed, and then we started having sex … and she started to cry.”
“I tried to comfort her. To make her feel better. I thought I was doing OK, I believed she was feeling better. She believed she was raped,” he said.
Spurlock also noted he had paid a settlement to a female assistant that he’d regularly refer to as “sex pants,” a situation he described as “funny at the time, but then realised I had completely demeaned and belittled her to a place of non-existence”.
Spurlock stepped down from the TV production company he had formed and went into rehab for alcoholism.
In 2019, he told website Uproxx: “It was really important for me to basically say, ‘I’m a person who’s made mistakes in my past. I’m somebody who has made it a point to tell the truth in my work. And I recognise that I can do better.’
“And I think that we live in a world right now where we encourage people to lie consistently and aggressively, simply for self-preservation. And I think that that is a very wrong message to be sending.”
Spurlock was born in 1970 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1993.
His start in the entertainment industry came when he won awards for his 1999 play The Phoenix at the New York Fringe Festival.
He also created and hosted the web series Bet You Will that paid contestants to do outrageous tasks for money, such as eating a full jar of mayonnaise. It also aired on MTV, reported the New York Post.
Spurlock’s CNN series Morgan Spurlock: Inside Man aired from 2013 to 2016.
He married Priscilla Sommer in 1996 to 2003, Alexandra Jamieson from 2006 to 2011, with who he had son Laken, and he married Sara Bernstein in 2016, with the pair having son Kallen.
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