Our waiter is looking down at me. He has a thick European accent of some kind—not quite German, not quite French, it’s the kind of accent that only waiters at nice restaurants seem to have—and he is eagerly awaiting my response to his question, "Your order sir?" I am tempted by the grouper and I am tempted by chicken, but with a week’s worth of California cuisine under my belt, I’m hell bent on eating something that Chicagoans and New Yorkers might call ‘real food’. The waiter has already assured our table that the cheeseburgers are delicious and grilled to order. "I will have the cheeseburger," I tell him, averting the gaze of my lunch companions while ordering. "Do you want something to drink with that? Coke, Sprite, Iced Tea?" our waiter inquires, once again putting me on the hot seat. I eye the red-haired man with the ever-so distinctive mustache across from me and the lithe, blonde-haired woman to my right. I want to say the word ‘Coke’, but can’t. "Just water," I say, hoping that the healthier choice will earn me points in the eyes of my dining partners. Unfortunately, the hamburger automatically comes with a side of French fries. Had I been able to substitute, I would have chosen a side of fresh fruit in order to really impress. Later my mustachioed dining companion looks down at the fries I haven’t touched and asks, "Are you not touching the fries because you’re sitting with me?" I laugh and tell him no, but that is the reason I didn’t order the Coke. And it’s then I realize: Super Size Me’s Morgan Spurlock has done for unhealthy food what Steven Spielberg’s Jaws did for swimming. One of the most harrowing parts of a lunch or dinner interview for an independent journalist comes at the very end of the meeting, just after the check has been placed on the table. It’s one of a host of situations that is never taught in graduate school classes to up-and-coming writers. Suffice it to say, the lesson could be summed up as follows: always prepare to be stuck with the bill.
Several years back, I had scheduled an interview with a very well known actor in Santa Monica. His publicist had said the interview would be over "drinks" at Ivy by the Sea, one of the most tony restaurants in Santa Monica. I eschewed the food menu after seeing a $16 bowl of soup listed and (this time) ordered a Coke, assuming that my subject would follow suit with a drink of his own. After arriving and sitting down, my interview promptly declared that he was famished and ordered the crab and lobster platter. As our waiter placed the three figure "drinks" bill on the table, my subject immediately thanked me for the wonderful conversation and meal, thus ending any and all debate about who was going to pay.
Dining with Spurlock and his longtime girlfriend, vegetarian chef, Alexandra Jamieson at the restaurant in the Beverly Hills Peninsula Hotel—a spot right across the street from the CAA, where their top executives go to lunch—I begin dutifully reaching for our lunch bill as our waiter placed it on the table. Spurlock frowns at me and tells me not to move my hand another inch forward. With a quick flick of his wrist, he has swiped the check out from in front of me and fitted his credit card on top of it. It is a surprisingly gentlemanly move and a first for me. When I ask if I can leave the tip, Jamieson waves me off and says, "Morgan just won $600 bucks playing Pai Gow poker in Vegas. Don’t worry about it."
Spurlock has another thing going for him that Jamieson doesn’t mention; he is the hottest, hippest documentary filmmaker to come along since Michael Moore.
Spurlock owes this lofty praise to the "really great bad idea" at the core of his first film, the Oscar nominated Super Size Me. Lying on the couch after a long Thanksgiving Day filled with eating and relatives, Spurlock unbuckled his pants and, while watching TV, learned that two girls were suing McDonald’s for offering unhealthy and fattening food to America. "Everybody knows that you’re not supposed to eat McDonald’s every day," Spurlock thought and something clicked.
Since that Thanksgiving, Spurlock has received an Oscar nod, his own television series and a shockingly large amount of press and appreciative ‘thank yous’. "Just the other day," Spurlock starts, "this guy comes running up to me at the airport and says, ‘I just wanted to say thank you for Super Size Me. My sons and I saw it and haven’t eaten fast food since.’" Spurlock laughs, "He told me, ‘I know you can’t tell by looking at me, but I’ve lost 30 pounds because of your film!’"
Spurlock hit pay dirt and it’s all thanks to his notion of documenting what would happen to him if he ate three meals a day at McDonald’s for a 30 day time-span.
"When I was first thinking about making a film, I was thinking that I was going to make a film about fast food in the big city," Spurlock says. "That was the acorn. The really great bad idea blossomed from that."
Spurlock coined the term a ‘really great bad idea’ early on his publicity tour for the film and has used it in almost every interview he’s done since. Normally, I try to avoid encouraging my subject to use terms he has used thousands of times before in previous interviews, but I’m relishing the opportunity to do so with Spurlock because of the fantastically spot-on job it does in describing Super Size Me’s hook.
A little over a year after Super Size Me’s theatrical release on August 7, 2004, Spurlock has not only made a name for himself, but has done it with an ‘aw shucks’ charm while striving to make humanity smarter and healthier. In the process, he also somehow managed to get the multi-billion dollar fast food industry to make some changes. Soon after Super Size Me hit theaters, McDonald’s yanked its ‘super size’ option off the menu. The company insists that this decision had nothing to do with Spurlock’s film, but the timing of the matter does nothing to support that claim. McDonald’s made its first public announcement that it was planning to remove its super sized portion two months after Super Size Me made waves at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s been a productive year for Spurlock to say the least.
Unlike the majority of interviews that I’ve done with people who have had their girl/boyfriends or significant others present, Jamieson’s presence serves a distinct purpose at our lunch: she is an in-demand chef and nutritionist who coached Spurlock on healthy eating after the end of his month of McMisery. Spurlock and Jamieson also have an advanced understanding of one another. They don’t necessarily hold the same beliefs about everything, but they always seem to know exactly what the other is thinking. While they often set one another up for a joke or tell stories in a tag-team fashion, they stop short of finishing each other’s sentences. It’s this latter component that sets their dynamic apart from the majority of other couples with whom I’ve spent time: Spurlock and Jamieson don’t seem to feel the need to prove that they know what the other is thinking, they just do.
Far from being just another random observation, this give-and-take between the two adds mightily to the flow of the conversation and the impact of the stories they are telling. When Spurlock and I begin talking about the honesty and truthfulness involved with documentary filmmaking, a topic about which he is very passionate, he leans forward in his seat and says, "The key for me, especially with Super Size Me, was to be as honest as possible… When Alex was talking about our sex life [and the negative impact that eating fast food had upon it], both my editors said, ‘You can’t put this in the movie.’" Spurlock looks at me flabbergasted. "I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Everyone in the world needs to hear about this.’"
Spurlock pauses for a beat to let the importance of this story sink in. It’s then that Jamieson pipes up, as if on cue, "Except my dad."
The comment has its desired effect. It has completely derailed Spurlock and I am smiling broadly. Spurlock composes himself and then says, "Except your dad… and your grandmother!" He trains his eyes on me and says spritely, "She just saw the film for the first time recently."
Contrary to the way it’s portrayed on reruns of Sex and the City, being a journalist is actually work. Before we make any phone calls or do interviews we need to do research and construct questions that have a similar theme or focus (unless you’re happy with asking "Jay Leno Questions" like "What was it like working with Tom Cruise?"). There are also press passes one can obtain, but, generally speaking, they don’t get you close to where the VIPs are. As such, while interviews can be exceptionally deep, informative and filled with intriguing stories and opinions, it’s rather rare that I’d consider an interview to be light-hearted and fun; there is a much different dynamic at play when carrying on a conversation with an interview subject than when carrying on a conversation with a good friend.
Having bid Spurlock and Jamieson goodbye, I am struck by the realization that our lunch together was honestly and truly fun. The reason for this is simple: Spurlock is exactly the way he is portrayed on TV and in Super Size Me. He is witty, affable, extremely quick on the draw, humorously self-deprecating and seems genuinely interested in buoying the spirits of those around him. In other words, he’s the best friend you dream about having. This is one of the major reasons that he has become such a popular interview.
Spurlock laughs when we begin talking about his media image. "The biggest thing [that people don’t know] is that I don’t like to be told what to do," he says. It’s hardly a surprising revelation, but does shine a very explanatory light on his do-it-yourself spirit. "As Alex will tell you," Spurlock says, pointing a fork in Jamieson’s direction, "I’m somebody who likes to find things out on my own. I like to burn my own bridges. I like to self-implode my own mistakes. At that point, I take a step back and think, ‘Wow, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.’"
Looking back at the editing of Super Size Me, Spurlock relates a story about how some people questioned the brutally honest approach he had instilled in the film. Spurlock is an open book both on-screen and in person. He’s already talked about how the McDiet he was on affected his sex life with Jamieson (complete with slide whistle jokes) and soon moves on to the metaphoric importance of his on-camera rectal exam. "Going into this, I said, ‘I’m going to make a film that is honestly going to examine this problem.’ I had to be as honest with myself as I could be. That’s why you saw me getting a rectal exam. That’s why it’s in the movie... It’s not a very attractive scene, but it’s real. People need to see that."
Spurlock and his producers actually took out a lot of music out of the film because it started getting "too heavy". "Suddenly, you’re telling your audience how to feel," Spurlock says. "Now you’re going to feel happy, now you’re going to feel sad. We needed to pull it back some."
Though Spurlock and Jamieson are both longtime New Yorkers, when I dine with them the two are just beginning a six-month stay in Los Angeles while Spurlock works on his new television series on F/X, 30 Days. Attempting to find the silver lining of the situation, they mention how they are enjoying the weather, but finally Spurlock cracks and grimaces, "We don’t walk here in LA. Nobody walks in this town."
"Yeah," Jamieson nods, "We walked here from Robertson Boulevard," a distance Map Quest pegs at 1.5 miles, "We asked a shop clerk how far it was and she said, ‘It’s a good 30 blocks.’" Jamieson shakes her head. "So we started walking and there was nobody else on the sidewalk. People were glaring at us from their cars. It’s like, ‘Look at those people walking over there. Are they looking for trouble?’"
Spurlock and Jamieson shake their heads in unison, wondering, is it any wonder that America is overweight?
Spurlock rolls his eyes quickly when I compare him to Upton Sinclair, the author of the provocative and culture altering 1906 book, The Jungle. While it’s an apt comparison, it’s an even more fitting response from the man who has almost single-handedly gotten Americans to question their fast food diets. He is doing his thing and it has just so happened that he’s gotten famous for it.
Spurlock is big on common sense and is enjoying his position atop the current social pulpit in order to get his thoughts out to people. When I ask if there are any myths in particular that Spurlock is working to destroy, he quickly begins talking about the rhetoric of the fast food PR campaigns beginning to be looked at as fact. Case in point: Subway’s tireless lobbying to be looked upon as a good alternative to fast food. "I think that a lot of people are buying into Subway as being this incredibly healthy restaurant," Spurlock exclaims. "But they’re not! Jared [Fogel] is the Ronald McDonald for Subway. It’s like, ‘If Jared’s healthy, it must be okay to go to Subway. I can go to Subway and lost weight like Jared did.’"
Spurlock frowns and shakes his head. "What people don’t hear about Jared is that when he was at his largest, he would sit down for lunch and order a pizza and he’d drink a 2-liter of Coke by himself. Then he says, ‘I’m going to change my life and only have a six inch sub and a diet coke for lunch.’" Jared’s situation begins to take on a slightly different sheen as Spurlock continues talking. "When you go from having 10,000 calories to 1,000 calories per day, do you know what’s magically going to happen?" He glances at Jamieson who looks equally disgusted. "You’re going to lose weight. And people don’t get that." [Jared’s weight loss] has nothing to do with the food he’s eating, but, rather the amount of food he’s eating. Spurlock laughs and says, "Me? Me, I’ve got a smart girlfriend who cooks healthy food for me. But what about everyone else?"
Granted Jamieson’s healthy diets and vegetarian cooking services have never been more popular, but the question rings true. "I think that the more information that you can provide to people, you’re at least enabling them to have the option of making a smarter, healthier choice." And this sums up Spurlock’s attitude about almost everything. He won’t preach to people or cram ideas down your throat. He wants you, the consumer, to make an informed choice and is willing to listen to criticism and consider opposing view points as well. If paying the check wasn’t polite enough, Spurlock even ponders the benefits of the ‘caveman diet’ I propose, where you can eat whatever you are able forage or kill, before lobbying successfully that if the caveman had a deep-fryer that he would have eaten French fries. "I’m really not lecturing," Spurlock tells me, returning our conversation back to his filmmaking approach, "I just want audiences to get enough of a story where they walk out of the theater and can make their own decisions."
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE OF STUMPED?
Actor Nick Nolte
Writer/actor Kevin Grevioux
Writer/actor Paul Reiser
Director Fernando Meirelles
Director Morgan Spurlock
Actress Bai Ling
Shrek 2 director Conrad Vernon
The Diary of Hollywood Starlet, Rachael Huntley
Hollywood Then (1985) and Now (2005)
Location Scouting in Manhattan
Don't miss writer/director Robert Rodriguez's sumptuous Sin City, writer/director Dan Harris' debut Imaginary Heroes or the rerelease of director Michael Curtiz's epic The Sea Hawk.
Back issues of this magazine are available for purchase.
