Hardly happy meals

When filmmaker Morgan Spurlock nearly ate himself to death last year, little did he know that his diet would become a fast-food flashpoint. He merely congratulated himself for having, as a friend put it, “a really great bad idea.”

“It’s one of those things that’s so easy, so simple, nobody else had thought of it, and it dealt with something that was so topical,” Spurlock says. “I couldn’t turn on the TV, I couldn’t open up the paper without reading about the obesity crisis.”

The idea? In February 2003, the strapping 33-year-old American male with a big voice, a Fu Manchu and the demeanor of a jock went on a strictly McDonald’s diet for 30 days -- breakfast, lunch and dinner -- and documented it for a film he calls “Super Size Me,” which opens here May 7.

One of the rules he set for himself was that if a McDonald’s employee asked if he wanted a super-size, he had to take it. Another was that he would exercise no more than the average person, which is to say hardly at all. Prior to embarking on this “journey,” as he calls it, Spurlock had his baseline medical condition documented by a trio of specialists.

After three weeks of cheeseburgers and Chicken McNuggets, Spurlock was falling apart. He’d gained more than 20 pounds and his cholesterol had shot up 65 points. He was suffering from “McGurgles,” “McGas,” a fatty liver, asthma, chest pains, heart palpitations, sugar/caffeine highs and lows and sexual dysfunction. (His girlfriend, Alexandra Jamieson, a vegan chef, of all things, said, “He gets tired easily.”)

“By day 21, I was scared to death,” Spurlock says. “You’re seeing things as I felt them. You’re hearing me talk to the doctors and getting my reactions as the doctor is telling me I’m going to be like Nicolas Cage in ‘Leaving Las Vegas.’ He killed himself [with alcohol] in a couple of weeks. Could something really bad have happened? Absolutely.”

Some have credited Spurlock’s documentary, which won the documentary directing award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, with influencing McDonald’s. The company has announced that by the end of this year, it will have scaled back its super-size 42-ounce sodas to 32 ounces and the super-size 7-ounce fries to 6 ounces. Now it remains to be seen whether the rest of the fast-food industry will follow suit.

Regardless, the current downsizing and diet debates no doubt will affect the film’s theatrical prospects.

“I think that it further legitimized the movie,” Spurlock says. “The movie has helped change the menu.”

McDonald’s doesn’t agree. “Super Size Me” “had nothing to do with it,” says McDonald’s spokesman Walt Riker, who thinks of Spurlock as a Johnny-come-lately on the dietary scene. “The super-size issue was vetted in 2003. Documents went out at the end of 2003 to our owners about the phaseout.”

Enlightening entertainment

Spurlock has been called the Michael Moore of fast food. Like Moore with his films “Roger & Me” (about corporate downsizing) and “Bowling for Columbine” (America’s gun culture), he’s found an entertaining way to push a hot-button issue, in this case a looming health crisis brought about by expanding waistlines. Obesity is second only to cigarette smoking as a killer of Americans. Two out of three adults and 9 million children are overweight. Nearly 300,000 people die of obesity-related illnesses each year. The estimated social costs are $117 billion a year. The House of Representatives has passed what’s been called a “cheeseburger bill” and the states are offering up “baby McBills” to shelter the fast-food industry from litigation that has sprung up around this health catastrophe.

Just such a lawsuit got Spurlock thinking about making this film. He was lolling about his parents’ house one Thanksgiving when he saw a TV report about a pair of girls who sued McDonald’s for contributing to their obesity-related health problems. It wasn’t the suit itself that set him off. (He thought at the time that consumers freely make choices, though he’s not so sure about that now, especially with respect to children.) It was the food companies’ response to it.

“Representatives of the food companies came forward and said, ‘You can’t link our food to these kids being sick, you can’t link our food to these kids being obese, our food is nutritious, it’s part of a balanced diet, it is good for you,’ ” says Spurlock, a confirmed carnivore and an occasional eater of fast food. “I was like, ‘If it’s that good for me, I should be able to eat it all the time.’ ”

“Any credible fitness expert will tell you eating 5,000 calories a day is not a good idea,” says Riker, who eats at McDonald’s once a week (two hamburgers, two apple pies) and weighs 150 pounds. “Our customers are smart. They don’t need a movie to tell them what’s best for them.”

Spurlock called up his friend, Scott Ambrozy, who said, “That’s a really great bad idea.” He immediately went into production, with Ambrozy moving in with Spurlock and Jamieson to begin filming. The financing came from the proceeds of an MTV show Spurlock and his production company, the Con, did called “I Bet You Will,” in which people do all sorts of things for money. Spurlock also served as on-air host of the show, so he was comfortable in front of a camera.

In fact, Spurlock has an eclectic career as a producer and a performer.

He was raised in West Virginia and was a ballet dancer until age 13. He applied to the film school at USC, was rejected, and went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1993. Off-campus, he performed stand-up in comedy clubs and studied improv. After graduation, he worked as a production assistant for such filmmakers as Woody Allen and James Cameron.

A friend urged him to audition to be a national spokesman for Sony Electronics. He won the part and spent the next two years as a frontman for the company. He then segued into the Sony-sponsored Bud Light Pro Beach Volleyball League, where he called matches. He also called beach volleyball at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and was ESPN’s face of extreme sports. By 1999, he had set up his own production company and started doing music videos and industrials for Sony.

When the idea for “Super Size Me” came to him, he was more than ready to embark on a feature of his own. That’s not to say Spurlock didn’t have a number of hurdles to surmount. Chief among them was the perception that this was just a stunt.

“This is medically significant because it’s the world’s first instance of fast-food hepatitis,” says one of Spurlock’s doctors, Dr. Daryl Isaacs. On the other hand, he adds, “It’s not really a fair experiment at all. One can take from it that fast food in large quantities is dangerous, but there’s no correlation between what we see on a daily basis and what happened to him.”

“People came in thinking, ‘Oh, this [idiot] is eating at McDonald’s for 30 days and that’s all it is,’ ” Spurlock says. “But as I started doing the research and devising how it was going to take shape, the story started to find its own life outside of the stunt. My journey is very food-based, but I think the problem is beyond fast food. McDonald’s is used in my film as an icon. They represent every food, every chain, every entity that is now everywhere in America.”

‘Brave, disgusting and funny’

To flesh out the concept, Spurlock traveled the country, interviewing former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson, “Diet for a New America” author (and Baskin-Robbins heir) John Robbins, and a variety of Big Mac consumers, including children who couldn’t recognize a photo of President Bush or a drawing of Jesus but could recognize a likeness of Ronald McDonald. He also contacted Eric Schlosser, whose book “Fast Food Nation” catapulted the obesity crisis into the American consciousness, though scheduling conflicts prevented them from getting together.

“I thought it was very brave and very disgusting and very funny,” Schlosser says of the film. “It’s brave in that it’s a full-on assault on the company, which despite its cheery face is very mean and very litigious.”

Riker scoffs at this characterization of McDonald’s, but Spurlock was cognizant that he had to cover himself legally. He made repeated calls to McDonald’s for comment. None was forthcoming.

Thus far McDonald’s hasn’t filed any legal action against Spurlock or the film. Certainly the company’s clout was a factor as Spurlock sought to sell the film. Many of the studios circling “Super Size Me” at Sundance had corporate ties to McDonald’s. Ultimately, he decided to go with Samuel Goldwyn. The film also will air on Showtime.

Meanwhile, Spurlock is developing a TV spinoff of the film -- “before anyone else can,” he says -- called “30 Days,” in which people will be lifted out of their environment and placed in another, very different one for a month in order to illuminate an issue. So a rich person might be on the street (homelessness), a law-abiding citizen put in prison (the criminal justice system). Spurlock will host and produce. It will be on FX, possibly by fall.

For now, he’s anxiously awaiting the release of “Super Size Me.”

“I think the movie will change the way Americans eat forever,” says Isaacs.

Certainly Spurlock has modified his diet. He has four pounds left to lose.

John Clark can be contacted at [email protected].