Dressed in a Ted Baker suit, adorned with the brand names of the companies who funded his latest documentary, Morgan Spurlock has come to spruik. Pom Wonderful Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold, sees Spurlock dive head first into the world of product placement. The film follows Spurlock and his team as they endeavour to raise the $1.5 million needed to fund the film, while they seek to reveal the increasingly prominent role advertising plays in film and TV. Earlier this month I sat down with the fun and gregarious Spurlock, out on a whirlwind tour of New Zealand and Australia to promote his film, in a harbour-view hotel in Sydney to discuss the trials and pitfalls of getting into bed with big brands.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Spurlock frequently puts himself into awkward, uncomfortable and occasionally dangerous situations. His first documentary, Super Size Me (2004) in which he ate only McDonalds for 30 days set the standard for his documentary practice and over the years since he has undergone other trials; 30 days in jail, 30 days living on minimum wage and 30 days as a coal miner stand out from his TV series and then for his follow-up film he upped the ante with Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden (2008), travelling to the Middle East to look for America’s public enemy number one.
“At least this one wasn’t dangerous. At least with this one I wasn’t being shot at by the Taliban, and I wasn’t in danger of being in a mining collapse, or being in prison and being some guy’s girlfriend. With this one, as uncomfortable and terrible as it was, it was better than others.” This drôle and somewhat brash answer to the question of why he keeps putting himself into unpleasant situations, is indicative of Spurlock’s approach as a documentary-maker.
How Spurlock came to make The Greatest Movie Ever Sold started with bad product placement on the TV show Heroes, which had previously been a favourite of the filmmaker. The unabashed prominence of a particular car brand on the opening episode of the second series sparked an idea.“I went to the offices days later [after watching the show] and my producing partner, Jeremy [Chilnick] was there and we both talked about how offended we were by this terrible show that we both loved so much. We started talking about terrible product placement in all the shows and movies we’d seen and we said ‘why don’t we make a movie that pulls the curtain back on this world of advertising and product placement and actually get it paid by advertising and product placement?’”
Initially, ever the optimist, Spurlock assumed it was going to be easy to get advertisers and agencies on board.“I thought we would get an advertising agency who would want to come on and help, because they would be like ‘we are going to get so much attention out of this, do you know how many people in the press are going to talk about our brilliant ad agency getting on board with this movie’.”
But as the film shows, no-one wants a bar of what Spurlock, a well known provocateur, is selling.“I called every ad agency in NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver. I called all the big agencies and none of them would touch it, they were scared to death of the film. They thought literally it was going to completely corrupt and destroy all of the snake oil they had been selling to all their clients for years, of how valuable they are and important advertising is. Somehow we were going to ruin this cash cow they had.”
Undeterred Spurlock decided to cut out the middlemen and approach the big brands directly. But he and his producers still couldn’t find any interested parties.“Some people would call back and say ‘you know we love what you do, what you do is great. We are big fans, but we really don’t want to do this movie. We saw what you did to that other big company, we want nothing to do with this.’ People were frightened.”
Just when it looked like the project was not possible, Spurlock’s saviour came in the form of a personal hygiene product.“Ban Deodorant said yes in September 2009, which was 9 months after we started calling. Nobody ever wants to be first, with any new idea nobody ever wants to be first. Then once somebody is first, and no-one ever wants to be last. So once Ban said yes, we would call companies and they would say, ‘Who’s onboard?’ ‘Well Ban Deodorant’s in.’ ‘Woaw, Ban Deodorant, well then we should meet with you.’ Suddenly Ban Deodorant was the linchpin. Once Ban said yes, Sheetz said yes, Pom said yes, then Hyatt.”
Spurlock is a character who comes across as having pretty high standards of moral and ethical responsibility, so I was a little shocked by his answer when I asked what stipulations he had about which brands he would work with.
“I tried to work with really shitty companies, I tried to get cigarette companies to sponsor the film, and no cigarette company would. I tried to get BP, if there’s a terrible company that needs some positive spin right now- it is BP. I called them up and said ‘This movie will be great for you guys right now, it will be amazing. It will be really positive, and I promise we won’t say the greatest oil ever spilt, we’ll say something else’. They hung up. I tried to get a gun brand onboard.” At this remark about gun companies I’m genuinely bemused, he wanted to have his name associated with a gun company? Spurlock could see my eyes widen and continued a little more earnestly.
“I wanted to have this real ethical conversation of are there people’s whose money you shouldn’t take. Where do you say this is a bad idea. I also wanted to push our contracts as far as possible to that line of what is acceptable. Like in our Hyatt contract, one of our things our contract said was that I couldn’t bring an illegal firearm into the hotel. So I called the gun companies and said ‘listen you can be the greatest shotgun ever owned and what I want to do is clean my legal firearm inside a Hyatt hotel, how great would that be?’ and they were like ‘Absolutely not!’.”
After watching The Greatest Film Ever Made I did wonder what Spurlock thought of the longer association he will have with these brand and the potential impact on his career of having a ‘bad’ brand attached to him personally. What if something came out about one of the brands during the publicity for the film?
“Then that is a great conversation for us to have in the press about how the minute you associate yourself with a brand, potentially things can blow up in your face. I remember pre us making this film, I got called by a car company to do the voice-over for a commercial. I called up my then agent, and the agent said ‘you should do this, it is going to be a lot of money, this is great for you.’ Then I called my manager, and he said ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea, what if 6 months from now one of those cars brakes go out and it blows into a school bus and all these kids get killed and now they have a recall and you’re the guy who is the voice of it all. Is it worth the money then?’. And I’m like that is a great point, and you never know, the minute you are associated with it then that is what it is.”
And of course there has been some controversy about the main brand Spurlock’s film is attached to- Pom Wonderful, which is being investigated by the FDA for false health claims.“In the United States, since the film has come out Pom is now being sued by the by the federal trade commission and the FDA. I think that is a great conversation for you journalists to talk about. I’ve made this film, the lawsuit came as the film was rolling out to theatres, how much of that did they [Pom] already know about, and did they said ‘if we make this film it could put us in a very different light when the lawsuit happens’.”
So after going through this experience of making a film, fully funded by advertising does Spurlock believe that filmmakers with smaller budgets should try and replicate this model of financing?
“This film has shown there is value for independent, niche movies. So is there a possibility now in the future that a guy who is making a $500,000 film could call up Chevy and be like ‘I want this guy to drive a Chevy’ and Chevy says ‘Great I’ll give you $20000’ and it doesn’t have to be a close-up of the logo, it is just a car. If I was an independent filmmaker I’d take the money like that (clicks).” But what I really want to know is if we will see more Morgan Spurlock films brought to us by big brands, but the filmmaker ducks the question.
“For this movie it worked, for other docs it’d be completely would be terrible. To suddenly see someone doing an interview in Rwanda, holding a Coke, or a Pepsi, would be an awful thing. But here is the one thing I will say of what I think could and should happen with documentaries, is that there could be an alignment of ideologies- where it is like ‘We like to see ourselves as an authentic brand, you are an authentic filmmaker, and you made a very honest, truthful movie, and we like the film, we’ll give you $20000, just to help get it out into the marketplace. We just want to be associated with it because we like what it says and we like what you say.’ I think you’ll see more of that happening in the next few years, in docos, because there will be more brands who will want to come forward and be transparent in essence.”
Spurlock is one of the few filmmakers who has been able to see a direct change because of his film, with Super Size Me influencing McDonald’s operating practices. With this new doco, Spurlock again wants to open the eyes of his audiences.
“For me the greatest change will first come from you, from the audience, from the consumer. It will affect what happens with you. What that does to the industry beyond, how that affects TV shows and movies, that we’ll see in the next year as the film continues to roll out. For me the greatest thing that could happen would be that it starts to change the level of awareness for people. Because people love to say, ‘everyone is so savvy, everyone knows they are being advertised and marketed to now’, and I am like ‘you are absolutely wrong’.”
Pom Wonderful The Greatest Movie Ever sold is released in Australia on August 11th
