Morgan Spurlock, director of Super Size Me, died May 24 in New York. He was 53 and had been battling cancer.
Super Size Me saw Spurlock eat only McDonald’s for a month, supersizing his order when asked, and chronicle how it affected his health and his mood. The documentary came out in 2004.
Spurlock was born in West Virginia in 1970. He studied film at New York University, graduating in 1993, and starting his career as a production assistant on movie projects, and writing plays. He also produced the online program I Bet You Will, five-minute shorts where he would dare people to do something unpleasant in exchange for cash. MTV ended up picking up the program.
Super Size Me was made for a modest $65,000 budget and grossed over $22 million.
Spurlock also directed Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, which saw him search for Bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and other countries. That film came out in 2008. Documentaries The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, about production placement, came out in 2011, and Mansome, about male grooming, was released in 2012. Spurlock directed the music film One Direction: This Is Us in 2013.
On TV, Spurlock created and starred in the FX docuseries 30 Days, which saw him embedded in a different community–living on minimum wage, living off the grid–for a month; and Inside Man, a CNN series with a similar theme, where Spurlock gets to know various factions of American life, including gun lovers and marijuana growers. 30 Days went for three seasons and Inside Man for four.
In 2014, Showtime aired the Spurlock docuseries Seven Deadly Sins, with episodes dedicated to lust, gluttony, greed, sloth and the other lethal sins.
Spurlock’s Warrior Poets production outfit teamed with LeBron James’ and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill Entertainment on a documentary called I Promise, which chronicled James’ efforts to launch a public school for at-risk children in Akron. It airs on YouTube.
Late in 2017, Spurlock revealed his involvement in multiple incidents of sexual misconduct, and his dependency on alcohol, in an essay entitled "I am Part of the Problem.”
Among his many film and TV projects, it was Super Size Me that elevated Spurlock to stardom. The film was nominated for best documentary feature at the 77th Academy Awards in 2005.
