"Super Size Me" by Morgan Spurlock

[Click for The Truth About Tech Central Station]

Boy, do I want to see this movie. Everyone who sees it raves about it. In theaters May 7.

Super Size Me:

Why are Americans so fat? Find out in Super Size Me, a tongue in-cheek - and burger in hand -- look at the legal, financial and physical costs of America's hunger for fast food.

Ominously, 37% of American children and adolescents are carrying too much fat and 2 out of every three adults are overweight or obese. Is it our fault for lacking self-control, or are the fast-food corporations to blame?

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock hit the road and interviewed experts in 20 U.S. cities, including Houston, the "Fattest City" in America. From Surgeon Generals to gym teachers, cooks to kids, lawmakers to legislators, these authorities shared their research, opinions and "gut feelings" on our ever-expanding girth.

During the journey, Spurlock also put his own body on the line, living on nothing but McDonald's for an entire month with three simple rules:

1) No options: he could only eat what was available over the counter (water included!)
2) No supersizing unless offered
3) No excuses: he had to eat every item on the menu at least once

It all adds up to a fat food bill, harrowing visits to the doctor, and compelling viewing for anyone who's ever wondered if man could live on fast food alone.

In the current issue, Filmmaker explores some legal issues:

Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me brings up all the legal issues that any documentary filmmaker will ever have to face — and all in one film! These issues become a bit scarier given the film’s subject — the fast-food corporate behemoth McDonald’s, which probably went over Spurlock’s film with a fine-tooth comb before going on the defense by cutting out their Super Size meals from their menus.

Filmmaker also has an interview with Spurlock. Also, Morgan Spurlock has a blog, of course. He blogged about the Canadian premiere of Super Size Me yesterday. He seems to be eating better now.

(Links via GreenCine)

UPDATE: The Truth About Tech Central Station

When McDonald's wants to influence you, sometimes it doesn't want you to know that it's McDonald's doing the influencing. It would rather have you believe that its corporate message is actually the independent view of a publication that just happens to be pro-McDonald's. So rather than deliver its message honestly, under its own name, sometimes a corporation like McDonald's will secretly use an "independent" publication that allows it to pay a behind-the-scenes fee in exchange for transmitting its message, no questions asked.

Tech Central Station is one of these unethical publications. Published by a PR firm called DCI Group, and financed by a group of companies who pay to have its "journalists" conveniently adopt their chosen messages, Tech Central Station is essentially a front. The companies behind it know that you wouldn't accept these messages if you knew they were coming from their hired PR firms, so they try to fool you into thinking the messages come from what sounds like an independent outlet.

Most publications accept advertising, of course, so the possibility of a pro-sponsor bias is present almost everywhere in the media. But with Tech Central Station this influence is direct and certain: The companies pay money, TCS adopts their chosen message. Vigorously. And the connection, of course, is never mentioned in the "articles" that result from these transactions.

And it is all generally done to try to make you believe something that isn't true.

Nicholas Confessore investigated Tech Central Station and DCI Group for the Washington Monthly. An excerpt:

TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also "sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.

James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence--until now.

The full article is here.

Tech Central Station, at the McDonald's Corporation's behest, recently published a seres of articles around the theme, "The Super Size Con," using the usual PR technique of ad hominem attack. The series is promoted on Google with keyword ads targeted on "Morgan Spurlock," "Super Size Me" and the like. When I discovered that this blog entry was a top search result on those same keywords, I decided to tag on this addendum on TCS to the entry.

(Thanks, Eugene Hernandez. And here, too.)