The 53 episodes MTV bought gave him the wherewithal to start filming Super Size Me. He learned one valuable lesson: "If you want to know the sure-fire way to not get credit card applications any more, get really terrible credit. I finally got to the point where they wouldn't even send me credit card applications any more I was like 'Wow, I figured it out. I would get credit card after credit card after credit card with like $25,000 limits on them." He didn't have cash to pay his staff: "I would use the credit cards to pay their rent, to buy them food, to pay for my office's rent; I would use credit cards to pay credit cards." In a year, he accumulated $250,000 in credit card debt, got evicted from his apartment and starting sleeping in a hammock in his office, using a local gym for showers.
After September 11, film production more or less shut down in New York, and Spurlock struggled to keep his own production company afloat."I had great credit at the time, so I kept getting credit cards. On the side, he started making corporate videos and commercials. "It was interesting for me to see how marketing works," he says, "to see how branding works." I suspect this may account for his slightly silly but very recognisable mutton-chop whiskers.The other reason he's not worried about being labelled a sell-out is that he knows how hard life is without money to back you up. The day before I met Spurlockhe signed a one-year development deal with Sony's TV arm. Murdoch and Sony, eh: is he just a corporate sell-out?The question doesn't bother him "I don't think so... If they were telling me what to do, I'd believe it, but basically I'm going in there with the shows I wanted to make anyway. Now we have a partner who actually has money."It's not as if he's any stranger to Sony: in the mid-1990s, after he left film school, he landed a job as spokesman for Sony at all the live events they sponsored, and spent two and a half years touring round America entertaining college audiences and doing announcements at sports fixtures.The high point of this phase of his career was, surely, announcing the beach volleyball at the 1996 Olympics.
The series has already been a hit in America, though, and a second season has been commissioned for FX, the Murdoch-owned cable channel that gave us The Shield and Nip/Tuck. Alex insisted on coming with him, and together the two of them discover a whole new reality of poor housing, inadequate diet and rotten healthcare.How this will play with English audiences is hard to predict: while the problems of poverty and bigotry are the same the whole world over, there is nothing here that has quite the same global appeal as taking a pop at Ronald McDonald. "I would be going from shoot to shoot to shoot to shoot to shoot, six months straight. I'm involved with the editing and the story process, so that means we couldn't even start editing the show until I'm done with all six months." Also, his fianc? healthy Alex the vegan chef, said: "Well, if you do that you can pretty much bet you're not going to have a girlfriend very long." He did only one episode, the first one, in which he attempts to live for a month on the national minimum wage. He abandoned that idea: the production logistics wouldn't work. I didn't have the heart to tell him that British audiences blew out on Jamie years ago.30 Days, the excuse for More4's Spurlock fest, is a development of the Super Size Me concept: if 30 days of McDonald's was enough for Spurlock to gain 25 pounds and enlarge his liver, what else could happen in the same time frame? What about if you send a conservative Christian to live in a Muslim household for a month? Or a conservative homophobe to shack up with a gay man in San Francisco? Get a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a spread to recapture his youth through dietary supplements and steroid injections?The original idea was that Spurlock himself would be the guinea pig. We just sit around and talk nonsense about what's happening in the world, so it'll be pretty easy."He gets jittery only when I mention that the series' other hosts are mainly comedians.
