BEFORE: Well, I said I wanted to get to some of the documentaries that are still on my list, so here I go. Since "Cold Turkey" was about marketing (sort of) I found another film that's about marketing and advertising. Linking from "Cold Turkey", Paul Benedict was also in "The Freshman" with Frank Whaley, who was in "Pulp Fiction" with Quentin Tarantino, who is interviewed in tonight's film.
THE PLOT: A documentary about branding, advertising and product placement that is financed and made possible by brands, advertising and product placement.
AFTER: Great, so after I spend my whole day looking at commercials and discussing marketing campaigns, I get to come home and relax with a movie, which is filled with talk of marketing campaigns, and is essentially a giant set of commercials. A Super-Size commercial, if you will.
I may have to recuse myself since I recognize some of the key companies and advertising personnel depicted here - then again, what the heck. This is one of the most self-reflexive films ever made, since the audience gets to see all of the planning that went in to making it, and the meetings to arrange the product placement are themselves part of the process, so they were all filmed.
I usually can't stand movies about making movies, especially when the movie in question turns out to be the VERY SAME movie you're watching now! (Hey, how did THAT happen?) Or when a character is revealed to be a writer, and gets sudden inspiration to turn the events we're seeing into a novel or a film. Usually, it's a giant thematic cop-out. But a documentary aims for transparency, and that means that all aspects of the planning, filming and marketing of the film you're watching are going to come under scrutiny anyway, so you might as well make them part of the deal.
I can't decide if Morgan Spurlock is as naive as he pretends to be - seems to me if you film 100 cold-calls to various marketing departments, you could expect 99 hang-ups. He must have known that, right? Just like he must have known that eating McDonald's food for 30 days was going to be bad for his body... But he's charming, and that goes a long way toward believability. So I want to believe that he didn't know much about this process going into it, and once he overcame the steep learning curve and signed a few sponsors, the rest sort of followed suit.
We have marketing and advertising because it works, apparently, which is another thing we all probably already knew going in - and there's so much money being thrown around in ads and sponsorships that $1.5 million to make a film will look like chump change to someone. And even though Pepsi, Coke, Burger King and McDonald's weren't on board (gee, I can't imagine WHY Mickey D didn't return this guy's calls...) he got everyone from POM Wonderful to JetBlue to Hyatt and even Mane & Tail shampoo to play ball.
Perhaps surprisingly, Big Advertising is not the main villain here - if anyone plays that role, it's the lawyers. Because in order to get his $50,000 or $100,000 from each sponsor, he has to sign a contract that says that this will be the ONLY beverage that appears in the film, or he won't stay at any hotel BUT a Hyatt during production, or he won't say anything bad about Germany. Plus he had to promise to give the sponsors final edit approval, do a prescribed number of endorsements, and guarantee a certain number of theatre screens (impossible to predict).
I'm generally a cynical man, so when a series of circumstances is presented to me in a particular fashion, I'm often skeptical. Is it possible to appear on the Jimmy Kimmel show on Monday, say, and then use that footage in a feature film released on Friday? Sure, he could have left a 2-minute hole in the film until the last week and still locked picture, but then you still have to factor in edit time, making a certain number of prints, etc. Seems to me the easier way to go would be to check if Jimmy Kimmel would consent to a segment taped in advance, so there would be time to edit it into the film, especially if the film's going to play on the festival circuit before release. But there I go, thinking like a producer again....
Spurlock goes off on a couple of tangents - one is a trip to Brazil that shows how the city of Sao Paulo eliminated all billboards, and still managed to survive as a city. But this film is not about the ugliness of billboards or urban sprawl, so I'm not sure I see the connection. He also visits a high-school in Florida that has turned to selling banner space at the stadium to help fund their school (haven't they ever heard of mixed martial arts?) and he ends up buying up a bunch of banners to promote his film - presumably he felt somewhat guilty over taking so much corporate money, and had the urge to do something remotely positive with it.
In the end advertising is about manipulation - companies make you think you can gain some measure of happiness or satisfaction if you buy their product - and I can't figure out if Spurlock pulled the ultimate fast one by manipulating the manipulators, or if he just went door-to-door and was determined to be pleased with whatever result he got. Since he doesn't trash the industry (being contractually obligated not to) each viewer is left to determine if he sold out or just "bought in".
I've spent some time with Mr. Spurlock, he's hung out at our Comic-Con booth before - and then he went on to make a documentary about Comic-Con and didn't include us, so should I be upset?
Starring Morgan Spurlock, with Peter Berg, J.J. Abrams, Jimmy Kimmel, Ralph Nader, Donald Trump, L.A. Reid, Brett Ratner.
RATING: 5 out of 10 storyboards
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