30 Days

[MacGuffin]

'Super Size Me' filmmaker to TV

Morgan Spurlock, who won an Academy Award nomination for his documentary "Super Size Me," in which he lived on McDonalds' food for one month, is expanding on that premise with "30 Days," a six-episode documentary series for FX that he will produce and host.

Each hourlong installment will follow a person who is placed in "a living environment that is antithetical to their upbringing, beliefs, religion or profession in an effort to examine real societal differences that Americans face every day." In the June 15 premiere, Spurlock and his fiancé spend a month in Columbus, Ohio, living on minimum-wage jobs.

http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/ShowMainServlet/showid-25836/

Morgan Spurlock ("Super Size Me") has scored a pilot commitment from the cable channel for a new one-hour documentary series that plants an individual for 30 days in a completely different lifestyle, whether religious, economic or ethnic. The news marks John Landgraf's first pilot order since taking over the entertainment reigns of the network. Spurlock, who will have an on-air role as host in the pilot, says possible storylines include a wealthy person would discover what it's like to be poor, or a prosecutor would try a 30-day prison sentence. He'll executive produce the project via his The Con production banner along with Ben Silverman, H.T. Owens and Mark Koops of Reveille Entertainment ("The Restaurant"). Also as part of the pact, Spurlock will get a blind script commitment from FX for a potential scripted series. FX is believed to have been involved in a bidding war for the project with at least one other broadcast network.

[MacGuffin]

'Super Size Me' director turns to TV

The man who made a movie about subsisting solely on McDonald's fast food is turning to television, with a series that puts people in alien situations for a month, including a "fundamentalist Christian" who lived as a Muslim.

Morgan Spurlock made his name with the Oscar-nominated documentary "Super Size Me," about the impact on his health of a month's diet of McDonald's burgers, shakes, chicken nuggets and soda.

Now he has developed the concept into "30 Days," a television series that places people in unfamiliar social circumstances.

In one show, a conservative straight man tries living with a gay roommate. In another, a mother turns to binge-drinking to send a warning to her daughter. Spurlock also puts himself to the test by living on minimum wage for 30 days.

The show starts on the FX television network on June 15.

"One of my favorite episodes is ... what's it like to be a Muslim in America ... who is seen every day as a threat to our freedom simply because of their color, their race, their religion," Spurlock told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

"(It's) something we deal with every day in America, and we hear about it with terrorism threats every day," he said.

"We took a fundamentalist Christian from my home state of West Virginia, somebody who is very pro-war, pro-'us versus them,' that when you hear Muslim the only thing he thinks of is a guy standing on a mountain with an AK-47," Spurlock said.

The man leaves his wife and children at home and goes to live with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States.

"He dresses as a Muslim, eats as a Muslim, he prays five time a day, he studies the Koran daily, he learns to speak Arabic, he works with an imam, a Muslim cleric, to learn the history of Islam, what are the five pillars, why are they important."

"And the transformation this guy goes through in 30 days is miraculous, it's incredible," Spurlock said.

LIFE ON MINIMUM WAGE

The documentary maker, who has visited more than 100 schools as part of his campaign to improve school food programs, says the television show is driven by the desire to make people think about societal problems.

"It's not one of those shows where anybody wins a million dollars, nobody gets voted off," said Spurlock, who is promoting "Don't Eat This Book," his new book expanding on "Super Size Me."

He said the success of the film, which played in 65 countries, had opened doors for him to tackle other issues. In "30 Days" he takes on the first challenge himself.

"The question is, what's it like to live on minimum wage in America, what is it really like to try to survive on $5.15 an hour, which is a ridiculous sum of money to try to live on," Spurlock said.

He and his fiancee moved to Columbus, Ohio, found jobs and an apartment and made the best of it.

"I was working two jobs, I was working on average 16 or 17 hours a day," Spurlock said. "On my best day I made $91.75, which is terrible."

They spent $35 a week on groceries. But he said they ate well due to the skills of his fiancee, Alex Jamieson, a chef who is about to publish a book of her vegan detox diet that Spurlock used to return to normal after "Super Size Me."

For anybody tempted to scoff at a man who puts himself through a month of poverty after his first film made some $30 million, Spurlock insists his bank account remains far from super-sized.

"If only the industry worked like that," he said. "I personally haven't even made close to that. I haven't even made a million dollars."

[MacGuffin]

A few more ideas to digest
'Super Size Me's' Morgan Spurlock again strikes out against complacency and convention with '30 Days.'
Source: Los Angeles Times

Morgan Spurlock insists he isn't trying to super-size journalism or advocate from a super-sized soapbox. He says he's not interested in becoming an obnoxious gadfly or the next Michael Moore.

But a year after Spurlock super-sized his way to an Oscar nomination and book deal ("Don't Eat This Book" was just released by G.P. Putnam's Sons) by devouring McDonald's fare three times a day for 30 days, the director, star and writer of "Super Size Me" is taking on the small screen, he says, to "pluck people out of their own backyards, send them out into the unknown and hopefully change some minds along the way."

"30 Days," a documentary-style reality show that premieres Wednesday on FX, follows along for a month as Americans trade in their lives for ones radically different from their own.

Spurlock and his fiancée, Alex Jamieson, swap their Manhattan lifestyle for a stint in Columbus, Ohio, where they both work minimum-wage jobs; Scott Bridges, a Los Angeles husband and father, undergoes an anti-aging regime that includes taking steroids because he wants to look like he did in high school; David Stacy, a Christian family man from West Virginia moves in with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Mich.; Michiel Nacke of Tempe, Ariz., binge drinks to teach her children about the dangers of alcohol; Ryan Hickmott of Oxford, Mich., moves in with a gay man in San Francisco to deal with his homophobia; and Johari Jenkins of Jersey City, N.J., and Vito Summa of New York City live without electricity and modern conveniences in an eco-village in rural Missouri.

"I have a whole laundry list of things that I think need to be fixed in America, or at least examined so that people can start to think about them," said the 34-year-old Spurlock, who hosts and narrates the series. "I've had so many people come up to me and say that after watching 'Super Size Me,' they've changed the way they are eating. Parents are cooking more for their kids, school systems are voting all of their junk food out of their cafeterias, and you see how it has empowered people. Hopefully, this show will do the same thing: to make people say, 'I need to think more about that' or 'I need to become more active in my community' or 'I need not to be so judgmental off the bat.' "

FX's signature dramas — "The Shield," "Nip/Tuck" and "Rescue Me" — examine the price of justice, the national obsession with youth, and life after Sept. 11, respectively, albeit through a fictional prism. So it fits that the network is fashioning its reality offerings with the same strategy, said John Landgraf, president and general manager of FX Networks. Indeed, "30 Days" moves the basic cable network past the contrived shenanigans of last year's "Todd TV" into the experiential storytelling that turned "Super Size Me" into the third-highest-grossing box office documentary in history.

"The reality business in general seems to us to be a little cheesy, hyped-up," Landgraf said. "For me, to find the unscripted equivalent of our scripted brand, it had to aspire to be high-end from a filmmaking and storytelling standpoint. And we wanted to go after something that feels more real and deals with contemporary American themes and issues."

Striking a chord

The idea for "30 Days" struck Spurlock as he was editing "Super Size Me" and thought about the debate his McDonald's-based documentary had sparked just at the test screenings.

"People started arguing with one another and I thought, 'This is fantastic — to evoke emotion like that,' " Spurlock said. "That's what good films do; good films really make you feel. So we were sitting in the edit room and I thought it would be great to create a show for television where we can deal with serious issues in a fun way that isn't preachy."

Spurlock pitched the documentary-style reality show in February 2004 to FX executives who immediately went for the concept. They helped Spurlock narrow his "huge list" of topics to a half-dozen to produce this year and bought six episodes.

"I love that FX jumped on it because we're taking reality television back to its roots: documentary films," Spurlock said. "Nobody wins, nobody gets voted off, and we're dealing with real issues in our society every day."

Executing the concept, however, became a challenge. "30 Days" isn't serialized like most reality shows. Each episode plays out like a short film, with Spurlock as its engaging common denominator. Spurlock and his production team — R.J. Cutler of the Oscar-nominated "The War Room" and Ben Silverman and H.T. Owens of "The Biggest Loser" and "Blow Out" — studied the structure of "Super Size Me" to see how they could best emulate it for television.

"It was easy to analyze that there was this experiential journalism," Cutler said. "You don't really see that, even in the films of Michael Moore; he's poking fun at different people and communicating with the audience. Morgan is immersing himself in another person's life and another world. So we decided every episode is going to have this experiential journalism spine and the nerves that wrap around the spine is Morgan exploring an issue."

Inquisitiveness is a trait Spurlock says he can't help. His mother, a lover of art, music and writing, wrote poetry and read it to her three sons when they were young, encouraging them to find their own voices. As a result, Spurlock, who always loved movies, decided early on that he was going to become a filmmaker. His older brothers became ballet dancers.

"I grew up in a family of ballet-dancing brothers in the middle of West Virginia, which was not the coolest thing to be doing in West Virginia," Spurlock said. "They both became professional dancers. Now they have kids and are married, but to grow up at that time in that place in a family that was so supportive of the arts was unheard of…. I learned how not to be afraid and go after the things you wanted."

That attitude served him well after Sept. 11, when his Internet production company fell apart because MTV stopped production on a show Spurlock was working on and the Internet-boom fallout. More than $250,000 in debt, he was evicted from his apartment and slept in a hammock in his office for five months.

A TV news tidbit about obesity provided the kernel for "Super Size Me," but Spurlock never dreamed that his first documentary would lead to a TV series and book deals for him and his fiancée.

Spurlock — who gained 25 pounds and suffered liver damage during his experiment — credits Jamieson, a vegan chef, for his return to good health by designing an eight-week detoxification diet.

"I was so horrified that he was going to eat McDonald's for 30 days straight that I couldn't think clearly about the movie," said Jamieson, 30, who imparts her knowledge in "The Great American Detox Diet," which was released by Rodale Books last week. "The whole reason I went to culinary school was to learn about healing and food and helping people get better with their diets, and he comes back with this idea."

For "30 Days," Spurlock decided to delve into the topic of the federal minimum wage, which he emphasizes has remained at $5.15 since 1997, and Jamieson, who didn't want to be away from her fiancé for a month, joined him. During the course of a month, Jamieson worked in a coffee shop while Spurlock worked in construction, washed dishes, made pizzas and helped in a print shop. After both of them wound up in an urgent care clinic — Jamieson for a urinary tract infection and Spurlock for a wrist injury — their bills mounted.

"It was eye-opening to see how many people are out there working not just full time but double time," Jamieson said. "It's amazing that people are able to sustain healthy relationships and a family life when they have to work so hard away from home and there are such big transportation difficulties … at the same time, it was unbelievable to see how many really good people there are out there."

Inclusion meets suspicion

David Stacy, who grew up with Spurlock, learned that lesson in Dearborn, Mich., after living for a month with a Muslim couple and experiencing every aspect of their religion and culture.

"Unfortunately, my views before, I'm kind of embarrassed to say, my thinking had been pretty shallow," said Stacy, 35, whose wife is Filipino. "I had never thought what it must be like to live in America as a minority."

Stacy's powerful episode, which FX will air third in the series, charts his entire journey, including his discomfort with praying five times a day to a "different God," learning another language and reading the Koran, and coping with the discrimination he faced every day from those who despised him because they thought he was Muslim and from Muslims who didn't trust his motivations.

Stacy's uneasiness with his decision to go through with the experiment began when Spurlock gave him Muslim garb to wear to the airport.

"When I went to the airport — and I do fly pretty frequently — people were terrified of me," he said. "I was freaking out people. These little old ladies wouldn't look at me. It was the first time I've ever had people look at me and not just think I'm a little different, but hate me."

After returning home in August, Stacy said he felt like he was in a "dream world" and "it took me another 30 days to reassimilate."

"I had so many new thoughts," he said. "I started to look at how we Americans can be so arrogant. While I was there, I didn't have my normal support systems of friends, family and cellphone. At night, I didn't watch any TV. It was just me with my thoughts for 30 days. It seemed kind of maddening, but I was like a lot of Americans who didn't look at the issues.

"I have changed. I'm rubbing some people the wrong way now, and some people feel I've been brainwashed. But this show opened my eyes to so much."

[lamas]

i thought the first episode was very good.  it pisses me off that this show isn't on NBC, CBS, ABC or FOX where more people can see it.  instead, i see a commercial for Princes of Malibu or some other worthless piece of shit.

[Reinhold]

i just saw the minimum wage one. not bad. i'll watch it again.

[Ravi]

http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/30-days.html

Title: 30 Days
Starring: N/A (Documentary)
Released: 11th July 2006
SRP: $26.98

Further Details:

Fox Home Entertainment has sent over artwork for the first season of 30 Days which explores some of America's most pressing social issues by following the lives of ordinary people who agree to live well-outside their comfort zones for thirty days. Each of the episodes will be presented in 1.33:1 full frame, along with English Stereo tracks. As far as we know, no extra material will be included. You'll be able to own this one from the 11th July, priced at around $26.98.

[hedwig]

morgan spurlock's face makes me wanna punch morgan spurlock in the face.

[MacGuffin]

'Super Size Me' filmmaker sizes up jail

The West Virginia filmmaker who chronicled his decline during a steady diet of fast food in the superpopular documentary "Super Size Me," spent 23 days behind bars for another video report — and discovered, he said, that inmates are not all bad guys.

Morgan Spurlock checked into the Henrico County Jail in February and left with some shattered stereotypes.

"One of them is that you imagine jail, and prison, being filled with all these bad guys," Spurlock told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "And I'll be the first person to say there's people that are locked up who should be locked up. But at the same time, I think there's a lot of good, honest, genuine people in there who made a mistake ... "

Spurlock's experience will air July 26 on the FX network, launching the second season of his "30 Days" documentary series.

Spurlock said he chose the suburban Richmond jail after reading an article about Sheriff Mike Wade and a drug-rehabilitation program his department started.

"Henrico is one of the few places that recognizes that just punishing somebody for being a drug offender isn't enough," Spurlock said.

An agreement was signed, and Spurlock was processed at Henrico's Jail West on Feb. 8, after he was "sentenced" to 30 days in jail for a phony contempt-of-court charge.

Wade said Monday that prisoners were told Spurlock was the focus of a documentary but was not identified as the filmmaker.

"He lived in a cell like everybody else," Wade said. "We treated him just like an inmate."

The county jail system includes approximately 1,200 prisoners accused of offenses ranging from drug counts to murder.

"Of course he didn't stay with any of the capital murderers," Wade said, adding, however, that Spurlock did spend 72 hours in solitary confinement.

Many of the inmates took to Spurlock, after some initial skepticism.

"There were some people here that kind of doubted his sincerity on why he was here, but he dealt with that, he got over it pretty quickly," inmate Wesley Stanbach said.

He went to church, tutored inmates, worked 15-hour shifts in the kitchen and eventually made it to the trustee dayroom.

"I think Morgan was a great guy," Stanbach said. "I consider him a friend."

Spurlock also got to know 25-year-old Michael "Travis" Ramsey of Highland Springs, who was filmed going through heroin withdrawal during Spurlock's stay. "He definitely showed concern for my well-being," said Ramsey, who shared a cell with Spurlock.

Wade said Spurlock did not "serve" his full 30 days because he was satisfied with the footage he had over 23 days.

[hedwig]

The West Virginia filmmaker who chronicled his decline during a steady diet of fast food in the superpopular documentary "Super Size Me," spent 23 days behind bars for another video report — and discovered, he said, that inmates are not all bad guys.

hahha, "inmates are not all bad guys," wow.. that's the most MIND BLOWING discovery i've heard since "Fast food is unhealthy." thanks, morgan! you win this year's Haggis Award for best documentary filmmaker. 

[MacGuffin]

30 Days' targets illegal immigration
From the Associated Press

A member of the Minutemen group and a family of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles are being paired in a reality series aimed at giving people a chance to see life from a different perspective.

The episode of the FX series "30 Days," from Academy Award-nominated "Super Size Me" documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, is scheduled to air Aug. 2.

In it, a man identified as Frank and said to be a member of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, the anti-illegal immigration group, lives in a one-bedroom apartment with a family that has emigrated from Mexico illegally.

The network remained within the law, said John Landgraf, president of FX Networks.

"We suggested the family seek outside legal counsel," Landgraf told the Daily Journal of Los Angeles. Participants were not paid and the family's real surname was not used, he said.

[elpablo]

Did anyone else catch the first episode? I enjoyed it a lot.

Hedwig, you should give Spurlock more credit. Yes, he states the obvious, but he does it in a way that makes the subjects much more personal, and showing the direct effects of them.

Plus, the minuteman on tonight's episode bore a striking resemblance Geraldo Rivera 

[picolas]

i find him punchable.

[pete]

who, spurlock or the minuteman?