Morgan Spurlock Biography
Morgan Spurlock born Morgan Valentine Spurlock on November 7, 1970, is an American documentary filmmaker, humorist, television producer, screenwriter, and playwright.
Morgan Spurlock Education
Spurlock went to Woodrow Wilson High School, a public high school in the city of Beckley, West Virginia. He graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1993, with a BFA in film.
Morgan Spurlock Career
Spurlock was a playwright, before making the 2004 Academy Award-nominated Super Size Me, winning awards for his play The Phoenix at both the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999 and the Route 66 American Playwriting Competition in 2000.
He was the creator of I Bet You Will for MTV. The show began as a popular Internet webcast of five-minute episodes featuring ordinary people doing stunts in exchange for money. Some of the episodes featured eating a full jar of mayonnaise, eating a “worm burrito” , and taking shots of corn oil, Pepto-Bismol, lemon juice, hot sauce, cold chicken broth, and cod liver oil. The webcast got over a million hits in the first five days, and this was a great success. Later, MTV bought and aired the show, with Spurlock as the host. Spurlock was inspired by a number of documentary films that include Brother’s Keeper, Hoop Dreams, The Thin Blue Line, Roger and Me, Harlan County USA, and The Last Waltz. He considers Brother’s Keeper the greatest documentary of all time.
Morgan Spurlock Super Size Me
On May 7, 2004, Spurlock’s docudrama Super Size Me was released in the U.S. The docudrama was later nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. He came up with the idea for the film when he was at his parents’ house for Thanksgiving, and while watching TV saw a news story about a lawsuit brought against McDonald’s by two teenage girls who blamed the fast-food chain for their obesity.
The film delineates an experiment he conducted in 2003, in which he ate three McDonald’s meals a day every day, and nothing else, for 30 days. The title of the film is derived from one of the rules of Spurlock’s experiment: he would not refuse the “super-size” option whenever it was offered to him and would never ask for it himself. According to Spurlock, the result, was a diet with twice the calories recommended by the USDA. Spurlock attempted to curtail his physical activity to better match the exercise habits of the average American .
When he started the project, he was of above-average health and fitness and by the end he gained 25 pounds , became quite puffy, suffered liver dysfunction and depression. His supervising physicians noted the effects caused by his high-calorie diet—once even comparing it to a case of severe binge alcoholism. The claims of his liver dysfunction being caused by eating solely McDonald’s food for 30 days have been questioned, following Spurlock’s December 2017 claim that he hadn’t been “sober for more than a week” in three decades.
It took Spurlock fourteen months to return to his normal weight of 185 pounds (84 kg),after the completion of the project. His then-girlfriend, currently ex-wife , Alexandra Jamieson, took charge of his recovery with her “detox diet”, which became the basis for her book, The Great American Detox Diet.
In 2017, Spurlock released a sequel film, Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, to be distributed by YouTube Red, but was dropped since Spurlock’s admission of sexual assault.
Morgan Spurlock Inside Man
Morgan Inside Man which airs on CNN is an American documentary series. Its episodes feature Spurlock investigating a range of topics from an insider’s perspective. Documentary filmmaker Spurlock investigates topics of national interest using participatory journalism, in each one-hour episode. Some of the topics explored include marijuana, gun control, migrant farmworkers, and eldercare. Spurlock worked at a medical cannabis dispensary in Oakland, California, in the premiere episode. Spurlock used only Bitcoin as currency for a week, in a Season 3 episode.
Morgan Spurlock Rats
Rats, also referred to as Rats NYC, is a 2016 American documentary horror film directed by Morgan Spurlock. The documentary is based on a book by Robert Sullivan and distributed by the Discovery Channel, the film chronicles rat infestations in major cities throughout the world.
Morgan Spurlock 30 Days
Every episode features a person or a group of people spend 30 days immersing themselves in a mode of life markedly different from their norm, while Spurlock discusses the relevant social issues involved. The show began airing on FX on June 15, 2005. In “Minimum Wage,” the premiere episode of the first season, Spurlock and his fiancée lived for 30 days in the Bottoms neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, earning minimum wage, with no access to outside funds.
Spurlock spent 25 days locked in a Henrico County, Virginia jail in the second-season finale, to experience life as an inmate. However he did not complete the entire 30 days in jail because the majority of inmates in the state of Virginia serve 85% of the sentence, so once Spurlock reached that benchmark, he was released from the prison.
The third season of the show premiered on June 3, 2008. Its first episode, titled “Working in a Coal Mine,” was filmed in Bolt, West Virginia which is located roughly 18 miles from the city of Beckley, West Virginia, where Spurlock was raised before leaving for New York. FX announced in late 2008, it would not renew the 30 Days series, making the third season the last.
Morgan Spurlock Documentaries | Movies And Tv Shows
- 1994 Léon: The Professional
- 1995 Kiss of Death
- 2004 Super Size Me
- 2004 The Future of Food
- 2004 Czech Dream
- 2006 Chalk
- 2006 Class Act
- 2007 Drive Thru
- 2007 The Third Wave
- 2007 What Would Jesus Buy?
- 2008 Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
- 2008 Last Cup: Road to the World Series of Beer Pong
- 2009 The Entrepreneur
- 2009 Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days
- 2009 New Brow: Contemporary Underground Art
- 2009 Abraham Obama
- 2010 Freakonomics
- 2010 Pool Party
- 2011 The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
- 2011 Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope
- 2011 The Other F Word
- 2011 How We Covered It
- 2011 The Unauthorized Documentary, Hangover Part II
- 2012 Mansome
- 2012 Knuckleball!
- 2012 Glue Man
- 2013 One Direction: This Is Us
- 2013 Web Junkie
- 2013 Dancing in Jaffa
- 2013 Waiting for Mamu
- 2013 Chronic-Con, Episode 420: A New Dope
- 2013 You Don’t Know Jack
- 2013 Misfire: The Rise and Fall of the Shooting Gallery
- 2014 A Brony Tale
- 2014 I Am Santa Claus
- 2014 We the Economy: 20 Short Films You Can’t Afford to Miss
- 2014 That Film About Money
- 2015 Man Under
- 2015 Censored Voices
- 2015 Made in Japan
- 2015 I Am Dale Earnhardt
- 2015 Crafted
- 2015 The Princess of North Sudan
- 2016 Rats
- 2016 The Eagle Huntress
- 2017 Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
Morgan Spurlock Age
He was born on November 7, 1970. He is 48 years old as of 2018.
Morgan Spurlock Family
Spurlock was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, to Ben and Phyllis Spurlock. He was raised in Beckley, West Virginia as a Methodist. He is of Scots-Irish and English descent.
Morgan Spurlock Wife
He was married to Alexandra Jamieson from 2006 to 2011. Later he married Sara Bernstein in 2016.
Morgan Spurlock Children
He has two sons; Laken James Spurlock, born on December 9, 2006, and Kallen Marcus Spurlock, born on May 22, 2016.
Morgan Spurlock Net Worth
Spurlock is an American documentary filmmaker, humorist, television producer, screenwriter and political activist who has a net worth of $12 million.
Body Measurements
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