Stephen's got (return guest) Morgan Spurlock, with The (POM Wonderful) Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Some snippets:
Why a kicking from Morgan Spurlock is good for our industry
If there’s one thing you can say about documentary-maker Morgan Spurlock it’s that he’s good at stating the obvious.
In Super Size Me we learned that junk food is bad for you. Then, in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? We learned that, um, nobody knows where he is. Now, in Spurlock’s latest project, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, we’re shown how branded messages are everywhere and product placement is on the increase.
But while Morgan Spurlock is often obvious, he’s always interesting and he’s undeniably good at engineering debate. And that is exactly the point of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold: to increase awareness about branded messages within content and to start a public debate about both its merits and its evils. For all of us who work in advertising, this should be a very interesting debate to watch unfold, not to mention contribute to.
If you’re not familiar with The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, here’s a brief trailer: to start with that’s not its title. Its full title is Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. In a Spurlockian twist, his documentary about product placement and advertising was entirely paid for by product placement and advertising.
The Greatest Movie is a meta-film: it documents Spurlock’s attempts to get brands to fund a project whose purported aim is to cast their marketing practices in a less than salubrious light...
Morgan Spurlock’s ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Sold’ Might Be The Most Meta Movie Ever Made {Sundance Review}
Like him, or hate him, Morgan Spurlock has quickly become a staple of the documentary world. It all started with the premiere of Super Size Me at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. His personal adventures have taken us inside of the world of fast food, into the battlefields of the Middle East, and now into the world of product placement. Well… it’s not that simple. Spurlock set out to make a film about product placement and instead may have created the most meta movie ever produced.
The idea was to direct a documentary titled The Greatest Movie Ever Sold that would explore the growing world of product placement in television shows and movies. The twist being that the doc would be completely financed by product placement. Sounds simple enough, right? Actually, it’s a bit more complicated. The movie follows Spurlock as he tries to pitch the concept to various brands (Spurlock claims that almost 500 brands were contacted). As you might expect, finding twelve companies to cover the reported $1.5 million budget wasn’t easy — especially considering the controversial nature of the filmmaker.
So while the movie features cutaway segments helping to explain the process of how branded sponsorships end up in television and films, the majority of the documentary is Morgan’s quest — to find funding and creatively insert the product placements within his journey...
But it doesn’t stop there. Morgan also explores the experience of co-promotion — in this portion of the documentary we see how the film, the movie you’re currently watching, will be sold to consumers through cross promotional co-branded advertising. We even see Spurlock out promoting the documentary on late night talkshows (taped segments which will later run the week of theatrical release). So essentially, we’re watching a movie about the making of the movie we’re watching, from funding to week of release promotion. I doubt it will ever get more meta than that...
There are reviews and such all over the place (including Morgan Spurlock: The greatest TED Talk ever sold), though only 10 so far at RottenTomatoes. It's got a 90% there, though. Here's a bit from that one negative review:
Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary gag, 'The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,' had a lot of people in stitches at the Sundance Film Festival. I didn't laugh as much as some, but I have to give the guy credit for continuing to bring a humorous and entertaining viewpoint to non-fiction film with his gimmicky experiments...
The premise this time is that Spurlock wants to expose the out-of-hand practices of product placement and cross-promotional marketing, particularly in film and TV, while in turn admittedly producing one of the most whorish documentaries of all time....
Many are calling the result the most meta movie of all time. Perhaps, but it's really not that big a stretch for documentary. Especially nowadays, the non-fiction mode is full of reflexive works. Spurlock's own 'Super Size Me' is about the process of making a documentary, and the same goes for far too many other first-person docs, many of them influenced by this very director (see 'Super High Me,' 'No Impact Man,' etc.). The only thing possibly different here is that Spurlock has made a film more about the behind-the-scenes stuff than the discovery of content. Again, though, it's not the first doc to depict a director trying to raise money for his or her film, either. 'Born Into Brothels,' frustratingly, did that too.
And speaking of things done before, the whole idea of a documentary funded or underwritten through sponsorship calls to mind almost the entire history of the mode...
Spurlock himself is a fairly big name, as well, and I find it interesting that as a celebrity documentarian, he himself has brand status. The one thing on my mind after the movie, more than the content and minor issues it tackles, was how few other non-fiction filmmakers could get away with a stunt like this...
And Spurlock's continued the tradition of photo-documenting his visit (minor spoiler here). I love this twitter thing...
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