According to his family, Morgan Spurlock, the director and former CNN series presenter whose documentary “Super Size Me” on McDonald’s received an Academy Award nomination, passed away on Thursday from cancer-related issues.
According to his brother, 53-year-old Spurlock passed away in New York while surrounded by loved ones.
“It was a sad day, as we said goodbye to my brother Morgan,” Craig Spurlock stated. “Morgan generously, artistically, and with ideas provided so much. We have lost a unique individual and a real creative talent to the planet. That I collaborated with him makes me very proud.
The directorial career of Spurlock was erratic and uneven. His film “Super Size Me,” which ignited a nationwide debate and plenty of controversy about America’s fast food connection, made him most famous. In the movie, he tried to live off McDonald’s alone for thirty days, and whenever asked to “super-size” his order during a sales transaction, he did.
In addition, he helmed a One Direction concert film, a satirical documentary on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and even a film about Homer Simpson and baseball.
The future director was reared in Beckley, where he attended Woodrow Wilson High School, after being born in Parkersburg, West Virginia. 1993 saw his graduation from New York University.
Founder of the New York-based production company Warrior Poets, Spurlock’s first picture, “Super Size Me,” received him a best director award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
The movie later received an Academy Award nomination for best feature documentary and the first Writers Guild of America best documentary script award.
Audiences were enthralled by Spurlock’s willingness in that documentary to use himself to test the consequences of consuming fast food for breakfast, noon, and supper. He put on 25 pounds and recorded the bad impacts on his health.
In 2019 he released the movie “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken.”
Spurlock pursued subsequent documentaries, such as 2008’s “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?” and 2011’s “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” driven by the popularity of his first effort. In addition, in 2005 he developed the reality television series “30 Days” and assisted Hulu with their first original series, “A Day in the Life.”
A message on social media in 2017 as the #MeToo movement gained steam acknowledged Spurlock’s previous sexual misbehavior.
He added at the time, alluding to the recent surge of sexual misconduct accusations against well-known men, “I’ve come to understand after months of these revelations, that I am not some innocent bystander, I am also a part of the problem.”
He quit as CEO of his production firm.
Spurlock was a prodigious writer and director as well. Rats, Seven Deadly Sins, and No Man’s Land are a few of his other credits.
