He’s best known as being the guy who ate McDonald’s for every meal, every day for a month for his documentary “Super Size Me,” but Morgan Spurlock’s first big Washington moment happened because of an episode of “30 Days,” his former reality show in which participants lived in someone else’s shoes for a month. Spurlock, who just finished filming “Freakonomics,” a documentary based on the book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner that will debut at the Cannes Film Festival this spring, played professor Tuesday night at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, taking questions on how he got the idea for his Academy Award-nominated documentary (as a reaction to two women suing McDonald’s for its food), reality TV (he loves “Jersey Shore”) and what’s next on the filmmaker’s agenda.
During the evening, he recounted how he was invited to the city to tackle the issue of the minimum wage.
“I remember we got a call from Ted Kennedy’s office who said, ‘We want to show the minimum wage episode here in D.C.,’ ” the filmmaker said. “He created this big event around it, which was remarkable, what an amazing guy.”
In that episode, Spurlock and his girlfriend, Alexandra Jamieson, tried to live on $5.25 an hour. In other episodes, he moved an atheist in with Christians and a hunter in with an entire family of activists for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
“We found this great family that literally is a multi-generational PETA family and this guy in North Carolina who literally grew up just like me, ‘What’s wrong with me going out and hunting my own food?’ ”
