Morgan Spurlock
Green Gioia's Gift From Gore
Councilman and candidate for public advocate Eric Gioia, of Queens, held his 35th birthday celebration and “green” campaign kick off at the W Hotel’s Whiskey Bar in Times Square last night. His guest list included Morgan Spurlock, writer and director of Super Size Me (who appeared in an ad recently), and Karenna Gore Schiff, daughter of Al.
Gore Schiff was in charge of the birthday introduction, while Gioia spent most of the evening surrounded by supporters bouncing with American Idol enthusiasm. read more »
Eric Gioia's Famous Friends
Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Osama's Siblings; Osama's Whereabouts; and the War on Osama
In his forthcoming Observer review of The Second Plane, Tom Bissell admires this throwaway Martin Amis line: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product … of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill.” Funny, but not entirely accurate—or so I gather from Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens (Penguin Press, $35), an epic history of the vast and vastly rich Saudi Arabian family that spawned W.’s nemesis. Meticulous and compulsively readable, Mr. Coll’s book has a huge cast of characters, swollen by the legion of Osama siblings—the exact number of which is apparently tricky to establish. (One declassified F.B.I. e-mail from 2003 referred to the “millions” of bin Ladens “running around”—and added, reassuringly, that “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”) Mr. Coll counts 54 children of Mohamed bin Laden, and notes that Mohamed “fathered seven children during the year of Osama’s birth—five sons and two daughters.” His cautious conclusion is that “Osama arrived among the Bin Ladens as somewhere between son number seventeen and son number twenty-one.” read more »
Super Spurlock Signs Deal With Fox
New York's Morgan Spurlock, the indie doc film director who gave us Super Size Me and the upcoming Sundance entry Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, has just signed a deal with Fox to develop both "scripted and nonscripted" fare with Fox, according to Variety. read more »
Blackboard Jungle ‘07: School Crisis Spelled Out in Chalk
O.K., so there’s no Michelle Pfeiffer—but this sensitive little film sends a message. read more »
May 25, – June 1, 2005
Spurlock's Super Size Lawsuit; Which Critics Beat the Odds?
