"The Greatest Movie Ever Sold"

The movie ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” was an interesting film to say in the least because it was a documentary about a documentary. This was something no one had ever done before and the director, Morgan Spurlock, was entering uncharted territory with multi-million-dollar companies trying to ultimately get funding for the film and advertising their brand. For as long as television and advertisements have been invented, major corporations have been finding more and more ways to relay messages to people that will make them buy their product. While people don’t physically get up right now, they see an advertisement and go buy whatever product they saw, it puts a message in the viewers head that makes them more aware of a product and eventually buy it.

The goal of this documentary was to make sponsors pay for the film itself, while the director occasionally shows advertisements and other bits that would show a product. One part that was interesting to me was when the director went to see a legal advisor for some information regarding talking about brands. One of the interesting points this lawyer brought up was that you can talk about the brand you have a binding contract within a positive manner because they are paying you to show their product. At the same time, you can say whatever you want about other products, it just comes down to reputation and how you want to be perceived by whatever company you want to talk about. This ties into our discussions in class talking about freedom of speech and freedom of hate speech. A lot of information in this film is pure speech, but there are limitations to this because some of it could be seen as incitement. While this is true, there are different limitations in the film industry that allow film makers to say different things about products or companies. For example, in the film the director, Morgan Spurlock, was talking about POM Juice in a grocery store and its contents. They compared POM Juice to Welch’s pomegranate juice and how Welch’s juice only contained a small amount of actual pomegranate material while POM was only filled with pure juice from pomegranates. While stating facts, the director’s reputation can be decreased with Welch’s overtime.

Another part of the film that relates to class discussion was when Morgan Spurlock was talking to the school board about advertisements and their methods of using advertisement money towards the school system. The school is using fence space for companies to pay for their advertisements to be put in that area. Companies in Broward County are not allowed to put advertisements on some places like the outside of school buses because of state laws. This is where the concept of time, place, and manner restraints. To find a way around this, the director put large stickers advertising his movie on the inside part of the school busses so that it wouldn’t break the law.

Overall, it was a really clever movie in that the director didn’t spend a dime making the movie, companies got facetime with viewers and the director exposed this business by showing people how these companies try to make people think what they want to think. It is a wakeup call for the public and hopefully it doesn’t make them think what these major corporations want them to think. If that is the case, then we have our very own modern day Stalin making forcing people to think a certain way.