I’m awesome. I wrote a book. It’s got little to do with movies. Download and read “Thank You, Goodnight” right HERE for free.
And now, you can follow me on Twitter. Find me here, This week saw a burst of activity with regard to Comic-Con lodging and how dismal the Comic-Con hotel ordering system really is. Hopefully you’re one of those ones who got through. Myself, I’m staying at a hostel/hotel hybrid. Should be interesting if nothing else…
For those who may not of found out about it one way or another, the esteemed human checkbook known around these parts as Kevin Smith was on the /Filmcast last week. Even if you are all burnt out on WATCHMEN you really do have to listen to this marathon podcast. David Chen, Peter Sciretta, Devindra Hardawar and Adam Quigley all do a great job with this show and it’s one of those things I like seeing drop into my iPod queue in any given week. This week was no exception but it really is fascinating to get a filmmaker’s perspective on things and it helped me to couch my own interpretation of the minutiae contained in this as well as delving into some of the particulars of the movie. Think of this as the perfect thing to listen to as you reconcile what you thought this could be versus what it actually was.
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Secondly, I always like to promote those who were more than complimentary when I had the chance to interview them. Christian Oliver talked with me last for the hotly debated topic of “Is it good?”/”Is it crap?” for his turn in SPEED RACER so when I heard he had a new film coming out I just felt it polite to return the nicety.
The film is called READY OR NOT and the film is described as follows:
Four college buddies find themselves on the adventure of their lives, when on the morning after a Las Vegas bachelor party, they end up stranded deep in Mexico penniless, being chased, falling in love, and fighting to make it back across the border in time for the wedding.
I can’t vouch for how mind-blowing it is but the man was genuinely nice and so it’s always a pleasure to simply be a human being and give a shout-out.
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Ribwich.
I loved eating ribwiches in high school. Along with a side order of sizzling fries, splayed out on a foam tray, chugging it all back with with a Barq’s root beer it was my version of a good lunch. I can’t tell you how vividly I remember the class I had after lunch, it was health, and consisently thinking about how sluggish and foul I felt after consuming these types of lunches day in and day out.
It wasn’t until Freshman year in college when I knew I was headed for Portly Town, getting winded just by doing warm-up calisthenics, and did something about it. I picked up a book by Covert Bailey, called “Fit or Fat”, and made life altering choices that have been with me now for over 15 years. I don’t consider myself freakish about it but I do try and always make sensible choices (although get me around a pepperoni and bacon pizza and watch the glutton in me leap out) and have kept an eye on the news reports regarding obesity in America and whether we really are becoming the fattest country in the world.
When I head about Steven Greenstreet’s documentary about the health and social issues facing our nation today with regard to our waistlines I couldn’t pass up the chance to talk to someone who might give me the inside line about how the battle of the bulge is going. From what he tell me, there isn’t really much to be proud of and a whole lot to be alarmed by.
KILLER AT LARGE hits DVD on March 31st..
CHRISTOPHER STIPP: How did this project come about?
STEVEN GREENSTREET: It started about ten years ago. We met up with a doctor who specializes in obesity and he contacted us. He had seen our last film and said he had some new research on obesity and asked if we could make a short film for him. So we said sure and then got into some of the research and said holy crap this is an epic film. We just touched the tip of the iceberg. There was tons of stuff that needed to be covered. So we went back to him and said why don’t we re-establish the budget and make this a feature film and he got on board. That’s how it got started.
CS: What kind of stories were you unearthing?
GREENSTREET: One of the stories we read was how the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland was shut down and had to be renovated because it was designed back in the 60’s when people were thinner and now people are so heavy that they were actually drowning the ride. They had to renovate it because of people’s weight. Locally, there was a huge theater that had to renovate its seats because the theater was built in the 70’s and people are just getting too big.
And then, we got a hold of a video clip, and it took us forever to get a hold of this by the way, but the Surgeon General of the United States was giving a speech at the University of South Carolina where he literally says that obesity will dwarf 9/11 or any terrorist event you can play out to me. And we’re like, “Holy crap…” You can’t do a film about obesity without taking time. We realized it was a big problem. The problem with obesity is that it’s a complex problem and you just can’t point your finger at any one thing. You can’t say McDonald’s is the bad guy or junk food is the bad guy or the lobbyist in Washington is the bad guy. We used the statistics for global warming – obesity is leading to global warming in that we used 39 million extra gallons of fuel each year simply because we weigh more and that’s since the 1970’s.
CS: Really?
GREENSTREET: Yeah, 39 million extra gallons of fuel and it works in reverse. If every American just lost one pound we would save 39 million gallons of fuel.
CS: What seemed to be the turning point in people’s knowledge that this is an issue? If we look back at the 20th century it wasn’t really an issue. What has happened that we are so attuned now to healthy eating ?
GREENSTREET: Well, we actually went back further. We went back 4 million years to the dawn of man and interviewed some anthropologists about evolution – back in Cro-Magnon days – how our brains were wired – we used to be hunters and gatherers running around the plain hunting our food. And for the most part we didn’t eat meat or high calorie foods because it was so hard to get so we were eating fruits, eating brush, eating things like that.
Every once in a while we would get a deer or an antelope or something like that and then we really had to run for dinner, essentially What has really happened in evolution is that we don’t have to run for our dinner any more. Nowadays, with technology and the luxuries that we have, we sit a lot and there is no movement being done. In fact with children in the No Child Left Behind Act which is one of the Bush administration’s significance to education it has upped the requirements for reading and arithmetic – schools are actually cutting out physical education. So kids are sitting on their rumps all day in school and then all night at home. So we actually interviewed teachers and superintendents about the effects of No Child Left Behind and literally we have a shot of this huge elementary school gymnasium that’s been converted into four classrooms. They don’t even use the gym anymore.
CS: Lazy kids…
GREENSTREET: So they could meet the requirements of the government. We interviewed experts about our toxic environment. Everywhere you go there are cues to make you eat. Car washes, the DMV, there is vending machines. I just edited into the film there’s a locally tire store called Swab Tires and they give away free beef. Come fix your tires and they give you slabs of beef. Back in the 60’s you go to a gas station and you just got gas. Now you get cookies, chips, soda. And vending machines at schools are totally off the charts. We interviewed kids that that’s all they eat for lunch. They put $5 in a vending machine. There is a school that is so under funded by the government that Pepsico moved in and said, “We will give you $50,000 – just sign this contract with us.”
School lunches are nothing but surplus.
If there is a surplus of butter, they put a lot of butter in the lunch, if there is a surplus of ground beef, they are going to eat a lot of hamburger. Here’s an interesting statistic – we spent more money feeding prisoners in the state of California than we do on school lunch on a national level. Per child.
CS: I haven’t seen the movie but I go back to the trailer with the Surgeon General – how does the government factor into this problem? Are they aware of it or are they complicit in it or, like you said, you had a hard time trying to track down some information. How do they factor into this issue?
GREENSTREET: You have to understand that by and large, money talks, money walks and in Washington, DC is bought and sold everyday and they are absolutely complicit. Let’s start with the Surgeon General – Dr. Vinichiy is supposed to inform the public about health crisis, health problems and stuff like that. While he was in office for the Bush administration, he wrote a document about the dangers of obesity. That document was not allowed to reach the public eye by the Bush administration. In turn it was given to a Bush insider, Wm. Steiger, George Bush Sr.’s godson, who edited it and any mention to eat less sugar, eat less, he edited that all out before it became public. And we got a hold of the before and after document (before it was edited).
CS: That’s fascinating…
GREENSTREET: Yeah, it was actually a very big news story. And then Carmona, before he left office he did a tell all and went on all the news stations and said that during his tenure with the Bush administration he was muzzled and was told to shut up on so many issues and obesity was one of them. Because big sugar lobbies, meat lobbies, etc., they buy and fund congressional and presidential elections and they didn’t want to tick their people off so they didn’t want anything in the document that says eat less sugar, eat less of this, any mention of eating less, because once you tell people to less of something you can tell them what to eat less of.
One of the most infuriating and yet fascinatingly funny aspects of our film is about a year and a half ago, when Shrek III was coming out the government got together with DreamWorks Animation who was releasing the film and they released a PSA with this huge glutinous ogre on TV saying get up and play an hour a day get out and exercise at the same time his face was on the front of over 70 junk food products. Like from cereals to candies to Fruit Roll-Ups to soda and the government knew it. Even on Twinkies, with green filling it was absolutely disgusting and Shrek gets out there and it was free publicity for DreamWorks and the government, Secretary of Health claimed it was a huge victory for government. We’re going to get our kids to get up and play. Another thing is the food pyramid. The government threw away the old one at this big press conference and replaced it with no food just colored bars and completely confusing and no one knows what it means in fact if you go to the my pyramid website and put in your weight your age and sex they will tell you what to eat – what your diet should be. And no matter what age, sex or weight you are it will tell you to drink 3 cups of milk per day. That’s the dairy lobby. Buy our milk whether you are two years old or 86 and 300 lbs. Drink 3 glasses of milk a day. Here’s another thing: The USDA over 75% of the officials at the USDA are former food lobbyists – meat lobbyists, dairy lobbyists. So basically if you go to the upper echelon at the USDA for agriculture, people are actually on leave from their corporate jobs. And now USDA is regulating the rule about food. Basically a revolving door with corporate America.
CS: How does this stack up against other countries? Are Americans genuinely the fattest people on earth?
GREENSTREET: Yes. Statistically we are. Granted per capita countries such as Tonga and some Polynesian countries are more overweight but as a leading country the United States is the fattest in the world. But obesity is not just an American thing. Strangely it is popping up in Ethiopia. Obesity is being seen in places we haven’t seen before…
CS: Didn’t we send money over there in 1984 for We Are The World to help feed them?
GREENSTREET: Yes, exactly. The experts across the board says one of the reasons contributing to world-wide obesity is the importing of American food. American fast food culture – Japan, Europe, parts of South America. Here is something else that is infuriating is for some reason and it didn’t used to be this way, the poorest people in America, the people with the littlest money are the fattest. How did that come to be? You would think that if you were poor you wouldn’t have that much money for that much food to be glutinous. We set up our system that the foods with the most calories are the cheapest and the ones with the littlest calories are the most expensive. You take a $1 in the grocery store and can get 1200 calories for your dollar in the snack food, candy or soda aisle but you can get 200 calories of carrots for your dollar.
CS: Why is that? It infuriates me because I try to eat healthy – I’m thin by comparison to a lot of people and it costs so much for me to make right choices and have salads but for half the price I could go to McDonald’s and have a huge bad-for-me meal. Anything you found out about why the inverse is the case?
GREENSTREET: Yes, in the film we do a history lesson. Back in the 70’s the Nixon Department of Agriculture Secretary Earl Butts decided that farming will not be a mom and pop type of business but should be more of a corporate conglomerate and he told the farmers plant as much as you can of corn of soy and we’re going to put you in a world market. What’s happened is that we have created a surplus of corn and soy, an over abundance of it and hence it’s become extremely cheap. Corn is put in more than 75% of things you buy at the grocery store. That McDonald’s meal that you buy, it’s in the bun, it’s in the burger because it’s a corn-fed cow, it’s in the ketchup, it’s in the mustard, it’s in the French fries, in corn starch in the chicken nuggets and in the high-fructose corn syrup in the soda.
So, one reason that fast food is so cheap is because they are using cheap surplussed corn. That’s one of the reasons that junk foods, all that stuff is so cheap. All that stuff has corn in it. Candy has corn in it. That’s one of the reasons we are growing so fast because as a species we are supposed to be eating 50 – 70 ingredients for nutrients for our bodies and now we are mainly eating 3 – 5. Corn and soy are the main products of that. The agriculture policy in this country is one of the reasons that cheap high calorie food is the way that it is. Because of the surplus. Corn production has sky rocketed and even now the corn production has increased every year – even though we don’t need it.
CS: Where does it go? Does it go into everything and anything they can stick it in?
GREENSTREET: Exactly. The film shows how so many ways the corn plant can break down the corn plants you can make starches and sugars out of it and you can process so many foods. Another very interesting statistic is that 40 or 50 years ago if you trace back the food’s energy source you’d go to the sun. it brings us to the cow that eats the grass and you eat the grass and the cow got it’s energy from the sun. Now….you have to go back to the Persian Gulf. Because what’s happening because cows and livestock are not eating grass they are being fed fossil fuel derived corn. The follicle fuel comes from the gulf. Essentially we are sipping oil. That McDonald’s meal’s energy source you’d have to go back to the Middle East.
CS: Hmm…
GREENSTREET: Another thing, if you took a strand of hair and put it under a microscope, you would find corn in your DNA.
CS: Really?
GREENSTREET: Americans. For the most part if you are an American and eating an American diet, there is corn in your DNA.
CS: Is it because we are eating so much of it, it is becoming a part of who we are?
GREENSTREET: Literally the children of the corn!
CS: What do you do now that you’ve spent time on it, what is your perception on how obesity has evolved?
GREENSTREET: First and foremost, I had no idea how complex and deep rooted this problem was but at the same time when the film was over it makes sense to me that things are the way they are. One of the anthropologists we interviewed who has been studying the evolution of man for decades he says that I think that humanity is heading for an evolutionary disaster because we set up this system that goes against our biological makeup. We are eating foods that we are not supposed to be eating and too much of it. We are creating a world of luxury and convenience and we are not “hunters and gatherers†anymore. And it is really sucking up our biology. And we are not keeping up with it. When you look at it from outside the box it makes sense that things are the way they are.
CS: Why don’t enough people care? Some people who are overweight are just sort of resigned to it. Some people care, some people take action, but we are not getting any thinner.
GREENSTREET: it’s complicated for sure and personal responsibility plays a big part for sure. A lot of people when they see a fat person would say if you wanted to lose weight you probably could. But there a lot of different factors, it’s one thing to tell a parent, tell kids, like Shrek says, gets up and play an hour a day but to say we’re going to take phys-ed out of school and convert the gym to a classroom. Adults – we’re going to put you in a cubical and you crunch some numbers and you can do your work but then you go home and see your kids. When are you going to exercise? We have a solution section in our film – $72 billion dollars a year is spent on health insurance obesity related illnesses. It’s really a threat to our health system to our insurance system and employers are beginning to wake up.
For instance, Sprint at their headquarters, they totally renovated their headquarters. They slowed down their elevators and updated their stair cases with beautiful vistas, sky lights and put signs on the staircases saying that if you walk this many stairs you will burn this many calories and in turn paying employees for every pound they lose. IBM, Astra Zeneca – there are companies around the nation that are realizing they are losing money. We gotta care about the health of our employees or we are going to lose money. And so they are actually taking steps during the day – we are giving you a half hour during the day to go exercise in the company gym and if you do that we will take $400 off your health insurance. So companies are starting to do that. And there is a lot of different things to do but I think the right people to help out are doing the wrong things, i.e., the government, the school system, companies themselves marketing to kids is astronomically off the charts.
CS: Talk to me about that. I have a 4 year old and a 2 year old at home and we hardly keep the TV on and thank goodness for TiVo because we can blast through the commercials but when I do have to sit down and see these commercials I can’t imagine that the amount of money that is used to spend on kids has gone down in years, the opposite must be true. They must be doing hardcore marketing to get that younger demographic.
GREENSTREET: Yes. $100 million is spent just on candy – marketing candy.
And if you want a comparison, $10 million is spent to market breath mints and $1 million used to market fruits and vegetables in this nation. The statistics show that companies want cradle to grave loyalty from kids. They want to get them out of the cradle essentially. They have 7 Up and Pepsi bottle bottles – they look like a 7 Up bottle or Pepsi bottle. McDonald’s had a billboard that’s in our film a billboard that had a baby breastfeeding on a McDonald’s burger. And kids under the age of 8 cannot differentiate the difference between the commercial and the program so when Sponge Bob cuts to commercial, they don’t know it’s a commercial. They don’t know they are trying to be sold something. And they have a thing called the Nag Factor. Ralph Nader’s film actually says it in there that Madison Avenue when a new ad campaign comes out they actually rate it. This has a 50% Nag Factor, this has an 80% Nag Factor – getting kids to nag their parents.
We have a Chuck E. Cheese commercial where the kids are having fun and then mom shows up and they say “Oh mom, why did you have to come?†And then she actually pulls her face off and it’s really Chuck E. Cheese and they say now we can have fun again. And there’s a McDonald’s commercial where they kids are doing homework and it’s raining and grey outside and classical music is playing and they are all bored but then Ronald McDonald shows up and the lights get all bright and he wisks them off to McDonalds and they start eating cheeseburgers and are happy. So they are getting the message that classical music is bad, being at home is bad, so they are getting these kids to nag their parents for what they are told is fun. So it’s really unfair and undermines parental authority. As a parent you have to choose your battles. Which battle are you going to pick if your 8 year old is dressing like a hooker? It’ll be the sexuality battle. So there is some movement, Senator Tom Harkin wants to eliminate marketing to kids under 8 but nothing of any significance.
CS: Demographically speaking, is it easier to get the individuals in the lower economic strata that a middle class child or adult?
GREENSTREET: Statistics show that kids or adults in poor communities are the fattest and most obese. They have a variety of problems but also if you go to poor communities some of these people don’t have cars. And where’s the closest place I can get fresh produce. It’s probably not a block away but there is a McDonald’s a block away, there’s a McDonald’s on every block or there’s a Wendy’s on every block. Or there’s a 7 Eleven where you can get a Grandma’s cookie. So the incentives in this country to feed our kids right are totally out of whack. There are no – the government is doing nothing to create incentives. You have to look at this evolutionarily – we’re screwing ourselves up and doing nothing to put the brakes on. Except in little sections of the nation people are starting to wake up.
CS: What are people saying after you show them this finished film?
GREENSTREET: 100% of the people are completely pissed off and say, “We had no idea.” People will email us and say “we have stopped drinking cola because of the corn” and it’s really getting people to wake up and be aware and how it’s all hurting our biology. The fat tax in Mississippi is not a solution.
Poor people are relying on that 99 cent cheeseburger.
We are just screwing the poor even more making it more expensive. I don’t think the idea is to ban McDonald’s or ban junk food but to show them something better and create incentives to get that. There is actually something going on today called upchuck rebellion. The next generation is refusing to eat crappy foods and is more focused on eating healthy and becoming more educated about their bodies and learning more about cooking. I certainly don’t agree with Morgan Spurlock or people like that that say McDonald’s is the bad guy – we just have to get rid of that and we’ll be fine.
CS: Right. And, regarding the process of making a documentary, what are your thoughts about the medium itself? Did you ever think…”Maybe I’m getting too preachy here?” How did you keep that in check in the editing room?
GREENSTREET: My first film, my first documentary I didn’t want it to be too preachy and I didn’t want it to be too biased. I didn’t want it to be like a war film. This is how it is. This is how it should be. This film is not narrated. It’s observational, it’s educational. And I’ve seen this film so many times and there is one part in the film right now that I’m struggling with because I think it comes across too vegan like propaganda. I’m a vegan but I eat meat.
(I laugh)
GREENSTREET: What’s that?
CS: Nothing. I’m just laughing that you say you’re a vegan but that you are a meat eater.
GREENSTREET: Yep, I can say that filmmakers probably have the worst diets ever. We put all our money into the film so we grab the fast food break between editing. But I don’t want the film to be one sided. We covered all aspects as best we could. It still could have been a 10 hour epic. But we tried to cover as many aspects as we could and stay in the middle if we could.
CS: When you did your first cut, what did you have to do to pare it back or did you have any babies you had to leave on the cutting room floor?
GREENSTREET: Our first cut was 3 hours long. Way too long. So anything that doesn’t 100% address obesity we had to cut. Like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon – things on the sidelines we had to cut out of the film. We had stuff about fertilizer – why does the orange look so orange? Why does the tomato look so red? So that it looks good on a shelf so you buy it but we trimmed all that and now it’s down to an hour and a half – literally cut it in half.
CS: Now that you finished it, and have shown the final version to people that could be in the position to buy it, what has it taught you about the final stages of movie making and how to market and to see you film and get people interested in seeing your film?
GREENSTREET: We have a good PR person and Oprah showed a clip last January 4th so we are out there. We’ve been in some newspapers and we’ve been interviewed but once our film gets sold it’s going to be full throttle. Calling on people to find out what their plan is to address the issues in the film. The activists are in the thousands that are involved in this issue. We’ll be calling on all of them to get the word out to call on their local leaders to see the film, and address the issues about what can be done. We have solutions in the film to see what others have done to solve the problem so it’s really grass roots stuff.
CS: Did any candidate that is out there now that is in a position to vote on something is there anyone out there that has a so-called food policy?
GREENSTREET: Bill Clinton is in the film. He had to undergo heart surgery and talked about how fast food and our kids are walking time bombs. He says that this may be the first generation that has a shorter life span than their parents because of obesity. So Clinton, for the last 7 or 8 years, along with Hillary, have been advocates very publicly. I know Mike Huckabee battled obesity and lost over 100 pounds so he’s an advocate for obesity problems. I haven’t heard anything besides general health care statements from Obama or any other candidates about the issue. But I would say if there was one politician nationwide tackled it like a lion is Senator Tom Harkin in Iowa. He’s all over it. He’s been changing eating vending in the schools, he’s updating nutrition policy at the USDA. He’s been a bull fighting this.
CS: What does he say about the lobbyists and the opposition?
GREENSTREET: He’s in the corn state so he’s fighting the junk food but fighting it the right way. He brings the story of children and he puts them up there on the Senate floor and how can you argue that. He did lose the 2007 farm bill for the USDA to update their school nutrition policy and it got completely shut down. Because the Republicans said it was too hard on the food industry. So there are wins and losses across the field.
CS: Well, Steve I have just one more question for you. When this film finally makes it to the public what would you classify a win in your mind?
GREENSTREET: A win?
CS: What would you hopes happens?
GREENSTREET: I think the best case scenario for me would be that people come away from the film knowing that this is a battle that we fight three times a day. It is the most democratic of wars. And the life blood of a democracy is our ability to be informed to make a change. I don’t want to shove anything down anyone’s throat or force a change but I want people to take a second look at the battle they are fighting with their food, their government, school, employers and take a second look. And think, if I just do one thing, if I put a gym in my work, put physical education back in our schools. I’m going to my kids school tomorrow and I’m going to see what my kids are eating. Getting people upset and getting them educated. I have no expectations for a final solution but a win would be for people to stand up and ask some questions.
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