A humble packaged meat that has straddled the century from Depression-era savior to pop cultural icon is the subject of director/producer Anne Pick’s Documart pitch, An Ode to SPAM. Or as she describes her project, ‘It is the amazing true story of the shelf life and times of the world’s most popular luncheon meat.’

Pick, writer/director of Up Front Entertainment’s 1999 documentary The Bunny Years, a retrospective of the Playboy Bunnies of the ’60s and ’70s, sees An Ode to SPAM: The World’s Most Popular Luncheon Meat as a similarly iconographic portrait. ‘It’s a great character – it has everything.’

The film, in active development for a year and a half at Pick’s Real to Reel in Toronto, will be available as a 90-minute special or as a commercial hour for international distribution. Budget is not finalized, but likely will be in the $650,000 range, Pick says.

And An Ode to SPAM is likely to make use of some surprisingly extensive archives – SPAM has had quite a life.

The spiced, high-grade ham (‘It wasn’t byproducts, it was good ham,’ Pick stresses), packaged in consumer-friendly sizes, ‘was an evolution of food manufacturing and processing. In fact, SPAM broke manufacturing ground in production, branding and advertising, and in the actual tin itself,’ she says.

Developed during the Depression, SPAM meant people without refrigerators could have access to affordable meat. Even before America entered the Second Wold War, the compact, easy-to-ship preserved meat was sent to Europe in relief packages. ‘It went in refugee packages to war-torn countries in Europe, to people who were captives and survivors. It’s been the dying soldier’s last meal and the liberated prisoner’s first decent meal,’ says Pick.

Soldiers, rationed the military version of SPAM (the manufacturers were keen to point out it was not the real thing) three times a day, were notorious for their inventive recipes. One favorite was SPAM meatballs wrapped in jungle vines. On the home front, Rosie the Rivetter, who didn’t have time to cook, could open a can for dinner. ‘It was liberation for women in the war,’ says Pick.

And SPAM lives on: cameos include an Andy Warhol painting, a Trivial Pursuit question and an Oscar-winning documentary about a labor dispute in the ’80s at the SPAM plant. Among SPAM spin-offs: SPAM sculpting, SPAM sports and a SPAM fanclub. Recipes in some of the several cookbooks dedicated to SPAM include bread, sushi, tacos, pizza and cheesecake made with SPAM.

And there’s more: 122 websites devoted to SPAM (one of which is composed solely of Japanese haiku poetry on the lowly luncheon meat); a church of Spam; the modern-day practice among radiologists of using SPAM to mark on MRIs. ‘And now, of course, it’s come full circle and worked its way into the modern-day lexicon: there’s spamming on the Internet,’ notes Pick.

And that doesn’t even include Monty Python.

‘The point is that everybody has a story about SPAM,’ says Pick. ‘Everyone knows the word and everyone’s had some kind of SPAM experience.’

Pick sees her project as a biography. ‘We are going to tell a life story. Everyone wants to know where these things start and how they got to be icons. Just like there are ups and downs in people’s lives, SPAM’s life has had its ups and downs and highs and lows. There were lots of interesting people involved along the way in the evolution of this product and it’s gone from being a business story to being a pop cultural icon.

‘The product has touched every facet of society and the archives are incredible,’ says Pick. ‘It’s a mind-boggling business story; it has had all those effects that make something an icon. I see the film as being fun and full of great archives from TV and film. I see other stories [there] about merchandising, about the evolution of the brand name in spite of itself.

‘And SPAM’s still a staple, it’s still on the shelves. Here’s a product that’s been in the same can with the same label [since its introduction] and it’s still consumed in vast quantities. It’s an icon. It’s a foodstuff that’s transcended itself to become a symptom of pop culture. I think it’s on a level with Elvis and baseball. SPAM has a place in the Smithsonian.’ *