From burgers to Bin Laden: has film-maker found al-Qai'da boss?

Morgan Spurlock, the documentary maker who stuffed himself full to bursting with McDonald's hamburgers for his break-out film, Super Size Me, couldnt have asked for a better publicity hook for his new documentary.The word on the street, or rather the internet, is that he's tracked down Osama bin Laden succeeding where six years of ostensibly unrelenting efforts by the US military, intelligence services and allies around the world have failed. The whisper went out last week on the website of the cable TV station MSNBC, and has spread like wildfire ever since.

We know his new film is called "Where Is The World Is Osama bin Laden?" We know that the Weinstein brothers snapped up the rights to it at the Berlin Film Festival in February, paying $25m ( ) after seeing just 15 minutes of edited footage. And we have a quotation from Mr Spurlocks director of photography, Daniel Marracino, who told Variety over the summer: "We've definitely got the Holy Grail."

From those less than conclusive elements, MSNBC concocted this headline: "Did Morgan Spurlock find Osama bin Laden?" The answer is unknowable, at least until the film gets its first showing at the Sundance Film Festival next month. But Mr Spurlock's publicist is unlikely to be complaining.

It is not inconceivable that Mr Spurlock was granted an interview with the world's most wanted man who has, after all, granted interviews to western journalists in the past, including The Independent on Sundays Robert Fisk. US intelligence experts familiar with the part of Pakistan where bin Laden is probably hiding have suggested the problem is not so much knowing where bin Laden is, but how to capture him without getting bogged down in a military quagmire.

Equally, the "Holy Grail" may be something completely different.

Some Spurlock bloggers have pointed out that bin Laden has picked at least one interviewer in the past Yosri Fouda of Al Jazeera because he was a personal fan of his work. Could it be that bin Laden saw Super Size Me and enjoyed it?