Original subtitles

Welcome to Criterion's special edition of This is Spinal Tap.

On this track, you will hear director Rob Reiner, producer Karen Murphy, and

editors Robert Layton and Kent Beda.

Hello. My name is Marty DeBerge.

I'm Rob Reiner. I directed Spinal Tap. I'm also one of the creators and writers

and play the part of Marty DeBerge in the film.

I think the criterion people ask me to do, A Few Good Men, and my feeling about

it is to dissect a film like this and to discuss it in such detail, I think has

tremendous value for people who want to become filmmakers or writers or actors

or whatever.

But what it tends to do is demystify what you've done.

And to me, it's like, you know, a magician telling the audience how he did

trick. And to me, that's not what we're supposed to be about. We're supposed to

do the trick, and we're supposed to dazzle you, and you're supposed to be

excited about that. And I can tell you things about this film that will take

away, I believe, your pleasure of seeing the film.

It will enhance your knowledge about the film, but it will take away your

pleasure. And I feel that it's not the best thing to be doing.

When I did Spinal Tap, everybody contributed an enormous amount.

I mean, it really is a product of the four of us. I mean, really, in all

fairness, it should be directed by the four of us.

And it should be written, it says written by the four of us, but the

credit should read everybody who's in the film because they all made up their

parts. We actually went to the Writers Guild and asked if we could list...

as the writers, all the people that were actually in the film, and they wouldn't

let us do it.

I am Karen Murphy, and I produced this as Final Tap.

Chris and Rob and Harry and Michael had started brainstorming, and the guys all

kind of threw in their thoughts about what the characters were, how they

to work, the fact that they were going to be improvising the entire film.

They wanted to know, could I, as a producer and documentary filmmaker, make

movie like that? So I said, of course, of course I could do that. It sounded

like the best job I'd ever been offered.

This interview right here was taken from the original 20 minutes that we

originally shot. There are only two pieces of film that made the final film

were literally taken from the original.

a 20 -minute film that we made, and that was one of them.

I don't think when we started the film that anyone knew who we were or what the

hell we were doing.

I mean, if I heard that idea myself today, I wouldn't want to touch it with

-foot pole.

We had made a deal with a company called Marble Arch, which was owned by Sir Lou

Grade, and it was run by a fellow named Martin Starger.

He gave us $60 ,000 to write a script, and the four of us sat down to write a

script, and we realized that...

There would be no way that we could convey the feel of this film in script

because it's the complete antithesis to what the film is. And so we went and

made this 20 -minute demonstration reel, and actually we put our own

money into it.

We finished this film, and we had this 20 -minute test film to show people, and

they passed on it, Marble Arch did, and then we were free to take this around,

and we went to literally every single studio in town.

You know, I used to say to Karen Murphy, who produced the film, I used to say,

you know, if we ever get this film made, we will have one of those stories where

we can say we took the film under our arm to every single studio in town and

played it for the executives and promptly got turned down by everybody.

They say that John Belushi had a pirated copy of this tape when they found him

in his hotel room in the Chateau Marmont.

Let's talk a little bit about the history of the group. I understand,

and David originally started the band back in, when was it, 1964?

When I did Spinal Tap, I just finished playing a part in All in the Family. I

did that for about eight years, and I always wanted to be a director, and I

think it was very tough for me at that time to make the transition.

doing that show and at that time people from television were kind of looked down

upon they were not thought of to be you know up to doing features so it was very

very hard for me to get this picture off the ground the regulars they changed

their name back to the regulars we thought well we could we could go back

originals about what's the point we became a tenement at that point

This is the other piece of film that was taken directly from the original 20

Minutes. And you'll notice on the drums is Ed Begley.

And on the bass to the left is Danny Korchmar, who is a great bass player and

has also played with Linda Ronstadt and a number of, you know, really good

bands.

I had worked with Harry and Michael and Chris, you know, over the years, and we

always had a great creative relationship, and it always worked out.

always came up with some really great stuff, so I thought, well, here we've

something. And a matter of fact, in 1978, I did a television show, which was

basically a satire of various things on television, one of which we did with a

takeoff on...

a show called Midnight Special, which was a late -night rock and roll show

was hosted by Wolfman Jack.

And I played Wolfman Jack, and I introduced Spinal Tap, you know,

loudest band.

And during downtime, they started improvising these characters, and it was

hysterical. We just thought, well, jeez, we've got to find a way to use these

characters in something else other than this little bit that we did.

If you took all the interview footage that we shot for the film, it lasted

three hours.

Our first cut...

of the film when we put it together we put it together without the interview

footage because we knew we would use that as kind of the glue throughout the

film so we had a four and a half hour film without one minute of interview and

we had three hours of interviews so basically we had over seven hours of

that was brought down to 80 some odd minutes editors robert layton and kent

They wouldn't make any concession to the fact that this was actually a feature

film and not a documentary, and the fact that we could control things.

And correct me if I'm wrong, it became apparent that there was such an

overwhelming mountain of footage that it was going to take more than one pair of

hands to deal with it all. Yeah, I think initially when we watched dailies, we

used to watch dailies and people would see these moments, which were great

moments. I remember one time Rob saying there was a line somebody said in the

masses in return. He said, that's the button for that scene.

And I wasn't really used to dealing with building narrative or jokes in that

way. It's more kind of joke telling. And Rob saw this great little moment where

somebody said a line. It was, I can't remember quite who it was. And I'm not

sure if that's it in the film, but it worked perfectly for the style of

We had a five and a half hour first cut without the interview footage. And it

was an amazing piece of work.

And I think at a certain point the decision was made that in order for it

a successful comedy and a successful feature film, that it should be of a

certain length.

Producer Karen Murphy.

There was a wonderful piece of the film that had to be cut out because it was a

side story.

Billy Crystal plays the part of a mime who has his own catering company.

The name of his catering company was Shut Up and Eat.

and he tells this wonderful story of how he grew up in a family where he had a

tight relationship with his father, but his father is very stern and strict, and

his father would always, at the dinner table, tell him to shut up and eat.

This is Patrick McNee from The Avengers.

I think he seemed to be having so much fun with these guys, but he also felt

like he was way in over his head in terms of, you know, improvising. He was

probably the only one in the film who really requested that anything be

down. He could have done it, I'm sure, improvising, but he just felt more

comfortable because he's a traditionally trained actor, having his words written

down. Are you reading Yes, I Can?

Yeah. Have you read it? Yeah. This is Bruno Kirby.

Bruno had a lot to do with shaping this particular character.

He knew a fellow who lived in Hollywood who was a big Frank Sinatra fan, and

Bruno himself was also a Frank Sinatra fan, but I think he spent enough time

with this guy that he kind of developed an appreciation for someone who has an

obsession.

I made a film with Bruno Kirby based on this character that he created called

Tommy Rispoli, A Man and His Music, which is about a guy who's obsessed with

Frank Sinatra. We made a short 13 -minute film about him where he drives

Rob Reiner picks me up at the airport, and he's having trouble with his

girlfriend who wants him to commit, and he won't commit to a relationship, and I

help him work through his emotional problems with her.

There's Tony Hendra.

Tony Hendra used to be part of a comedy team, Ullit and Hendra, which was a

great British comedy team. And he also was at National Lampoon and created

Not the New York Times and all of those.

He's a really fine satirist.

So you are hitting that market.

We're certainly doing, I'm doing everything I can. That's right, we're

blaming you. And I'm writing about it. But you know that we're not blaming you.

It was very hard to trim this picture down.

We had a scene that was very funny where they get him high, and he's singing all

the way, the Sinatra tune.

I would never tell them this, but this is a fact.

They loved trying on the leather collars, and they loved trying on the

they loved the spandex pants, and they loved performing on stage, and they

playing music.

So, I mean, to me, that would be...

the best reason in the world to want to make a movie like this.

If you get excited about all those things, who wouldn't want to do this?

Rob is just as good a musician as the rest of these guys, and he could have at

any point said, well, I want to be in the band.

He ended up deciding, or everyone decided, that he could play another

other than being in the band, and what character would that be? It would most

likely be somebody, if we're going to choose this style of filmmaking, that

making the film, the documentarian.

Rob was a very good keyboard player, and he had a good voice.

He could have been a member of the band easily.

I don't know if he envisioned himself in spandex like the other ones did.

I mean, all these guys are accomplished musicians, and I think they're all guys

who fantasize being rock and rollers. I mean, they actually went around the

world and played in London and all over the United States, and I think they got

a tremendous kick. It's like the best fantasy camp you could ever go to.

because these guys can actually do it. I mean, they can actually play. Chris

actually can play the mandolin and all those instruments.

There's not one note of music that isn't generated by the guys that are playing

the instruments.

Editor Kent Beda.

They were also very, very, very conscious of having the playing on stage

real, and particularly Chris Guest.

was very, very concerned that his fingering was always exactly right.

And if he would come in and see something that looked like maybe he

playing the right notes or whatever it was, he would always comment on it and

would, you know, try and change it accordingly.

I do believe, actually, we went into the music studio at the end and we redid a

couple of notes on certain shots because Chris was concerned about that.

Let's talk about your... That hat that Rob is wearing is a personal triumph of

mine. He liked that hat. He wanted to wear that hat. But it was originally

you know, famous USS Marine ship hat, right?

And I...

took the responsibility because the DeForest Research Company said you can't

something that's a known name without getting permission.

So I personally sat down on the set with a sewing needle and yellow thread, and

I closed up letters so a C became an O so that no one would know what it said.

These interviews that we shot, the guys never knew what questions I was going to

ask. Completely surprising.

So everything they say, they're hearing for the first time.

See, Chris is laughing.

Chris is going there.

This film is definitely a weird tour of LA.

Somebody should put together the Spinal Tap tour of Los Angeles, visiting every

site that was used in the movie.

We decided to not really get into the real seamy side of rock and roll, you

know, and not show too much of the drugs or the groupies. I mean, they're there

and stuff, and there's one place where you see some drugs being used, but just

to indicate that that was going on. I mean, to do a comedy and to get into

side of it, I think, would really take away.

Oh, there are so many scenes with drugs and alcohol and groupies in the movie.

You would love to see that film.

Robert Layton.

I would say most of the times the way we edited this film in the smalls, in the

detailed areas, was by being able to edit dialogue together. We'd make the

cut first, and then we'd think of the picture and choose where to cross over

from one image to another.

You had to make these bold cuts between images, and it was really editing in

terms of story editing.

It wasn't anything to do with a visual flow, although we tried to do that.

And they would do these things about three or four times.

And then we'd have to remember where that line was in the midst of four hours

material.

If you really want to get into filmmaking, what makes a jarring and bad

always audio.

It's very rarely picture.

I mean, the audio is what makes you jump, not the picture.

I mean, we plotted this thing.

Just that the dialogue in each scene was not... We knew basically these things

would happen along the tour and that Janine, who was David's girlfriend,

come between David and Nigel and would break the band apart. Those things we

knew. We had a general outline for what was going to happen in the film. It was

just that each individual scene was not scripted. Because you tell me, the White

Album? What was that? There was nothing on that goddamn cover.

Excuse me, the phone's ringing. We looked at every conceivable document. We

looked at, you know, the kids are all right, the song remains the same, don't

look back.

I mean, we looked at everything. I mean, every film that had ever been made

about a band.

We watched all those to just sort of get a sense of how you shape the story and

what's interesting in the story.

I think it gave them an idea of how it's different being a performer in a

feature film in a traditional way and being a subject of a documentary.

But it's really not that offensive for Dennis. Come on.

Yeah, this scene, if you'll notice, when they show Chris and Michael,

you see the two sores on their lips, the two herpes sores.

That is the remnants.

of a whole section of the film that we had where we had a band called The Dose,

which was a new wave band fronted by Cherie Curie, who was one of the

and each band member.

slept with her.

And as each band member slept with her, the next day, you know, time would go

by, you'd see they'd each have the herpes sore.

And finally, there's a band meeting where four of the guys are with herpes

sores, and they're all deciding that they want to drop the dose from the

And the drummer, who's the only guy without the herpes sore, says, why, I

them, they're good, you know, because he obviously hasn't slept with her yet.

See, look, here's the herpes sore.

He's got it, and then you pan down.

And then he's got it. It's all a joke, isn't it? I mean, we're making fun of

that sort of thing, you know? Not, you know, over and over again. We can

probably work something out. I'll talk to Dennis and maybe we can come up with

compromise and a new design concept that we can all live with.

The last waltz was the inspiration for my Marty DeBerge character.

You know, his name is Marty, from Marty Scorsese. De is like De Palma, Berg is

like Spielberg, and E could be any one of a number of Fellini or, you know,

Antonioni or whatever. It's like a combination of a lot of directors.

And also, we took off a little bit on The Last Waltz, those interviews.

I happen to be a big fan of The Last Waltz. I happen to love that film, and

seen it, you know, 10, 15 times.

I mean, basically...

Chris and Michael, you know, they've been in these characters for 20 years. I

mean, you know, at the drop of a hat, they'd start improvising as David and

Nigel. So, I mean, that's what improvisers do. They kind of just, it's

musicians, you know. You kind of just, when you get with another guy who does

it, you just start riffing.

And that's what...

That's what these guys do.

If she's not on the 519, then I'm going to know what sorrow means.

And I'm going to cry, cry, cry all the way home.

We wrote an extensive Bible for each character. We knew where they were from,

what bands they had played with.

We all had that common information when we did all this interview footage. We

knew about these people.

So at least I had the information that I could talk to them about, just as I

would do if I was a real interviewer. I would have background material on the

people. But in order to do it, they also had to have the same background

material because we couldn't be contradicting each other about, you

they met and all that stuff. So we had lists and lists of names for bands, you

know, Silver Service, Hot Waffles, I mean, you know, Clam Caravan. I mean, we

had all these weird names we used, you know, and they could crop up here and

there. It's really quite frightening, the size.

And they run screaming.

This scene came from an article we read in Rolling Stone about Van Halen.

It was an article called The Endless Party.

in which it was described that as part of their contract for what was provided

for them backstage were M &Ms with no chocolate M &Ms in there, so they could

only be the colored M &Ms.

I mean, Chris is, to me, the greatest improviser in the world because he is so

immersed in his character that he can't ever remember having said anything.

I mean, he's just in the moment. He's so in the moment that if you told him he

said that, he'd say, I don't remember saying that.

He can never remember what he did.

No, no, no, you put it on the bread like this, see? But then if you keep folding

it, it keeps breaking. And then everything has to be folded.

And then it's this.

And I don't want this. I want large bread so that I can put this.

Right. So then it's like this. I mean, it is a total, you know, amalgamation of

Black Sabbath and Van Halen and ACDC and Judas Priest.

Uriah Heep, I mean, you know, there's a lot of bands.

And that's another thing about this film, and that is, you know, even though

we're making fun of the subject matter, we all love rock and roll. I mean, I

don't... Calm down. No, it's no big deal. I'm sorry. It's a joke, it's

It's just some crack at university, you know? I mean, it's a joke.

I don't want it to affect your performance. It's not going to affect my

performance. Don't worry about it, all right? I just hate it, really. It does

disturb me, but I rise above it. I'm a professional, all right?

I like rock and roll music. It's funny because, I mean, when I was younger and

the bands that I listened to, which were comparable to that, were like, you

know, Moby Grape and Blue Cheer, which was the bands that had that big wall of

Marshall amps.

And, you know, I used to go love that stuff.

And when we went to research this to see what the, you know, the new bands that

were playing that kind of music, we went to like a Judas Priest concert. And I

tell you, I've gotten now, you know, so much older, it physically hurt my chest.

The reverberation in the hall was so strong that it was like resonating in my

chest and I couldn't stay there longer.

I cut this scene and I remember that there was some argument about the fact

he kept spinning him around.

But I think musically or for some reason.

He had to keep spinning in order for him to get up at a certain point in the

guitar solo.

It was at that point where he raised his fist in triumph, and it had to be that

way.

We did everything we could to fill the auditorium with people. We could only

for a certain number of extras, so then we had to depend on friends and

promotional campaigns and people off the street, wherever we could find them.

Do you actually play all these?

Chris is really into all these guitars, so he knows all the stuff about this.

Between Chris, Harry, and Michael, I think they're all equally matched in

of their ideas and their improvisational abilities and all that.

But for the purpose of the movie and the characters that they're playing in the

movie, Harry's character, to me, seems to...

focus a lot and help the movie a lot in terms of physical comedy.

Chris and Michael, because their characters were playing off each other

friends most of the film, tended to feel more similar, more cerebral.

I wouldn't answer the John Lennon of the group question for any amount of money.

I know, but I'm not telling.

I do know for Chris, who is in real life a real guitar buff, this scene was

probably a wet dream.

because he had the opportunity to go to all of his favorite guitar stores all

over the country.

This is my favorite part of this thing. He won't even let me look at this thing.

It's such a pristine instrument that the tag is still on, and he won't even let

me look at it.

Whenever I'm dubbing a picture, invariably someone says, let's do it in

or this goes to 11.

I mean, it comes up really every time.

I'm in any kind of audio situation.

One of the oddest things, these switches that go to 11, the room I cut it in

has an air conditioner that goes to 11, and we cut Rob's next eight films in the

same room, and we didn't find out until, I think, somewhere through Stand By Me

that it went to 11.

It's the only other machine I know that goes to 11.

Robert Bauer, who's in charge of merchandising, immediately issued a T

right after the movie came out that said in big letters all over the front of

the T -shirt, goes to 11.

Nobody got it. It took like five years for anybody to understand what the T

-shirt meant.

Now it's a collector's item.

These go to 11.

Basically what was told here is that the band is checking into the hotel and the

reservation's been screwed up.

Now let's see what happens.

Seven suites. He mistakenly put you on the seventh floor with one suite. That's

considerably more than mine.

Well, it's a good -sized room, sir. It's a king leisure.

We can get you a... How are we going to get 14 people on a king leisure bed?

Don't tempt me, sir. Have a good time.

Welcome,

gentlemen. This is Paul Benedict, the actor who was in The Jeffersons.

The next -door neighbor in The Jeffersons is the...

The clerk here at the hotel. This is one of my favorite scenes, too.

I think everybody kind of knew the form we were following. There had been enough

really good and primarily British documentaries and a few of those rock

documentaries that everybody kind of knew the style of it. But I don't think

that once they started performing in character, they were not really that

thinking about the fact that it was a documentary.

They were a band on tour, having these experiences and playing and, you know.

having all these things happen to them, and we were just a gypsy band of

filmmakers who were following them around.

There's Howard Hessman, who was a member of the committee.

I worked with Howard at the committee, and he was in WKRP in Cincinnati and

of the class.

Sit down in the lobby and wait for the limo.

This scene contains my two favorite lines in the whole film.

One is there's a fine line between stupid and clever, and the other line is

love to sit and chat with you, but we've got to go sit down in the lobby and

wait for the limo.

They've got more important things to do, which is they've got to sit in the

lobby and wait for the limo.

The scene in the hotel lobby here is one of the scenes where I think if you look

at it, you'll find that people are standing in different formations, and we

cut this stuff together.

Really, we went so precisely for the lines that hopefully you were just

following that and it carried you through.

There's a certain type of filmmaker who would linger, and if you linger and you

favour an image, then you make a visual mismatch, you're going to notice it

because it's coming up in such a fallow area.

But if the information is coming quickly... Or if the cuts are taking

without thinking about it, just where you want to be. If you're seeing the

things that you want to see, then you're not looking at the knife in the hand or

the handkerchief in the pocket.

People always ask me if I thought a film was well edited, and if the film was

any good, I don't notice the editing.

I think Peter had a great intuition about...

who to stay on when people were talking, because sometimes, for example, Chris's

face was more interesting to look at while someone else was talking.

Peter's instinct in knowing where to go and not always staying with the person

who was talking was similar to having coverage.

So it was kind of a shorthand that kept us from having to shoot more film than

we needed to shoot.

The film took us nine months to edit.

because there was so much good stuff and it was so difficult finding a really

cohesive through line to the film. But once we had really discovered what the

through line was and how one scene went into the next, then it became pretty

clear what we had to cut. I worked very long and hard in the editing room, and

then when I had something to show, the guys would come in and we'd all sit

around and go through it.

So Chris, Harry, and Michael had a lot of input in the cut.

We had fights, you know, certainly they were interested in showing more of the

music and showing more of the stuff on stage. And I understand that, but I

we were trying to also, you know, tell a story and have it flow along in some

kind of, you know, coherent way.

The scene where the manager is smashing up the hotel room used to be a whole

different scene where the group was sitting around in a hotel listening

the radio they were depressed because their first song listen to the flower

people came on the radio and then the dj comes on and says uh yeah that was

spinal tap wonder where they are now and they're of course they're in the middle

of a tour and they're all completely depressed then the manager walks in and

says you know what's the matter guys buck up and then he starts saying come

you're supposed to be like doing this and he takes his cricket bat and

the entire room and We ended up just incorporating just a brief bit of it

montage.

Editor, Robert Layton.

After he's broken up, he walks out and leaves the guys there, and they're just

standing there, and it cuts to Nigel looking at the broken TV set.

He says, oh, I want to watch that nature documentary.

It's like, I'm sure that that would have been something to repeat.

I'm pretty ruthless when it comes to editing.

Like I say, I don't like...

An audience being bored for one second.

I mean, to me, you know, you have a responsibility to put on a show for

And it's very self -indulgent to put stuff in that you like, that only you

I mean, I do.

A little of that, I mean, certainly, you know, a very minimal amount. If there's

something I really, really love and it doesn't take all that long and the

audience may not get it, I'll put it in because, you know, you've got to do

satisfy yourself after all. But then it comes down to the audience, you know.

They're watching this thing and you're doing it for them.

You're not doing it, you know, I mean, first you have to please yourself, then

you have to please them, but they have to be pleased.

I mean, I just have a feel for...

you know, putting on a show. I mean, I'm just, you know, I got it from my

father, wherever I got it from, I don't know. But I just have a feeling, oh,

we're staying too long at the fair here. We've got to, you know, we've

overstayed our welcome. You know, we got to move on. And I also know what's, you

know, pertinent to the spine of the story and what's not.

I'm always standing behind the cameraman. And actually, I was like a

because many times I would just physically.

turn Peter Smolkler one way or the other or whisper in his ear and tell him, no,

go over there, something interesting is happening here, you know.

And he had great instincts, though.

I think we realized that if we cut to this scene here at Elvis's grave, first

they're down about, you know, spinal tap, where are they now? And then it

immediately cuts to the grave, and I think we felt that that was a good cut

a better way to get out of the scene than having Ian come in and smash up the

hotel room.

I searched and searched and searched looking for an Elvis Presley tune that

wasn't written and owned by Elvis' publishing company.

This particular song was written by Hoyt Axton's mother.

And because she still owned the publishing and because I had a wonderful

conversation with her over the phone, she gave me the rights to use this song.

So we were able to keep the Elvis Presley story in the film without having

through. Elvis' publishing company, who would never have allowed us to shoot

this scene.

I started out working with John Cassavetes on a picture called Opening

People think that his films were improvised, but in fact they weren't,

nearly as much as Spinal Tap, that's for certain.

Spinal Tap was really much, much more of an improvisational piece than anything

that Cassavetes ever did, in my experience.

This only had an outline of however long it was, 40 pages, not even that, I

don't think.

Whereas with Cassavetes' films...

It was always there on the page, you know. I watched John Wright, believe me.

John was an amazing writer.

Basically,

we were, like what they do with documentary films, we were writing with

pieces of film.

We were, you know, using the pieces of film as a tool to write.

A lot of this film goes a long way just on the satire aspect of it. You're

making fun of the genre and all that.

The story is very minimal.

It's just about the woman that comes between the two guys. They break up and

they get back together. It's really a minimal type of story.

But I think if you were to do...

full drama this way, you'd have to really work out the story pretty

Then you might improvise within the context of a scene to get performance,

it's difficult because then you have matching problems.

I think to use these kinds of improvisational techniques in something

a documentary form is possible, but I think it's a lot more limiting.

Because in a drama, it has to be much more structured. I mean, you have to be

telling a story in a much more structured way.

I mean, the story in this film is very thin, and the nature of the film is a

documentary, so that you kind of expect to see a certain kind of acting.

I mean, everybody's always said, wow, you did this without a script, and it

all improvised. And for us, for myself and Chris and Harry and Michael and

everybody else that we picked to be in the film, these are people that are all

very proficient in improvisation. I mean, it comes very natural to them. So

wasn't a big deal for us. I mean, it wasn't like...

you know, wow, you made this stuff up. I mean, that's what we did, you know, so.

I mean, for a lot of us, you know, good improvisational actors sometimes have

trouble with a script.

They have a much more difficult time, you know, making pre -written dialogue

come out real than they do with making up their own.

I mean,

you'll notice there's a scene where the Black Album comes out.

I think it's in this scene, as a matter of fact.

you'll see there's some major matching problems that we just kind of blow by

because we're just using this form and we're taking the license because of the

form we're using. But in a drama, you couldn't have those kind of mismatches.

It'd have to be a little bit more worked out. You could improvise within the

context of a structure, but I think it would need to be a lot more structured

than this.

This is so much like a documentary, even though we say we took the documentary

out of it somewhat in the editing and made it more of an entertainment

It still essentially is a documentary.

It's got the shaky camera. People wrote notes saying bad camera work, really

shaky. They didn't get that.

They didn't get that all these things were studied comments on other types of

documentaries.

This is the scene where first we meet Janine and she comes.

This is one of the few times in the film that we acknowledge the fact that the

film is being shot, you know, that we're aware of the camera.

Because she's a new character, and we felt that she would have to be told that

this was going on, although I'm sure David would have told her that they're

documenting this tour.

But we felt that, you know, since it was a new character, so she would be made

aware of it.

whereas everybody else knows that that's what's going on. So we thought of

breaking the fourth wall a number of times, but it didn't really make sense.

The weird thing about this film is that it's so close to the bone.

I mean, it is so close to what actually has happened and is happening in rock

and roll tours that I think a lot of people just, you know, assumed it was

We knew it was funny. We knew we were being funny, although Peter Smokler...

shot a number of these documentaries when we were shooting, he kept saying to

me, what's funny about this? He says, this is no different from what I do. I

said, trust me, this is funny. Because what we did was we just turned it a

couple of degrees. That's all really good, fine satire, is you take what

exists and you just turn it a little bit.

Okay, now watch this.

I'll show you.

See, there's Chris, right? And there's

Tony Hendra, and you can see where they are.

I'll see it again. Watch.

And there's Chris on the other side. See, he jumps to the other side.

Because we shot it a couple of times and it's completely improvised and he just

walks over there.

I mean, the second time we did it, now he's back on the other side, see?

He just keeps jumping around.

It doesn't work. I mean, if you really study it, it's not good. I mean, a guy

can't physically be on both sides of a guy, you know, but...

He just didn't remember where he was standing because we shot it.

There's like a thousand of those things in this film if you look for them, if

you really study them.

Well, that's basically, again, what I'm going back to. It's a magic trick.

If the scene is working and it's flowing, if you're really into the movie

watching the movie, you're not noticing stuff like that. You shouldn't be

noticing stuff like that.

I mean, we're not perfect. No filmmaker is perfect.

Who would have thought that those stupid little plastic...

pods with the veins on them would mean anything to anybody or the skull i mean

the skull was only worth keeping around if they were performing as a band and

they needed an expensive stage prop that they couldn't otherwise afford and even

then it got to be a drag because it was so heavy and it was so expensive to

store and expensive to ship and you know that's why the stonehenge actually

became a good symbol of the band because it was foam and light and easy to carry

around There's Robert Bauer, yeah. He was a roadie, played a roadie in there.

We shot all the concert footage within a five -day time frame.

We basically went from one venue to the next, all in the Los Angeles area.

We went from one place to the next, packing all our equipment into the

moving it to the next location, setting it up again, just as if it were a real

rock and roll tour with roadies and everything.

We had one day when we shot the opening sequence, the first number of the film,

we had, I think, 600 extras.

But we only had 600 extras one day.

And we shot that number and one other number, maybe three numbers that day.

the rest of the numbers we shot with anywhere from 40 to 60 extras. And we

them around in such a way that it always looked like it was packed. You know,

wherever the angles were, it looked like it was packed.

I remember there was just this real atmosphere of pretty much freedom to say

whatever you felt, to really express what was on your mind. And then Rob was

like the synthesizer of it all between the three guys in the movie and we in

editing room. When you're distilling comedy and distilling a parody, there's

danger that it could get more mean -spirited in a more distilled version.

because the basis of the parody has to be very strongly presented for the scene

to work.

And as you're winnowing down the sort of side aspects and the peripheral

aspects, then you are going to get more down to kind of a harsher...

uh feeling i think unfortunately you're definitely being anti there's no

question about it you are poking fun and there is meanness but i think in this

case there's the gentlest it's the gentlest kind of antagonism the

idea we had was that you know there was always these drummer tragedies

and weirdly enough life imitated art with uh keith moon but then Even more

weirdly, this guy Jeff Procaro, you know, from Toto, he literally died in a

bizarre gardening accident.

I mean, he was spraying some kind of bug spray or whatever, and it got inside

and it caused him to have, you know, coronary or something like that.

Producer Karen Murphy.

The role of producer in Smile Tap, I've always described to other people as the

role of a rodeo queen.

It seemed to me that...

There were so many things to keep track of. The movie was always very shapeless

in a certain way because it was a documentary.

I felt my job as much as anything else was to make sure that...

I helped Rob and the guys keep the focus on what the movie was supposed to be

about because a lot of the scenes were just so much fun.

It was really important to make sure we got what we came to get. June Chadwick,

we did meet some very interesting women to play that part, and there were

enough, I think, known improvisational actresses to do the part, but June just

took to it like she was a natural.

She managed to keep up with the guys, which was really the test.

Could you improvise your way around these guys? And she did a great job.

It was also important that everybody have input so that I was always there

everybody to talk to. If Rob wanted to complain to me about something he was

having trouble with, I was there to listen. If he was not getting through to

somebody, maybe somehow I could act as a translator, communicator, go -between.

While they were aware of it, their focus was really creating the characters and

making up the dialogue and the music and performing it. So I knew they had their

hands full in terms of that. So I was there to pretty much stay true to the

documentary form, to try to surround them with people who knew how to make

documentaries, try to stay as authentic as possible, and sort of to be the

reality check while they were having fun.

And, of course, it's so strange because Nigel and Janine are so similar in so

many ways, but they just can't... They don't dislike each other at all. There's

great love between the two of them, but there's some sort of communication

that's just not... It's just blocked or something.

Here's Chris playing the piano. He actually plays the piano.

I mean, these guys are real musicians and they can all play different

instruments. That's what made it so real, too.

It wasn't like The Monkees, you know, where we were putting other musicians in

there.

We got good reviews from every single newspaper.

I don't remember ever reading a bad review of this film.

I mean, it's one of these films where, you know, people feel that they're

smarter. You know, reviewers, they get it, and they want to show that they get

it. So they write a good review.

Plus, I think it's a good film.

But there's a lot of good films that don't get good reviews because for

agendas that critics have.

The reviews were also helpful in positioning the film for people to

what it was that they were going to go see.

I guess this was after the first airplane because we had some delicious

with them about not putting a twisted guitar on the cover of the videocassette

or the poster even. And we kept saying that wasn't our audience exactly. There

was another audience for this.

This piece is called Lick My Love Pump.

The poster in England that I have, actually I like much better than the

American poster.

Someone had done a really great pen and ink color

caricature of all the characters with little bubbles with them saying things,

and it was like a cartoon strip, and it was really nice.

Many of the locations that you've seen progressing obviously weren't in the

original progression, and there are scenes which are supposedly in Los

in this film, which were meant to be in Boston in the earlier version when it

was first shot, so we could move everything. We could move stuff around,

then there was enough footage to recreate the transition from one thing

another. There were often very bold transitions anyway. You go to them on

somewhere, you can cut out of anything.

with the opening shot of them on stage, so you could re -truncate stuff, and

then if you moved something back somewhere, maybe you'd stick the back

It was incredibly manipulable, this film.

I mean, there was little sort of moments that I think we could have maybe

preserved that we didn't, sort of in the name of keeping the story going.

So I was a little bit disappointed about certain things that weren't there that

I felt maybe we could have incorporated less than we thought. But then, of

course... There's always the issue that Bob was addressing, which is that it

wasn't always so easy to make something work editorially because of the nature

of the coverage, since it wasn't coverage per se.

Sometimes we had to sacrifice a bit that we liked because we couldn't get to it

very easily.

I think there were some songs that we never cut.

That was one that was never cut, I believe, because either it wasn't cut or

totally recut it, one of the two, because I know that we made a lot of

I think we actually made a lot of changes in all of the musical numbers on

stage, but particularly that one, since it hadn't been in at all.

And I don't know why the decision was made to put it back in. I guess somebody

felt we needed more music at that point, or I don't really know.

But it was added in at the last minute.

The first time they performed before an audience was on Sunset Strip at

Gazari's, and they played Double Bill with Iron Butterfly.

I remember feeling really stupid being there. I'd never, ever wanted to go to

that place. It was a big heavy metal club.

I didn't relate to it. I thought it was a little bit too close to the real

thing. Half the audience were Iron Butterfly fans and the other half were

of Chris, Harry, Michael, Rob.

You know, what were we doing there?

And yet there was something just absolutely silly and monumental about

that they had scored this gig, that they were actually playing with Iron

Butterfly. And so every now and then you'd remind yourself of that and you

to laugh.

There's Paul Schaefer, David Letterman's band leader.

He'd done some acting too.

I mean, that's one of the things that's so good about him on Letterman.

I mean, he can, as we call, schnadel.

He can schnadel with Letterman.

One of the funniest scenes that we all loved, and it's not in the movie, is

Paul Schaefer.

He plays a promotion guy. I don't know what town it's supposed to be in.

But he's trying to talk them into going to do an early morning radio talk show.

And he does this whole manic rap, ending up with him taking an egg and smashing

it on his head.

And it was hilarious.

But unfortunately, the whole point of the scene was just to get them into the

radio station, and unfortunately the radio station was not as funny.

That's Archie Hahn, who's also a terrific improvisational actor.

Heavy metal, as a rock and roll form, has pretty much existed

forever. Before we made the film, I mean, heavy metal was taken very

by the people who played it and the people who...

went to the concerts.

Maybe there are more people making fun of it now. I don't know.

It really wasn't about let's make fun of a band or let's do a rock documentary.

It was really looking first for the characters. Who do we really want to

and what is the best form to show them in?

I mean, it's very possible they could have come up with those characters and

because they're all excellent writers and actors, they could have written a

script and decided to do it just like a typical...

you know, structured, written feature film.

Kick My Ass was actually based on an actual incident that I

think, I mean, Michael will probably know it better than I did, when it was

Lenny and the Squigtones, and they had a band, and there was a guy that worked

for the record company who fucked up and basically went through this thing of

kick my ass and, you know, kick me, I'm sorry, I did it, and we took that from

that experience.

Kick this ass for a man, that's all. Kick my ass. Enjoy.

Come on. I'm not asking, I'm telling with this. Kick my ass.

There are groupies. I mean, there's no question. You see groupies around, but

didn't play that up as much.

See, there's a little drugs right there.

That's the only time we showed drugs in the whole film.

But it was enough to know that that went on there. We didn't have to keep

throwing that in the audience's face.

I don't believe there was a conscious decision to de -emphasize naked groupies

or drugs. I think they just kind of fell by the wayside as a sort of natural

byproduct of the other things we were doing.

It was more a movie about their stupidity, and wherever alcohol and

a part in that, you might see it, but their basic stupidity was not affected,

and that's why you don't see too many drugs and alcohol scenes.

See,

this shot kind of basically shows you we could afford about 200 extras and a few

friends that day.

That was the budget limit.

Same 200 people.

This was always one of my favorite scenes.

And it did used to go on longer.

You go right straight through this door here, down the hall.

Wonderful Smith is his name.

He's a terrific actor.

This scene, I don't get.

I think it's funny that they keep going around in circles and they stop and ask

the janitor where they're going.

But when people come up to me and say, my favorite scene in Spinal Tap is this

is not an exit, I still don't get what's funny about this is not an exit. I'm

probably the only person who doesn't get it.

I think that was dubbed in because I think he said hello somewhere else. This

was a different location, filmed somewhere else. We had to change it.

added later. Then it had to be Cleveland, so they brought him into the

stage and looped in hello Cleveland.

I hate to keep half of it, but I think the notion of a black album has really

cursed us.

We knew that Janine coming between the two guys was really the only story we

had. So whatever scenes fueled that aspect of the film, we had to keep.

I mean, that was one of the parts of the decision -making process in the

editing, was, you know, very simply, after a while, you have to say, well,

are scenes we need in order to tell that story. That's the only story we have.

When deciding what stays and what goes, this scene we knew had to stay because

this scene sets up Stonehenge.

This is the beginning of the end here. This is where you see Janine's

insinuation into the business of the band.

This happens to be a real location.

I mean, it's a real restaurant. So, of course, it has that really bad lighting

that you get in bad coffee shops anyway.

They created a lighting grid.

which was just suspended above the actors in sort of a pool of light in

they could move around. So the lights were never behind them, and they would

shown in the shot if they moved in a 360.

This is a look for Bib. He's a Libra. There's sort of a ying, yang sort of

This is Nigel. He's got the cord. Here's Janine suggesting that they dress up

as, you know, signs of the Zodiac.

We'd shoot it once.

You know, there were no rehearsals because, I mean, you never know what the

are going to say. You always have to be shooting because you never know when

something good is going to come up.

We'd shoot it once, and then we'd sit and talk a little bit about what we just

did. And we'd say, let's do it again. But, you know, maybe we don't need to

into that discussion because that's really irrelevant.

You know, let's lose that discussion. Or, hey, maybe we should add something

about this, you know, about some other idea. And then what we would do is then

we'd shoot it again.

Then we'd shoot it a third time. And every time we shot it, the dialogue

be slightly different, but it would be generally covering the same subject.

Then I'd shoot it a fourth time, making sure that the cameraman always was on

people not talking so that I had plenty of stuff to cut away from if I ever

wanted to bridge any of the dialogue.

And then when we assembled the film...

What we did is really assemble it via the audio track more than what you saw

visually. And once we had a good audio track that tracked, that made sense,

one dialogue went into the next and, you know, conversations that had a flow to

them, the pictures would go along with those.

You know, more important was getting the audio track to, you know, to track, as

I say.

Do you feel that in collaboration with David that you are afforded the

opportunity to express yourself musically the way you would like to?

think I do, you know, in my solos. My solos are my trademark.

This is based on the kind of...

I think it's based on Jeff Beck, who does these incredible guitar solos.

The thing went on forever.

But we took the highlights, you know, one is he's kicking that other guitar

his foot. I love that he picks up the violin and uses the violin as a bow,

is what he's going to do here for this flying V that he has.

I don't know how Chris ever let us cut this, because...

I think originally this was an incredibly long solo. I mean, once he

started, he just didn't want to stop. He was like in some kind of meditational

state or something.

This looks absolutely perfect.

This is Angelica Houston.

I think this was one of, I mean, I know she had worked with her father when she

was very young, but she hadn't done a whole lot at this point.

I mean, the only thing I would have changed is maybe to try to structure the

story a little bit better. I mean, it's really kind of bottom -heavy in a weird

way. You know, most of the story takes place in the last 20 minutes of the

But I guess it's, you know, maybe there wasn't much more we could have done.

During Spinal Tap, Rob was very clear about moving forward with the story. It

was always his central interest, and he would be very quick to take something

out if he didn't see that it was moving the story along, and he's been like that

ever since.

In the five -and -a -half -hour version, there was much more character

development and much more awareness of who each person was, I think, much more

of a sense of who they were.

And so therefore, when we got to the end, there was a real progression

getting more serious, you know, as the tensions escalated within the group.

And so that's probably why it feels, you know, maybe a little more

serious than the rest of the picture in the released version.

Because we sort of...

It went for, it's kind of de -emphasized some of the sort of side character bits

throughout.

But then the ending was still the ending. So I think that maybe we might

lost some of that along the way. I'm not sure.

I don't think it's a thought out position previously.

I think it's a characteristic of the way the story was told.

It's not a story per se at the beginning. It's just the documentation

event at all, and you're watching it, and slowly parts of the story are fed

it, and by the time you get halfway or two -thirds of the way through, enough

the story has developed that you realize now there is a story going on. I

actually don't think that there's any less parody happening, but before the

parody was out there in the open, and now the story is built up enough that

you're tied into the characters. I think there's probably still as much parody

going on, but it's not biased.

When I met Rob six months before making that film, he was a charming, wonderful

guy. I always enjoyed him.

He was very, very giving. He was very trusting, which was wonderful. He

hired me without having ever seen anything else I cut.

Once we started shooting, I saw, the first day I went to the dailies, and I

started to see this guy who was a rob, who, you know, after one night, suddenly

there was a rob who was, like, buried in clothing.

There was his collar turned up, there was his hat put down, and there was his

stern face.

And it's like, you know, it was just obvious the pressures of filmmaking are

difficult.

In the body of his work, Spinal Tap, it has a unique situation.

I think it's his first film, and it's quite different, and it was a

collaboration. Everybody had a very strong idea of who their character was,

they were very consistent with that.

So I think that it was kind of a ballsy thing for him to do because

it was so kind of unconventional in a way.

There were some, you know, healthy, passionate arguments, which was all

part of the process, and it was, you know, what made it what it is.

I think you could map more clearly Rob's desires and progression in his other

films. I think this is a very separate individual piece that was, well, not an

individual committee piece, but individual to the body of his work.

The last hurdle before we got to make the movie was sort of on Rob's shoulders

was to confirm to them that there was actually going to be a story, that there

would be characters that you care about and there was going to be a story.

So we all got together with all the heads of the embassy at the time, the

production people, the head of Jerry Prancho, Norman Lear, and a couple of

people. production people. My test for the day as the producer was to prove to

them that I knew how to make a feature -length film with the money that they

were going to give us. They said, you know you're shooting this film in 16mm.

And the guy gestures and shows me how wide a piece of 16mm film is. He says,

it's a little tiny little film.

Now how are you ever going to cut that together?

I thought, oh, boy, I've got them now. This is it. Because I had to phrase my

answer in a way that I wasn't really, didn't make a lot of fun of them, but

certainly to prove my point. I said, you'll never believe it. I said, I

know a guy.

He's British.

And in England, they make these documentaries using that little tiny

And this guy actually knows how to cut that film and put it together. He's done

it for a living.

And I've got him to agree to do this movie.

And everybody just looked around and went, well, okay, there you have it.

And that was Bob Layton.

This was an education to me as well.

My feature editing since, I mean, it's carried on with Rob, and I've used it in

other films, but the fact that you can get away with amazing stuff as long as

you're following the rhythm of the dialogue and you're using a forceful

about it, you can just boulder your way through visual mismatches. People don't

really seem to notice or mind if they're into the movie.

It was quite amazing looking at the takes, one from one take to another.

They'd go off in different tangents.

You'd see the pathway and the other ones would just branch off into this weird

thing and then try and come back again. It was fascinating watching the

different takes.

The camera did different things every time, but mostly we tried for the first

three takes to stay with the people talking.

Whoever was talking, we'd stay with them. And then the fourth time, we would

with people who weren't talking because I felt usually by the fourth time, we

weren't going to get such interesting stuff as interesting on camera because

they'd be a little stale with it by that point.

But also, they had exhausted whatever funny stuff they were going to do at

point. But many times when the camera was on people not talking, you'd hear a

gem would come out of somebody's mouth, and then you just wouldn't be there.

But you could still lay it in, you know, over somebody's face.

Kent Bader.

There used to be some hilarious insults that she threw at him that we took

out. Some very obscure English, I think.

I thought it was hilarious because it was so strange.

But finally we decided that since no one would ever know what it was, including

us, we decided to take it out.

Does she still talk about his three -piece suite?

To refer to his cock as his three -piece suite in this scene.

Can I raise a practical question at this point?

Yeah. Are we going to do Stonehenge tomorrow?

No, we're not going to fucking do Stonehenge.

Okay, we're all set. Thank you.

See, this is a scene we shot four times.

It looks like it's just one scene.

You know, as long as you have one shot where you do cutaways, you can paste

things together.

Which, you know, it's no big revelation. I mean, it's the way they make films.

But that move worked pretty good, so we kept that in.

But this may have been taken from another

pass at the scene.

Sometimes they'll say things that they said the first time. Other times they'll

discard it and say something else.

But, you know, we would discuss it after the first time and say, you know, ooh,

that section worked great. But it's never exactly the same because, you

you can't remember exactly what you said. It's like if I asked you, you

you've asked me a couple of times while we're doing this, repeat that thing. I

don't remember exactly what I said. I said it a slightly different way.

So that would always happen.

But basically, generally, you remember, you know, what you said.

Except for Chris Gass, who never remembered anything he said.

Not really.

I mean, you know, we've grown up.

But really, it's not.

No, not really.

We feel like children much of the time, even when we're playing.

We're closer than brothers.

Brothers always fight, sort of disagreements and all that.

We really have a relationship that's way, way past that.

I think the question is, how long can you go away from the story?

And that was the thing here, there was always more jokes we would cut in, but

you want to hold on to the story enough?

This scene here is based on a very well -known tape

that has made its way around recording studios and

rock and roll bands since it happened, which was there was a session with a

group called the Trogs.

And they might have been doing a wild thing. I'm not sure what they were

But there was a fight that broke out about the drummer and how he was,

how he, you know, what he was doing on a particular track.

And the fight lasted forever. And some engineer.

turned on the tape, and you hear these people screaming at each other and using

such profanity. Oh, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I mean, it just goes on

forever. I can't hear the fucking beat.

It don't fucking sound. It don't fuck.

Fuck me, fuck you. I mean, they're just going on with each other, you know.

That's not a fucking beat.

And then we just go on and on and on, and we just said, this is hysterical. So

we used that as the inspiration for this.

There used to be a shot.

Following the two, following Michael and Chris into a game room off the studio,

a long kind of tracking shot, and then Nigel was playing pinball, I believe it

was. The tension was palpable, and you could really feel that something was

about to blow.

There's also scenes where Rob goes off with Marty Tabergi and tracks down Nigel

as he's left the group and interviews him. He's staying at some friend's

in Beverly Hills. He's in a tennis outfit.

Here's Fred Willard, who's a brilliant, brilliant improviser.

He's a writer, too.

An actor has to be a writer as well. All these people, I mean, Fred Willard used

to be a part of a team called Greco and Willard, and they wrote their own

material. I mean, it's, you know, a lot of comedian stand -ups write their own

material, and they're writers, and so they can improvise as well.

Most actors don't know how to do this stuff.

Most actors can improvise in character, but not interestingly.

That's the difference. I mean, you have to make it interesting. I mean, the

dialogue has to crackle, has to sparkle, and that takes a real writer's mind at

work. And most actors, you know, need the help of a writer.

Can I define a writer's mind? I can't define anybody's mind.

Nowadays, most previews are actually done in town.

People go as far away as Marina del Rey or North Hollywood thinking that they

get a suburban audience.

But there used to be in 1982, I don't think every film wasn't so big, and

used to go out of town. I had been to Detroit and Chicago and Middle America.

went to Dallas and we went to Seattle with Spinal Tap to preview it in both

places because Dallas would be a more regular audience and Seattle would be

college town. audience and in fact in both places it was poorly received and

when the film was well received finally it seemed to be that a certain awareness

had to be apparent there were people obviously at both all those screenings

previous screens who got the film and understood it and enjoyed it and some of

those people came out to us but there was a general kind of

I don't know.

In Dallas, I remember it was treated kind of like a party. The people were

constantly standing up, going out and getting drinks and getting popcorn and

coming back. They didn't leave, but they were just drifting in and out. They

were like the people from one of the party things in Spinal Tap.

Those types of people. It was weird.

And because of those previews, we decided to shorten the film, basically.

There wasn't anything that didn't go over well, but it was just to tighten it

up, get it as fast as possible.

And make it a quicker, shorter film. And another, I don't remember now, another

five minutes or so came out to that point.

I was actually upset.

I was upset that they didn't get it because it's very frustrating when

that is so clear to you is being misunderstood by other people. And also,

upset because I knew it wouldn't do well.

You know, we'd open the picture and people wouldn't, you know, they just

wouldn't get it.

Now, in all fairness, I don't think we had a very good marketing campaign for

this. I mean, this is a very original kind of film. I mean, there's really no,

mean, except for like The Ruttles, which I think was a specific satire of The

Beatles. There had really never been a film like this.

And they marketed it with a, you know, a guitar flying in the air with a twisted

guitar neck, which looked like airplane.

You know, it looked like here's a very original film that trading.

on another film.

So I think that hurt us. I don't think they knew exactly how to market this

film.

And I think if we had done it today, we would have gone very slowly. We would

have put it in a couple of theaters and one down in the village and one here in

L .A. and just run it for a long, long, long, long time and then slowly roll it

out in such a way that people would catch up to it. It's one of the reasons.

For me, why I wanted to start Castle Rock, so that I could have control over

marketing and not have a situation like what I had on this film, and also

Princess Bride, which I thought was marketed really poorly.

Kent Bader.

After these previews, we set up another little cutting room, and Chris came

back, and I went through, and based on the notes from the previews, we went

through from top to bottom and made a lot of changes. We incorporated a

number that we had taken out.

But I remember the last time I saw the picture, I thought that maybe we might

have gone a little too far, you know? I think the dramatic elements are put in

closer proximity now, and there's more dramatic tension, except that...

The longer cut makes it more real in a certain banal, the banalness of it, the

tedium of it. Not that it was boring, it was always funny, but it, as Kent was

talking about the scene in the recording studio following down the hallway, you

feel intrusive. You have that sense of the camera being poking into somebody's

private business, which you don't get so much in the final film because it was

geared as entertainment.

We just thought if we can get some money allocated to us from advertising and

publicity, we'll do a trailer and a video. I think it was smart that we had

do them both at the same time because there was no way to stop us.

This video I also produced was also directed by Chris.

It was just like cheese rolling in Denmark. It was there to tell you about

band. It was there in some way to pique your interest. If you got what that was

about, then you would get the movie. That was the idea.

We thought people would, if they enjoyed that, they'd be looking to see the

film.

On the bait, Derek Small.

He wrote this.

took out whole subplots with a certain crazy license.

The emphasis in cutting it down was to keep a dramatic... We knew the jokes

there all the time, but it was to keep a dramatic structure so your interest

worked on a second level as well.

But it was kind of exhilarating because everything, to me, everything was so

good and the material was so consistently of a high quality that it

like a no -lose situation.

But, you know, what was interesting too was we had a board with file cards.

with the list of, you know, each scene was listed on a card. But do you

later on that we actually would come back and we'd take all those file cards

and put them on the ground because we were moving so many cards around that

couldn't do it on the board. You kept pinning and pinning. So we just had it

like some game on the floor.

There's Lindsay Duran, by the way.

That woman right there was Lindsay Duran, and she was the one responsible

getting this film off the ground.

I'm sure it would have been discovered in the end. I don't think it would have

had its financial success that it had at that time, which wasn't huge as I

remember it. It was made for 2 .4 million and it grows something like 15

million. But at that time, that wasn't bad for a film of that size and it

certainly showed a percentage return.

I'm not sure if it would have done that. In fact, when it first opened for the

first... week or so, it didn't do very well, and then I had a very good review

from Vincent Camby, and that night the box office was incredibly better in New

York City, and then advertising built up from that.

Really what happened, I think, was that Embassy Pictures, who were distributing

it, they figured out that instead of just being something you could put out

not worry about, this was something you could actually make money off, and they

did. A collection of my acoustic numbers with the London Philharmonic, as you

know. We're lucky.

Yeah. I mean, people should be envying us, you know. I envy us. Yeah, I do. Me

too.

When you're doing a film with a script, you're trying to get certain little

values out of each moment, you know, with an actor.

This is, you know, totally freewheeling, you know, like jazz. It's like doing

jazz. I mean, it's a totally different set of ground rules.

I don't have to tune performances here. All the people that are doing this know

what they're supposed to do. They all inhabit these characters. They're living

inside these characters.

They created these characters.

It's not like it was written for them and they have to act them. They've

them from the ground up. These are their characters.

They've lived with these characters longer than I have.

They can't make false moves. They're incapable of making false moves.

This scene here, Chris is an incredible actor, and he's very dramatic here. I

mean, he's a very solid dramatic actor as well as being a really good comedic

actor.

They're all good actors. They're all really good actors. You can't play

the way they do unless you're a really good dramatic actor.

I mean, they look to me to help structure a scene and, you know, to

know, make a certain structure, but not for their performances, no.

The Sure Thing was more like a first film than this for me because it was a

traditional film, and I was completely inexperienced doing that kind of thing.

This was easy for me. This was like falling off a lock.

It doesn't spoil you, I mean, because you know you're never going to get to

film like that. I mean, it's basically you know there's a one -time thing.

It's not like the next experience is going to be like this. I mean, it's

you know, it's just going to be different.

The final budget for the film...

was way above the $200 ,000 or $300 ,000 mark, but I would guess the final

budget was between $2 million and $3 million.

Most of the budget of the film went to paying the talent.

Actually, all the performers, Chris and Harry and Michael, were all Writers

Guild members, Directors Guild. Well, at that time, Rob became a Directors Guild

member, and they were also musicians.

So in a sense, they were wearing all the hats that on a film you would normally

hire anywhere from...

three to 15 people to do.

So they were doing basically what would be called the writing. They were writing

all the music. They were recording the music. They were performing the music.

They were acting in their roles as SAG players.

And Rob was also directing.

So a good portion of the budget, because they were all guild members, went

towards providing them their feed for their guild.

Because the rest of the film was filmed entirely on location, all the other

expenses were primarily location expenses.

This concert here, we filmed it dramatically to happen in the pacing

happens in now.

I think Rob is very intelligent. He's got this really probing aspect to his

personality. I think that's one reason why he's probably done so many different

genres as well.

And he really likes to get inside of a story, it seems to me, and really try to

sort of work it through.

And I think that he likes the challenge, it seems to me.

of these different genres, do one of those rockumentary films like all those

other people.

Well, we talked about doing a Spinal Tap 2, and we all looked through all this

other footage, and there's some very funny stuff, but we realized that

only one story. Even though there's a lot of footage, there's only one story

tie it together, so it would just be scenes that were unrelated, you know,

kind of just out of context.

And so we decided not to do it. You've got very well -defined characters that

can either empathize with or sympathize with, and it has

entertainment value.

If you're trying to do a comedy, then it's funny.

You're making people laugh.

So it has to have all those things, and it has to also not bore the people. I

never like to see people shifting in their seats for a second. It cannot just

wander.

So all those elements have to be in place.

That moment of the drummer exploding and cutting to Japan, I think maybe we cut

it together and Rob saw it, but it was either a joke or it was part of

else, and he said, no, that's the way we should make that final transition.

That was total luck.

We didn't plan to have that drummer. I mean, if you look at it very, very

carefully, the explosion...

happens on the B side of the cut.

Karen Murphy.

I was very upset this day because we were supposed to fill the hall with

Japanese extras.

And we showed up the day of the filming, and the person in charge of the extras

had not done a very good job of selecting Japanese people. There were so

people who were Chinese and Filipino and very many people who were not Japanese.

And I remember we went through the roof, and we almost couldn't film that day

because there just weren't enough people to make it look like Japan.

We actually sent everybody out to Little Tokyo with cash, asking people to

please come and be in our movie.

Playing rock and roll music. And here's some interview footage that just didn't

make it into the body of the film that we thought was really funny and we just

put it in for the credits.

And in fact, when it first came out and we previewed it in Dallas, you know.

85 % of the audience didn't have a clue as to what we were doing.

They came out after the film was over, and I talked to a number of these

and a lot of them wondered why I had made a film about a band that nobody had

ever heard of and a band that was so bad.

I think it's one of these situations where it's in the forefront of things,

it takes a while for people to catch up and really get the joke and really see

what's funny about it.

Spinal Tap's become a cult film.

And every rock and roller that I ever encounter tells me that, you know, it's

required watching on a tour bus, you know.

And they wear their copies thin, their tapes thin, you know, from watching it

over and over. And I remember when I was making Princess Bride, I had an

interview with Sting to play one of the parts in the film. And he told me that

he had seen it.

you know, like 50 times.

And when he watched it, he didn't know whether to laugh or cry because it was

close to, you know, his experiences.

I tell people the movies I've done, and when I get back to this one, 95 % of the

people react to this one more than any other.

And everybody, everybody can repeat more phrases than I can about this film and

remember it in more detail than I do.

Because to me it's so tied up with all of what it was, the whole process, it's

not just the final film. And these other people, like these guys I met recently

from an improv group, they watched it thousands of times. They can do whole

pieces out of it, stuff that I'd forgotten ages ago.

We're watching it here silent in the studio.

I haven't seen this film in four or five years. I'd like to sit down and watch a

movie. It's kind of poignant to me.

It's something I did a long time ago. I have a great affection for this movie.

I remember cutting this on 16mm, and it was just like this little spaghetti

stuff, and somehow we made it all work, and it was very low budget, and we were

cutting in this little house in Hollywood that no one would know was any

editing facility at all.

And we had our own little kitchen, and sometimes Bob would come in and have

breakfast in the morning, or maybe every morning, I don't know.

And we'd have our tea in the afternoon, and we had a picnic table outside.

We had this amazing piece of work that we could just be completely playful

And we felt like we could do no wrong with.

So it was quite a good time.

Good group of people and a good way to approach any movie, I think. It should

all be that way.

This is my 108th time to see this movie.

I started counting because, of course, I'd never produced a film before. And

when I started looking at the film over and over again, I thought it was really

odd how many times I'd watched it. So I started counting.

And I remember at the 107th time, I said, that's it. I can't see this movie

anymore. But I enjoyed every minute of it all the way to that point.

This is 108.

Not only do I wish I had a piece of it, I wish I had a lawyer who could go in

and get me that piece that I have of it.

Here lies David St. Evans.

And why not?

I feel that sums up your life.

There's a great story about that. And if you notice, his name is Moak.

Well, we saw a movie called Butterfly with Pia Zadora.

And there was a credit that said, James Franciscus as Moak.

His name was in a box, so we just thought it was kind of funny. So we put

guy, this guy's character name in a box, and we called him Moak because of this

character in Butterfly.

If you're a first -time director...

You know, I wouldn't recommend making a film this way because unless you're

experienced in improvisation and unless you have the horses, in other words,

have the actors who really know how to do this stuff, it can be very boring. I

mean, because good improvisational actors, what they do is not just are

improvise in context of their characters and able to be truthful to their

characters, but they also improvise in an interesting way.

They're humorous. They're cogent. They're intelligent. They turn a phrase,

interestingly.

They're doing the job of a writer, and at the same time that they're doing the

job of an actor.

So it doesn't work unless you have a really good writer. All these people are

writers. It's not something you could just do, anybody could just do.

In other words, kids, don't try this at home.

I don't know. What are the hours?