Original subtitles

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

On this track, you will hear Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Schur.

Hello. My name is Marty DeBerge.

Hello. Hello.

Hello.

Oh, interesting chord. A portrait in sound. A portrait in sound.

I'm Harry Schur. I play Derek Smalls, the lead bass player in Spinal Tap.

Hello. My name is Bill, and I'm an alcoholic.

How's that?

Hi, I'm Michael McKeon, and I play David St. Hubbins, lead guitarist.

Hi, I'm Michael McKeon. No, you say your own name.

Oh, well, you didn't get to be... Hi, I'm Christopher Geth, and I play the

of Nigel Tufnell, lead guitar player in Spinal Tap.

That band was Britain's now legendary Spinal Tap.

Rob, as Karen Murphy, the producer of the movie, recalled... He ended up

directing this because he didn't look good in spandex, so he couldn't be in

band.

He works on lyrics. He works on lyrics, yeah.

The three of us wrote the music, and the four of us wrote lyrics together.

One of the reactions that we had from the embassy people when they saw this

picture was, don't you have to, in this 30 seconds, wink at the audience to let

them know that you're joking?

And we said, if they don't know, we thought that this was plenty of tip

this opening, what we had in mind.

But I'm sure a lot of people don't understand.

strange joke here.

Walking by every piece of movie equipment that has ever been made behind

It's like, what shot are they setting up for?

Yeah, but also there's a pretentiousness to this opening that smells.

Yeah.

But hey, enough of my yakking.

What do you say?

Let's boogie.

We had known each other for years. Michael McKean and I had gone to college

the mid -60s in New York City, and we had played music together starting in

about 67.

When we were all located here, Harry, Michael, and I, we started working on

TV show.

It was 78, wasn't it? Yeah.

Near the end of the show was a parody of a popular late -night rock music show

of the time called Midnight Special. Rob Reiner played Wolfman Jack, and... We

played with Loudon Wainwright and Russ Kunkel. We played this band called

Tap. That's the first time they existed.

With a totally different logo, too.

Oh, this girl. She's the wife of Tim Schmidt of the Eagles.

But she was not taught to speak this way. No, she was on her own here.

Yeah. Yeah.

My recollection of what got us into the first step, all we were doing...

ostensibly was playing this song that we'd written called rock and roll

nightmare and the last shot or one of the last shots in the in the piece was

we're on the floor the camera's over our heads and we're doing like june taylor

dancers stuff with our legs as part of the finale of the song and there's

supposed to be smoke billowing around us but the prop guy the hot oil which is

supposed to generate smoke instead was as we were lying on the floor just

generating droplets of hot oil on our faces and we had a choice between

the prop man or

talking to amuse ourselves while he worked out this problem. And we started

talking as these guys that later on fed our desire to do more with these people.

Not the prop guy, but the character.

It's the prop guy fed your desire, Harry. We have to talk.

Anybody remember where this is?

Pasadena?

Is it the Pasadena Club?

Perkins Palace.

Perkins Palace. I think you're right.

I think we shot for 25 days.

Five weeks.

Two hour days.

French hours.

We never left the confines of Los Angeles County.

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

This was a man's house in the Hollywood Hills.

Wanted to be considered a landed gentry, but had to live in the Hollywood Hills

for some tax reason.

And Rob was living at the Lermontage Hotel in Beverly Hills, and we gathered

his hotel room. He'd gotten a deal from Marble Arch Productions, which is Lou

Grade's company.

He had $50 ,000 to write a first draft screenplay of the movie, and we gathered

in his hotel room for about three days trying to write a screenplay.

And just at the end of the third day or something, he said, this is like a

stupid thing to be doing. Nobody's ever going to be able to make sense of this

on paper.

Let's see if they'll let us take the money and make a demo of the movie

They didn't care what we did with the money as long as they didn't write or do

anything.

This was actually shot during the demo shoot.

So this is the earliest piece of film that's in this collection.

You look so young.

That was my real hair, too.

How sad.

That's Ned Begley Jr.

on the drums, of course. And that's Danny Korchmar on bass.

We made a 20 -minute demo of the movie with Stonehenge was in it.

We shot some audience.

Richard Belzer's ass.

Had a lot of attractions.

Rebecca de Mornay in a bathing suit.

Yeah, she played a groupie.

We thought this would be the sales tool for this project. One of the good

stories regarding this was taking this to David... Bigelman.

Bigelman, over at Columbia, was it at the time? Yeah.

We showed this to him, and I don't know if he watched the whole thing, in fact.

I think two -thirds of the way he said, oh, boys, boys.

And then these words came out of his mouth, I'll be honest with you.

Hey. Hey, right, hey. He said, we already have a...

I've already given a million dollars to the Eagle to do a rock and roll movie.

Of course, they never made the movie, but... It was the Eagles, wasn't it?

Yeah, that's right. And that was worth the whole price of admission of the

anyway. We could have all gone home happy after that meeting. I'll be honest

with you, meeting.

And he wrote us a check, he wrote us a check, and he signed it Cliff Robertson,

and it left.

You can't really dust for vomit.

This is the Hollywood Athletic Club, which was at the time called something

else. This was the penthouse of the Hollywood Athletic Club. The Berwyn

The Berwyn Entertainment Center. That's right. Thank you.

Fran Drescher really does talk like that. And this was one of the amazing

discoveries because we had used some people in the film that we knew.

and who we knew could improvise, and Fran came out of nowhere, and this is

She's just going here. She has no... None of these lines are written. She's

perfect, she's just smacking it. Yeah.

We went to every major studio in town, I think, with this 20 -minute demo under

the four of us, Rob and Chris and Michael and I, and you've never seen

stares on the faces of major film executives after they'd seen this 20

and they'd say...

Yeah, so, and your point is?

Word being, what they actually said was, I can't sell this.

And there was one guy who looked at it and he said, you know, it's really,

really funny, but what you need, in the very beginning you need a joke like they

have an airplane where you see the shark fin style tail fin go through the

clouds so that people know that it's a funny movie.

We thought that we had left a few tips that it was supposed to be funny in

in the 20 minutes.

Zane Busby? Zane Busby, director Zane Busby.

Was that mine? Dana Carvey.

Billy Crystal and Dana Carvey.

So the next step was Norman Lear's company at the time. Empathy, I guess.

what about United Artists? We were at UA for a minute. Ultimately, Norman Lear

said, I'm just going to have to trust you on this and go away and do this. And

he gave us 2 .2, as I recall.

2 .7 is what I remember. 2 .3, I thought.

Now, this scene...

was also done in the demo version of the movie, and the girl with the book in

the demo was Nina Blackwood, one of the first MTV VJs. Right.

I still list that scene on her resume.

Yes, I can.

The Frank Sinatra set is okay.

This is, of course, Bruno Kirby.

In the demo version. Yes.

In the outline that was written, what was important was the arc of the scene,

what was going to happen in the scene, so we all know where the scene begins

where it ends, and what happened in the middle happened. Every person was told

the information that they needed to know so that we wouldn't contradict each

other, but this all came from Bruno, Fran Drescher's all came from Fran, and

there was a big load on all these people's shoulders, essentially, to

write their own pieces.

and to listen to each other like people should, and like actors always should

too, but in this case it was essential to avoid talking over each other.

And a lot of times we would use the first take. We would use the first take

as much as possible because there was something about the surprises of it

happening for the first time that really looked good on film.

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that you see in this picture is that

people really are listening to each other because they have to.

Tony Hendra, I had worked with at the National Lampoon starting in 1970, and

had done a series of albums together.

And we knew, in some cases, that these people could just take off and do it.

Bruno is an exception for someone who is an actor who can do that. Most actors

can't do that.

Bruno's nails are never featured, but he had a great manicure at all times.

Yeah, Bruno is about the most thoroughgoing. He had the limo driver's

He studied limo drivers. He hung out with limo drivers, and he went to the

that they had them polished.

The double bass, B .C. Rich. I think they built this. No, they had this

there in their warehouse in East L .A., and I said, that I have to have.

What's the point of it? They said, no, there really isn't one.

I said, that's perfect.

This is perhaps Spinal Tap's most covered

song, covered by other bands.

Soundgarden had a live album or a live EP.

One of the things we had in mind and talked about a lot and had to keep

on throughout the course of making the picture was that As people who played

who had gotten tired of seeing rock and roll movies where people's hands were in

impossible positions when they're supposed to be playing, we wanted to get

right. We wanted to do a movie that got the scene and got the thing right.

At the time we were trying to sell this movie, the conventional wisdom in

Hollywood, and I'm using wisdom advisedly, was that rock and roll movies

make money and you shouldn't make them, the same as with baseball movies.

And we kept saying, you know...

Rolling Stone and Entertainment Tonight and all these media have shoved every

minutiae of rock and roll down people's throats for 20, 25 years.

Even if they don't care, they know all this stuff. They know all these stories.

We're just distilling and feeding it back.

There were times when the film editors, to make a pretty picture, a shot that

they liked, would move a piece of a song, a shot from a song, to a whole

section of the song. And now suddenly fingering was way out of whack. And we

went in and re -recorded parts that...

tried to match that fingering so that people could see that, yeah, we were

playing and it really did look right.

Let's talk about your reviews a little bit regarding intravenous de Milo. These

covers, when were these generated? Do we remember?

I have the intravenous de Milo cover. What size is it?

What do you mean?

I mean, it's not LP size. It's LP size. Yeah. Now, you can see I'm laughing

because we'd never heard this.

nitpicking isn't it the gospel according to spinal tap this pretentious

ponderous collection of religious rock psalms is enough to prompt the question

what day did the lord create spinal tap and couldn't he have rested on that day

too we had never heard this material rob wrote these reviews and sprang them on

us one of my favorite times of seeing this movie was when it was shown in

midnight in oslo

And I was invited to, like, come there and just open it and wave at people.

But I stayed long enough to see the Norwegian subtitle for Shit Sandwich,

was, I think, Schlett Schmorbrud.

He opened for us once. Yes, he did.

He may be our new drummer.

Oh, Brink Stevens.

Brink Stevens, now femme fatale horror movie scream queen.

It's a very unimportant reason.

They're just experimenting with...

with some new packaging materials, right? This is the Bonaventure Hotel in

downtown Los Angeles.

The other thing is that the Boston gig has been canceled.

What? Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it, though. It's not a big college town.

We looked at several films. We looked at The Song Remains the Same, and we

looked at the Scorsese film.

Last Waltz. Last Waltz.

I think it's other people's egos that...

make them say, you're doing us.

We have had a million people come up and say, you're doing Black Sabbath, or

you're doing me.

And people have always said to me, you're doing Beck, you're doing Jeff

And I didn't model this after Jeff Beck, but in people's minds, that's what it

was. I went on the road a little bit with Saxon in England before we shot,

copped a couple of things off their bass player. But basically, I think we were

very self -consciously trying to make this its own band as opposed to a

kind of thing, which is very visibly traceable to some other band.

As far as longevity goes, we always thought like Status Quo or Uriah Heep,

always seemed to be breaking up and changing personnel.

But musically, we just kind of said, let's go for the core here. Let's go for

the real, the true mediocre.

My favorite moment from the pre -production process was we were looking

cinematographer to shoot it and needed to have somebody with documentary

experience. And Peter Smokler walked in with a couple reels of his documentary

work under his arm.

And he had shot a movie that had played one week in Los Angeles, and I had been

dying to see and had not gotten to see. It was a documentary about Werner

Erhard, the founder of S, learning to race Formula One cars.

He just took a year off, and it was called Today is for the Championships.

That's right. And Peter brought that in. I just said, well, as far as I know,

he's got my vote.

He would be running around the room like a real documentary cameraman. That's

why he had that documentary experience.

Rob would be.

walking, you know, crab walking with him, whispering in his ear, you know,

because he might have a better sense of where the focus of the scene was going.

But Peter's instincts were very, very good. And those pans off of people,

because the improvisation mimics what would really happen, he was able to

instinctively just do what he would do as a cameraman if this were a real

documentary.

Well, so what?

What's wrong with being sexy? I mean, there's no...

There was a very big subplot with a band that was supposed to be opening for us,

and Harry Curie was the lead singer of this group called the... The Dose. The

Dose.

First thing we say is, you know, Ian's, like, trying to sell us on this band

package with us, and we go, oh, shit, what are you talking about? This is a

stupid idea.

Whoa! And then we see the girl. Bimbo!

When you caught to her, she had this big herpes sore on her lip.

And you would see us on the bus, and periodically we'd each pop up with this

Thor. So what remains is that scene with Michael and I in this room where the

camera pans across us and you see us with these Thors. And some journalist

to me, he said, I think it's very interesting that one of the subplots

that you, Nigel, and David are gay.

Or lovers. Yeah. And I said, yeah, okay. Well, I said, let me just explain where

this comes from.

You guys were schoolmates?

We're not university material.

Harry, you were going to play at one point, you were going to play a southern

guy that came into the band, but then it just became more fun to do accents from

another country. It's just more fun.

Yeah, actually, I was living at the Chateau Marmont. This was in the 70s, in

fact. And a band came into the hotel lobby.

I happened to be sitting there.

and uh englishman and they came in with the manager and they were checking in

and the manager said to one guy do you have your base i said what do you mean

said do you have your base i left it at the airport you left your bike at the

airport yeah i left it there we'll go and get it what your base where's my

base i don't have it because you left it at the airport you nick so do what You

said you left it. Left what? And I'm not exaggerating. This went on for 10

minutes, and I was just entranced with it.

And finally he said, go and get it.

And he said, go and get it.

What? It's your base.

Go and get your base.

Where is it?

At the airport.

So finally, this went on for 10 minutes, and I thought, well, you know, this has

to be, we need to do this here.

This was about 70.

I think I was living there when I saw this unfold.

I had first played my character on a National Lampoon record in 75 called

Goodbye Pop.

He wasn't called Nigel Tufnel, but it was basically the same guy he was

interviewed. I played actually a character named Nigel on the Lenny and

Squigtones band. Lenny and the Squigtones was an album my partner David

and myself put out.

And Chris was our guitar player. And I was... And he was Nigel Tufnel, because

we were all in character.

We read, there was an article in Rolling Stone about somebody's... Van Halen.

Van Halen's writer.

It was No Brown M &M's, was that what it was? Something like that.

The show business is rife with stories about, you know, this stuff. I mean,

Jerry Lewis's writer, which I got a copy of at one point, is pretty funny. Yul

Brynner's was famous. Yes, Yul Brynner's is great. Under no circumstances must

white eggs be substituted for brown.

It's just that that's an inside story But the fact the rock and roll element

it through Rolling Stone and other media has leaked out to the public So they're

aware that rockers are like this actually everybody in show business is

that We

are

fortunate that since we each have musical ears

I think that made it more possible for us to lock into the music of the way

these people talk than if we were actors without a musical thing going on. My

particular thing was I didn't want to be doing the same kind of thing that Chris

and Michael were doing, and I was more amused by the guys who had this kind of

transatlantic sound, you know, because they'd just been back and forth too

often. I remember feeling before we went to England great trepidation that we

were going to be caught out and that the English press was going to say, you

know, get these Yanks out of here. Who do they think they're kidding?

Yank these Yanks out of here. Yeah, and I just remember being really stunned at

the reception that we got in Britain. And in no place do they buy it as

thoroughly as they do in Britain.

Don't worry about it, all right?

I hate it, really. It doesn't deter me. But I rise above it. I'm a professional,

all right?

The drummer is Rick Parnell, and the keyboard player is Dave Caffinetti, or

Caff or Dave Ewer. Both Englishmen.

We were not allowed to be on American Bandstand to perform this song because

they didn't want us to say the word hell.

The joke that we're trying to make is that these guys have bad taste as

to being musicians that can't play, and that is a kind of a paradox for people.

They don't really understand.

To this day, when we've played, journalists will say to us, are you

playing up there?

This guitar is my 1955 Les Paul Gold Top.

And this is Moak, by the way. People say, who's Moak? In the end credits,

there's one character who has a box around his name.

That's Moak right there. And that's Moak. Our roadie, Robert Bauer.

Robert Bauer is the name of the actor.

He was the sole purveyor of Spinal Tap goods and services for a while there.

Yes. And he's an actor now. He was in a series on Fox a couple years ago.

The irony of all this is that there are a lot of big bands that go out on tour

where they're not playing.

There's a DAT playing.

And the irony of all ironies is, of course, this is us. The joke band really

plays.

Do you actually play all these?

I play them and I cherish them. Most of these guitars are from Norm's Rare

Guitars. Some of them that I play in the movie are mine because I have a

collection, a real collection, in fact.

This is a 58 Sunburst.

These are worth about $60 ,000 now. This is exactly where Nigel and Chris

intersect. This is the overlap point right here.

I've done a million things for Guitar World and Guitar Friends or whatever

they're called.

Guitar Babies. No, I have some of my real guitars in these magazines. This is

truly the intersecting point because I've collected them for a long time.

This one, of course, is a custom 3 pickup.

We knew that the wireless thing had to be set up to pay off the joke when we do

Sex Farm. That was clearly intentional.

That had to be laid down here so that later on you'd understand what happens.

I wasn't going to touch it.

No, don't touch it. I was just pointing at it. Well, don't point even. Don't

even point? No, it can't be played.

Never. Can I look at it? No, you've seen enough of that one. This is the top.

This section here, which is the 11 business, Marshall made a special plate

me that went up to 11.

Subsequently, they have done some ads with me, and now the new amp that they

made for me actually goes up to infinity on the dial.

They made a real amp that goes up to 20. That's the one that people can buy in

the stores now, for real. But mine goes up to infinity.

This has been ripped off just big time. Almost every amp company now sells knobs

that go to 11.

And guitar knobs.

Where can you go from there?

Where? I don't know. Nowhere, exactly.

What we do is if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Put it up to 11.

Do we know where this was?

It was backstage.

Was it also at Perkins Palace?

Or was it a venue?

I don't remember where this was.

This is the Holiday Inn in downtown Glendale. This is Paul Benedict as the

clerk. A well -known actor from the Jeffersons and many other... Yes.

God bless him. Brilliant wig, brilliant glasses.

He wore thick lens glasses in a couple of pictures. In Sibling Rivalry, he wore

thick glasses.

He knows they're funny.

He knows how to use them. He's another example of an actor who is hasn't had

this kind of training but can just fly with this kind of premise We want these

tweets, we want them now, okay?

This twisted

old fruit here tells me that you have lost your time reservation.

Here's the silent Duke fame.

It's that Loudon Wayne Wright song, there was once a man who couldn't speak.

And who's this woman?

Wasn't she actually married to someone?

Oh, sure was. She was married to a real rocker.

I thought she was, was that Jackson's girlfriend?

Maybe that was Jackson's girlfriend, but she'd been married before to someone

else.

As far as the casting goes, there were situations like, for example, Howard

Hessman. His character did not exist until the day before we shot it.

Originally, it was going to be a rock and roll...

star a rock and roll performer duke fame that they run into but the guy we got

to do duke fame couldn't couldn't talk at all i mean it was just like he was

just he was just terrified and he couldn't he looked great he looked

so it's like can you get howard over here in eight hours can you be here and

we shoot him i think he'll be able to like to be a manager or something so

howard walked in and of course you know he's gone over the fence you know it's

like that's why we had him in the picture because another guy couldn't

This particular scene points up, of course, the idea that we did a record

Bitch School in 92, and the cover was a woman on all fours, and MTV saw it and

they said it was too sexist to show.

Have you seen Duke Fame's Currents album?

Um, yes.

Have you seen the cover?

Um, no, no, I don't think I have. It was a rather lurid cover. The story we

heard was that the guy who was in charge of what videos they were going to show

this week...

was fired for sexual harassment, and his job was filled by two women.

So you know that there was a no -nonsense cloud hanging over that

least for a couple of days, and that's when we submitted our video.

This is a scene where you can see just how small our wardrobe budget was

I think most of us were wearing our own clothes at this point. I had dredged out

this strange down coat that I bought to wear in New York a couple years before.

We really were, you know, operating on a shoestring. We had this wonderful

wardrobe lady named Renee.

who just had a crazed sense of weird stuff to find in odd places, but even

we had to patch it together with a lot of our own stuff.

This scene probably took maybe three hours tops.

We'd have like three setups, three major setups a day, I think.

The last time TAP toured America, they were... I said the record player. Where

we had filmed a part of the demo.

We'd filmed a scene in the jacuzzi of the record plant, and we came back. We

didn't use the jacuzzi, but we used this office because it had a lot of gold

records.

Tony Hendra went back to the Lampoon, and he's written a number of books, and

then briefly was the editor of Spy magazine.

I had a one -man show at Lincoln Center for which he took out an ad in the New

York Times that said he was the creator of Spinal Tap.

It was an oversight.

It was strictly an oversight.

No, it wasn't a one -man show. It was a Ronald Reagan operetta. One -man

lawsuit.

There was a scene that was only a bit of which came into that montage, but there

was a piece in which we were so blasé and tired and weary of the road that we

had the girls destroy the hotel room because we were too tired to do it, so

told the girls to do it. And the only thing left from that was Tony's hitting

the TV set with the cricket bat.

I miss you too, darling.

This is, again, the Bonaventure Hotel downtown.

We had great casting sessions, too.

Actors came in, and since there was no script, we couldn't ask them to read, so

we talked to them. We couldn't teach them to read.

We'd ask them why Johnny couldn't read, but that was merely a conversational

tool. And then basically just, you know, saw what kind of ad -libbing or

improvisational facility they had in a situation with the four of us.

That's not until April. Great.

We'll do it. Oh, fucking great.

What guitar is that, Chris? That guitar we got because at some point it was

smashable. We were going to break it, so we wanted to get a cheap imitation

strap.

Oh, God, I love you too.

Okay, bye.

Well, my problem's been solved, mate.

Who's that?

Janine. She's going to come meet us.

Enter the Yoko plot.

This was part of writing the scenario for Norman Lear. We'd had a lot of these

ideas, you know...

During the process, it was from 1980 to 1982, taking the

20 -minute demo around. As we'd gather, we'd add ideas for songs and add ideas

for plots, so this was all accreting in archaeological time, but in June of 82,

we all finally wrote it down.

When we were talking about doing another, doing a sequel, we thought for

minute about doing a plot film like Help, which purported to be taking place

1967, when they were...

in their first flash of fame, a quickie American international film.

We didn't make any money off the first film, so who's going to ask us to do a

sequel? After a while, we did. I mean, the 80s rolled along, and the film had

some kind of adherence. People came up to us and said, when are you going to do

the sequel?

You can't do the same form again.

I mean, that was clear. We weren't going to do another backstage documentary

about this band. So, like, a sequel just seemed to be out of the question.

We look too old to do the thing. Yeah.

Well, that's true, too. I think if we had done it right afterwards, we could

have gotten away with it. But like I say, the profits were not the point.

I'm not really sure this was such a great idea. I mean, I don't feel any

than I did at a hotel.

He was going to do a TV special.

This was shot Griffith Park?

No, Pasadena.

Or Alhambra, actually.

Or Altadena. Yeah, some park in the smog belt.

This was about the most elaborate art direction in the movie, recreating

Graceland. Got a copy of the tombstone.

And the gates.

And also, we had the correct spelling of Aaron.

There was some mistake on this. There's some way it's not accurate.

It's very small.

And this was the only Elvis Presley song we could get the rights to.

If I'm going, since my baby left me.

No, you can't hit that note.

Since my baby left me.

Well, I found a new place to dwell.

That's all right. This was written by, what's his name's mother? That actor.

Hoyt Axton's mother. Hoyt Axton's mother wrote this. Wrote Heartbreak Hotel.

Absolutely true. That actor.

Interesting. Well, he was. No, I know. But I mean, basically none of the same.

There was also another scene.

It took place at the gates of Graceland, where we were trying to get in, and it

was locked because it was a Sunday or something, and we're yelling, Mrs.

Presley!

It's too much fucking perspective now.

1967,

that was the first time Spinal Tap came into existence.

Well, the whole world was changing in those days.

Also, we had the world's ear, because we had just released an enormous -selling

single. Listen to the flower people. Flower people.

We toured the world, we toured the states, toured the world and elsewhere.

It was a dream come true.

Michael McKean.

First thing we ever shot on this movie.

Harry Shearer. Shot on tape and transferred to film to give it that

oversaturated but under -focused look.

Christopher Guest. That's Ruth Kunkel playing the drums, the famous studio

drummer.

Because it was in documentary form, if you have a written script, there's no

to really make that seem spontaneous.

There's just no way to act that, and we just knew that that was not going to

work, and we knew enough people that could improvise convincingly to portray

this as a real -life experience that we felt confident that this would work.

I did go to one screening where they showed the four -and -a -half -hour

version.

There's a bootleg copy of the demo that's around.

And also there's a bootleg copy of the four and a half hour version of the

Is that true? Yes, I'll tell you about it. There's also a bootleg copy of Run

Silent, Run Deep, but nobody wants it. But not Letterboxd.

No, French Letterboxd.

French Letterhead.

The thing about this kind of anecdote is that a

lot of these guys, if you've looked at, seen interviews with these real guys, is

they do have interest in the...

either the afterlife or in the paranormal.

The paranormal is a big thing.

They have this mystical kind of connection.

There's a little green globule on his drum seat.

Like a stain, really. It's more of a stain than a globule, actually. You

dozens of people spontaneously combust each year.

It's just not really widely reported.

There is now, in fact, a shank hall in Milwaukee named after a music venue

we visited and blessed.

tour.

This is the... Perkins.

No, no. Is it? Yep.

This,

I believe, is the only piece of music that we're actually playing live as it's

filmed. Jazz Odyssey.

Right.

All the rest were pre -recorded and... Us playing to ourselves.

June Chadwick, the actress, had adopted a working -class, attempting -to -be

upper -middle -class dialect, and she could improvise like crazy. She was

English. That was it.

Hello, darling.

Hello, not surprised.

Janine walked in, and she had the part within seconds. She was just so perfect.

June was very funny, and she also looked like me.

We had the same hair in this movie, so we wound up looking a lot alike.

You see that in rock and roll sometimes, guys who marry women who look just like

them.

It's an elevated form of narcissism. Yeah.

Narcissism with a spare pair of hands.

We saw a few people, some just weren't right.

Tova Borgnine was the leading contender.

But her skin photographed so badly.

Whoopi Goldberg was there for a moment, but they were a hair problem.

Susan George. You know who else was the... Victoria... No, not Victoria

Principal. Steve Martin. Victoria Tennant. Victoria Tennant was the other

serious candidate.

Yeah.

David, spell the glove in here.

We had a few musician friends that were sort of in on the joke, basically, but

it really wasn't until the film came out that this became the tape for all the

band buses, basically.

The reactions were split.

Probably 50 -50 between severe depression and people seeing this and

that's us, and why would they want to make us feel worse about this?

I mean, really, I've had many, many people come up to me and say, you know,

way too painful to watch, and people obviously enjoying it. And then some

not really realizing that we were kidding and just thinking.

I mean, one of the first comments at a screening, I think it was in Seattle,

card was, why would they make a movie about a band like this?

Because they thought it was a real documentary.

The other note was, why is the camera so shaky?

This was before all the AT &T commercials.

I frankly think that this is the turning point, okay? I think this is, we're on

our way now. It's time to kick off.

Where was this?

I don't know, but the sound was created by Johnson Clare on a Prophet 5. That's

right.

There are people underneath these pods, opening them up. This was not mechanical

at all. I mean, this was not electronic or anything. There are guys under those

platforms, guys crouching under or lying down under each of those platforms,

opening them up on cue.

One

of the

trickiest parts of this is that

aside from Dave Caffinetti's keyboard blank, is that because it's a guy

underneath, he's having to pull as hard as he can to keep the thing closed while

everybody's acting as hard as they can to try to get it open. And it really,

there's a lot of faking going on trying to avoid pulling it open because it was

too easy to open, really. It would have opened at the merest touch because the

guy is in a very difficult position down below trying to hold it closed.

There was an argument between Rob Reiner and me over when Mocha's hammering to

try to get the pod open, and we were at the sound mix, and Rob wanted the

hammering louder, and I was always the stickler for absurd reality, saying, how

are we hearing that?

It's a rock and roll band playing very loud, and a guy's hammering. How would

be hearing it any louder than the instruments?

And then Rob went around the room and asked everybody who was there, all the

assistant editors and stuff.

What do you think? Should it be louder? And they said, yeah.

I think it is a compromise.

I have

in my possession, not today, a scrap of paper from one of the writing sessions

where I have written down various rock and roll band names, and on one side it

says F -P -Y -N -A -L, tap.

And then on the flip side, as it's written today, Spinal Path. That's the

time that we came up with that. Some of the other names were...

The poodle people.

No, it was not.

Jumbo Prawns. Jumbo Prawns was written down on that piece of paper, yeah.

Kind of a Jeff Rotel feel to it.

In the past, do you have any fears for your life?

Hyatt House.

There's an interesting...

omission here in his speech. Listen.

To every.

To every. Not every drummer. Or everybody.

He left the subject.

It's not happening to every.

Joyce Heiser plays my girlfriend in this. Vicky Blue.

Runaways. One of the Runaways. Runaways.

Who is now either a real estate broker or a school teacher.

Really? Or both. I believe a real estate broker.

This is Cindy's first massage.

Where'd you get that shirt?

It was made by a woman. It was made by the mother of one of my son's friends.

During one of the times when the band broke up, we all had separate things

we did, and one of the things I did was get involved with, Derek got involved

with Marco Zamboni, the great Italian film director, and did the Spaghetti

Western.

It was like a gangster thing. A futuristic gangster thing.

I'm in an all -white suit, assembling this futuristic gun.

Pointing it, aiming it.

Weren't you trying to get Rob to do it?

To look at it? Weren't you showing it to him? To try to get another job. I think

that's what it was. Possibly. I just wanted to... Yeah, it's getting muddy.

me a minute.

Where is this? This was Janine's first day, actually. I know that.

And I believe it may have been in the same park where we shot the soccer

We did a montage that we wrote a song called America, which is on the album,

it's not in the movie.

and we thought that there might be this very pretentious montage of our trip

across America, and so we shot a bunch of things like us playing soccer with

cops. That song ended up in the tour, the second tour on the second video.

This is the same day as Graceland.

This is that same big park in Altadena. Oh, that park in Altadena, yeah.

But we also did some stuff in Griffith Park when we got on that little, we went

to the zoo and we rode around on the pretentious montage.

Was it the record plant? I think so. Yeah. The same place where we did the

session, recording session scene later, right? Right.

Was that the record plant? I think so.

This was another room in the record plant. This was not the big room.

It's pretty.

Yeah, I like it.

Been fooling about with it for a few months now.

Very delicate.

There would be times when people would laugh because no one had ever heard what

anyone was going to say. And you can see it subtly in some of these shots

where... And it happens still because we've been doing that now. When we do

interviews together, Harry and I were doing these interviews in Australia and

came up with this line that was like a moth... Oh, shit.

They're drawn to it like a... A moth to a flame.

No, like... No. No, it was... They're drawn to it like a moth to a fly.

It's amazing doing this form because you get to hear it for the first time as

well as the audience.

What do you call it?

This is at

the Imperial Terminal of Los Angeles Airport, which is the luxury terminal

from the regular airport where the basketball players fly through and you

MGM Air.

This was the only part of the airport they would allow us to film at.

There were a lot of scenes that were cut out of... Derek's zucchini fetish. As a

matter of fact, there was a scene where I was teaching Moke how to wrap it for

the stage.

There was actually a scene that prefaced that with us having a meeting with

Derek and saying, you know, look, we don't know how to say this. You're a bit

light downstairs.

You need something more up front.

What do you mean? Project more.

Yeah, more projection, let's say. Exactly, yeah. Trying to diplomatically

explain it. You've got to reach out to the audience a bit more.

The fruit basket's a little light.

What do you mean?

It's just the guy's refusing to take the hint.

I couldn't quite tell whether they were talking about me or my character, but I

chose to believe it was about the character.

Do you have any artificial plates or limbs?

Not really, no.

Would you... In the demo version, the lady with the wand there was Lorna

Patterson.

This was actually the first song written for this movie.

Because this was written for Lenny and the Squigtones. We did it, maybe didn't

record it, we did it once or twice.

These were also mixed specifically for this purpose. In other words, when we

these pre -records of the music, we wanted them to sound like they would in

hall as opposed to a record mix.

The movie The Rose was being done around the same time, and we talked to one of

the sound guys, and he said they were having a big problem because the tuning

various takes and through the show was changing, and they were having a lot of

trouble editing, and they were having to go back and re -record over what they

had done. Because we had talked about just doing it live. It created more

technical problems than it... You have to play to a click, first of all, which

is a drag.

Annoying.

There were other problems, too. You couldn't play at the right volume level.

Cameramen couldn't hear directions, so if we had played live, we would have had

to play, I think that we were told we would have had to play softer than it

would have been practicable to do so that people could hear instructions and

stuff. Extras had to be given directions.

It was a major can of worms. It was our first choice, but there was no way we

could end up doing it.

Hi, Artie Fufkin. So many promo guys that we've run into since then have said

so many words, I'm kind of the Artie Fufkin of the Northwest region, like

thing to be proud of.

There's a wonderful scene not in this movie where the ostensible purpose of

visit is to get us to do a radio station appearance the following morning at 7 a

.m.

Joyce is already laughing. This is an example of the camera starts to pan. It

starts on the woman that plays my girlfriend, and she's just laughing.

Who was it that came in with the food?

Archie Han comes in with food, and there's a great eating scene that they

in the movie.

Archie is in the film. Yeah, here he is.

Oh, it's the food!

Oh,

thank God!

Where did I put this?

That scene didn't pan out at all, but between this and that, he sticks around

the room, and it ended with Paul Schaefer. Do you want me to show you how

want you to do this? Take a watch, I'll break an egg on my head. And he breaks

an egg on his head.

What record store is this?

Moby Disk. Moby Disk in the Valley. Long gone. On Ventura.

Now called Colors.

What are you doing to me here? Chuck Levine. Chuck Levine. Wonderful actor.

was in a play with you, wasn't he, Harry? Yes. He was in Beyond Therapy, I

believe.

This scene is a virtually literal recapitulation of an experience that

and I had with the credibility gap in Tucson in front of a convention of audio

tape wholesalers, Larry Finley's International Tape. something, and we

exactly what we needed for sound and lights and stuff, and absolutely none of

was done. Nothing was done. Lou Dennis of Warner Brothers Records came

after the show and just literally played that thing. Guys, I want you to do this

for me. Kick my ass, please. Listen,

it's my fault. Please, kick my ass. It wouldn't give us the satisfaction of

getting mad at him.

And we gave credit to him on our album on Warner Brothers, Lou Kick My Ass

Dennis. did this scene, and he now brags to everybody that he meets, you know,

I'm the guy. I'm the real artist. I'm the kick -my -ass guy.

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

The drug use in this scene is sort of a rare occurrence of

that in this movie. We had a big discussion about that, and one of the...

reasons you don't see it happening more is that they wouldn't have allowed that.

They would have gone over to the cameras and said, you know, go away now. We

don't want to see you. It wouldn't have been realistic to show that. They would

let it be peripheral at most, but never would you see a scene of them getting

high.

There was also the idea we'd spoken about that these guys had been together

already for so long that they had already even passed that.

They may have gone through that stage and they were probably, one of them was

probably AA and they were probably not even doing that anymore much.

This getting lost sequence, we saw a tape of Tom Petty playing somewhere in

Germany where he's walking backstage and a door is opened and he ends up on an

indoor tennis court.

And there's just this moment of stunned, you know, where am I? And then he

continues looking for the stage.

Wonderful Smith.

Originally cast in the part was a man named Spodey Odie. But he died right

before, you know, his call time. I also had this experience for real. My friend

Danny Rifkin, the occasional manager of the Grateful Dead, who have... years of

occasional management to their credit, and he invited me to see them at Madison

Square Garden. I was living in New York. Madison Square Garden has a circular

rotunda to it, and I went around and around and finally went in the wrong

and was in felt form and watching two light heavyweights boxing, and what

happened here?

So there's plenty of precedence for this. Where is this? Do we know? This is

basement of either Variety Arts or that other big theater, the Embassy. The

Embassy. The Embassy Artorium, which is no longer there, probably. Yeah, it is.

It is, really? Mm -hmm.

I've seen it in the last week. We've got a lot of stuff from the demo there. I

think all the concerts.

Which is where? On Figueroa.

Spring? I thought it was on Spring.

Bright Arts is on Spring.

Other way.

Other way.

This is in the Valley. What is this place?

Seasons.

Yeah, which is now probably a J .K. Frimple or something.

J .K. Frimple?

We're too embarrassing to even talk about.

This was early on in the shoot.

Yeah. We were purely dependent on the availability of locations.

Actually, there's a lot more continuity going on here. A woman comes and takes

our order, a woman played by Miss LaPierre.

Georgette LaPierre. Georgette LaPierre. Georgette LaPierre, thank you, who was

very funny. She was a waitress and everything, and she interrupted this

argument.

to take our orders, gets them all wrong, comes back to check on them, they're

all wrong, comes back with the wrong orders anyway. So it's like a running

thing. It was a long, long scene.

But the meat of it was always the Janine's suggestion for astrological

then the counter move of let's do Stonehenge.

There was no new age at that time. It's more about the idea that the stereotype

of the woman that breaks up a band is of this ilk, more than the fact that it

was a widespread, generic thing in Los Angeles.

As long as we've known the rock and roll scene, there have always been people

who've been of this consciousness.

It wasn't called New Age, but it was definitely the same stuff, crystals and

itching and all that. This is the heart of what happens to bands, where a woman

comes in.

girlfriend of one of the guys and whatever ensues is the heart of what

to these groups on these tours. Every group that we've ever met has seen this

and said that to us.

It

wasn't Yoko

at all, really. That's something that's so specifically Beatles.

It's not just, oh, a woman broke up this band. It's just...

There's a very specific kind of boys club atmosphere and a relationship that

goes back years and years between Nigel and David, for example, that really

couldn't take the stress.

And it's not so much women are bad because they do this. It's like these

haven't got a clue as to how to, you know, how to handle this or how to be

in any sense.

They're all just they're playing at something. And if anything, you know,

in the way, it's trouble.

They treat it like trouble and they run from it.

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 still my favorite scene in the movie.

This was live, too.

You did one day for about 20 minutes, I think. I think I did this for about

probably half an hour.

That was the setup.

That was directly off of Jimmy Page's playing with the bow.

This looks absolutely perfect.

I mean, it's the right proportions. It'll be this color, right?

Angelica Houston.

She wasn't a known actress at the time. She was a known daughter.

And girlfriend.

And girlfriend.

This is also the Bonaventure Hotel, I believe.

We had a problem with this prop, didn't we?

No, this was good. Oh, okay.

This was the embassy, I believe.

We did a stonehenge that was too large for the room. At the Albert Hall. We

the other way.

And you'd see this prop being just trying to jam it through the door. It

even get in the building.

We did a couple of things on the road where the prop would arrive by Federal

Express in an envelope.

Just in time, in the number, a man in a uniform would come out and bring a

delivery, and Harry would open it. This is what I was asked to do.

18 inches, right here, it's specified, 18 inches.

I was given this napkin, I mean... Forget this!

Fuck the napkin!

Another alternative title for the film. Fuck that.

In ancient times, hundreds of years

before the dawn of history.

We played Gazaries. We played The Central and a place down in Orange

Radio City. Radio City.

Opening for Killer Pussy. That's right.

Teenage Animal Nurses in Bondage. Right. The Gazaries show was...

Sort of the clincher. Was that the one with the... Iron Butterfly. Iron

Butterfly, yeah, was also on the bill. We were supposed to open for them, and

they decided that they had to go home early. Well, they had a dental problem.

Their bass player had dental work done that day and was under heavy sedation.

Yeah, like a matter. Like a fish, he was under heavy sedation.

That show was kind of the convincer for us that this absolutely was like just

another band coming in there. Nobody had any idea that this was... We just

played very loud and whatever.

And I remember some kid as we were walking off saying, You guys shred!

And I thought, well, that's kind of good. Of course, that was my agent.

No, this was a...

15 -year -old kid.

That was your manager. And we were on our way.

See,

we should have had Rick playing that hood a lot more often than we did.

That leather hood.

Well, now he can do it.

Now we'll bury him in it.

Now he could do it and he wouldn't notice.

Rick, our drummer, the real drummer in this film, when we went on the road, one

of the things that he expressed most amazement and delight about was the fact

that we were staying in pretty first -class hotels.

They give you all this free shampoo.

I've got a two -year collection of it. He had this huge, this bag full of,

there's like dozens of bottles, little bottles and packets of shampoo. And he

really thought he was getting away with something. Like, they don't have a clue.

I'm taking all this shampoo home.

I mean, that's the other thing, is going on tour after doing this movie, there

were a number of times and junctures where you're stupefied by the awareness

how absurd it is to have made fun of this and then to have to experience it

real.

The little children of Stone Age Beneath the haunted moon

For fear that daybreak might come

This song, I, Chris, actually have an interest in Celtic music, and I play the

mandolin, and the genesis of the song came from one of my doodling around on

mandolin. Of the middle bit. Yeah. The middleman.

Michael McKean.

That's the intersection of Rick and his character right there. Intersection of

Rick and Sepulveda.

That's his girlfriend, Sepulveda, right there.

That is his wife. That was his wife, the harpo wig.

Whom we met in Denver.

Rachel. Rachel.

Harry Fuhrer. To be able to do the Spinal Tap Tour in 1992, we had to take

thing that we had created between 1980 and 1982 and to put it on the road in

1992.

We had to follow a trail that went through the bankruptcies of three movie

studios to this company called Parafrance, which is a subsidiary of L

Cosmetics, and negotiate a deal to buy back the rights to use our own creation.

which was an 18 -month process.

We would have gone on tour the previous year, except we had the negotiations for

the rights to be Spinal Tap hadn't been completed by then.

It was the most arduous, crazy, expensive, lunatic part of this thing,

back the rights to our own creation, because to make the movie, we had to

up all rights to everything excepting our firstborn. We don't own the

on the music, and we didn't even own the right to be Spinal Tap. And when we

went on tour, our manager approached the people who had the publishing.

to the original songs, because we'd written a whole bunch of new songs. We

well, listen, why don't you give us a piece of these songs that would be kind

an incentive for us to perform them on the tour?

Their response was, we are in the business of acquiring things, not giving

away.

Christopher Guest.

The fact is that we could have probably done all this without them ever knowing

that they even owned it, because it was just buried. You know, people buy up.

catalogs of things, and they would never know that it ever happened. They would

never have been able to track it down themselves.

We still pay them a royalty. We have to pay Frenchmen every time we say hello.

And that's not a euphemism.

No.

We have a license, a limited -in -time license to use the characters and the

name, and every time we use it, the license is automatically extended. But

we... go through a period of three years without using the characters in any

way. It reverts, and we have to go through the whole thing again.

So that, in a way, is a strange incentive to resurface from time to time

keep our right to be these guys.

Wow. Free to be, you and me.

Well, they also test their cosmetics on animals, so what do you want from them?

That's right.

Something we've never done.

You were asking about comedy antecedents, and there's one that, I

it's for everybody, but at least for me, was kind of an antecedent of this,

which is a very obscure sketch by Peter Sellers on one of his records, where he

interviews a rock and roll star named Twit Conway.

With Irene Handel. Or does he do both? No, he does both. He does the women and

the manager. Yeah, he does a... Major Ralph.

A BBC woman interviewer interviewing this idiot rock star, Twit Conway, and

Bengali -like manager.

It's from the 60s, this record, right? Yeah.

And she says... What have you done to your blue jeans?

He says, I've cut the hole out.

Cut the knees out of magic. Cut the knees out. They were too tight, so I cut

knees out. And she says, well, he says, well, take my fountain pen and ink in

where the flesh shows.

That's a very funny sketch.

We are just good friends.

That is the answer to another question.

The answer to this one is... I want to become an all -round... We all know

of course. Yeah, I want to become an all -round...

Entertainer. No, he has to finish the... Entertainer. Yeah.

My dream is to one day play old Vic in Shakespeare.

Now we're not going to fucking do Stonehenge.

We had auditions for musicians. For the demo.

We had an original keyboard player who left us because it was taking us so long

to get a movie deal. He called us when... He was a marvellous player named

Sinclair who ended up doing some tracks on the soundtrack.

And he called up and he said, guys, I'm sorry, I've got to go on the road with

Uriah Heep.

And he went off with Uriah Heep, came back before we filmed the picture, but

had to replace him in the meantime.

But he told us the story of Uriah Heep being booked into an Air Force base,

which we said, thank you very much, we'll use that.

This is the real LAX, the real terminal at LAX.

This is available light, I think.

Most of it's available light.

Everyone's on the move. This is a gorilla.

This was done just the way you would do it, so you're not traipsing in there

with that many trucks or anything.

We had a very small crew. There was virtually no crew as you would know a

crew.

Once we were going, we were going. We were on our own thing.

They couldn't ask, how many pages did you get today? Because we had no idea.

Usually it's like, we got five and three -eighths pages. There was no being

ahead or behind.

Brothers always fight, sort of disagreements and all that.

We really have a relationship.

This was the record plant?

Yes.

This was a very long scene. Obviously, this is live as well.

Everybody in the music business has heard this Trogs tape, where the Trogs

having a very difficult time trying to get a guitar part down. That was sort of

our template for what was supposed to be happening here.

We just did it for a very protracted period of time, built it as a very long

scene, and this is...

the distilled version.

Jesus Christ, this is fucking all we need.

You can't fucking concentrate because you're a fucking wife. Simple as that,

right? It's your fucking wife.

There was a cut that was even more like this.

There were something like 40 hours of footage to cut down.

We were all in on the editing process, so this was a group effort.

Bob Layton was the editor who's obviously gone on to do a lot of

The final version, the film veered back and forth before it got to this point.

And following this scene, there was another scene that took place just

David and Nigel after the smoke had cleared.

And it's the two of them kind of like talking about old times and talking

what's the problem in here and everything. It was just, it was too

think out of that...

came the intensity that we did this other scene.

It was because we knew it was about something bigger than just, you know,

two and a half minutes or whatever is on the screen.

And you really do need, you have to get a sense of not just a series of scenes

that are funny strung together. So this helped add a dimension.

There was also another subplot of another guitarist that was hired to

me. After Nigel talks out. So they find a very handsome,

flashy lead guitar player who could also sing a million times better than David.

And so what happens is we shot some scenes. We found this kid who was, in

this rock and roll guy. What was his name?

I don't remember his name. Lucky? Peter, I think.

Lucky sounds good.

Not because that was the name. It just sounds good. But he really had, I mean,

all the women on the crew. Yeah, very handsome, blonde, dazzling guitar player

could sing. And we shot scenes where...

David tries to sneak up to the mic to sing, and he basically gets pushed out

this new guy. I guess I have that footage somewhere at home. Really? It

never... It wasn't even in the four -and -a -half -hour version we saw recently.

He's never amounted to anything.

I don't know.

I don't think he has. Maybe his name is, you know, George Michael or something.

I don't know.

Although I shouldn't talk. My hair's getting a little shaggy, too. Better not

get too close to you. They'll think I'm part of the band.

I'm joking, of course. Shall we go in, and I'll show you around?

You're joking, of course.

Well, we're gone at that point.

Michael and I had done a tour with our group, the Credibility Gap, had gone on

tour with Fred's group, the Ace Trucking Company, and we had closed at least one

nightclub with that tour.

Mr. Kelly is in Chicago.

I had done Little Murders in 1969 with Fred in New York City.

So we know Fred Willard's rich tapestry.

Sucker for it every time.

Fred Willard is one of the great, great improvisers.

Never heard any of it?

No.

He's got us on the edge at every moment of this thing.

He had done Fernwood Tonight. Post -Fernwood, yeah. And pre -History of

People.

This was some warehouse?

No, I believe this was a real airport.

This wasn't White Man Airport, was it, in the Valley?

I don't think so.

I don't know.

It's like we're talking about a movie that was made in the 30s. We can't even

remember. Well, that was back when Monogram was on the corner of Sunset.

was before they took the streetcar tracks out.

The old red car. Remember that? Yeah.

I still remember going to Cal State Dominguez to do the scout of that

I do, too.

This premise here, I saw a production of, I think, Midsummer Night's Dream in

the park in New York City, Shakespeare in the Park, where this happened. A

Shakespearean production where a guy comes out and thinks, and justly so, so

that you bequeath, and you hear, please have a taxi over on the Amsterdam and

79th Street at 10 .30, please. The corner, the northwest corner.

And the place, of course, you could not continue.

You totally ruined the gig there.

He walks off and, you know, I mean, he can't be expected to sit home and get

money. We've got to get someone else in there. The lobby of the Hyatt. So that

might have been the same day or the next day.

Yep. You've got to understand that, like, in the world of rock and roll,

are certain changes that sometimes occur.

And you've just got to sort of roll with them, you know. I mean, you read that,

you know, you saw exactly how many people have been in this band over the

37 people have been in this band over the years.

Rob is hunching behind Peter and tapping him and whispering in his ear to move

if he's not in the right place.

But then Peter put the camera on and... Yeah.

And that was during lunch. That was right.

If Marty DeBerge wasn't in the scene, Rob... had free reign. He didn't even

to wear the hat.

Although he did every day just in case we saw him. But you often know as actors

to sense where he is with the camera so you can stall line and everybody's

working as a sort of a team to know when it's back on you and to finish a line.

What do you mean?

He's not going back? No. We shall work together again.

Listen. Magic. You think that's video games? No, that wasn't video games, but

video games within this sequence.

This was Magic Mountain. Magic Mountain.

There's two tracks playing. There's two pieces of music playing, and one of them

is video games.

We've got a big dressing room, though. What?

We've got a big dressing room. Oh, we've got a bigger dressing room than the

puppets, so that's refreshing.

I've got some menacing rocket fuel.

A real line from Mr.

Caffinetti, which we said, you have to say this in the picture.

Mendocino, Rocketfield. He would pay this to us on occasion.

Double that. If you recall the line, it fits.

Oh, yeah. I've got two hands here.

It's not enough.

It's what the hands can do and can't do.

Becoming a cult phenomenon is not like taking off.

Like taking off is when you make $15 million over the weekend and you cost

That's taking off.

It's been so gradual. I mean, it's like watching a person, like watching a child

you see every day grow. You don't really notice it. It's like watching a chia

pet. Very much.

A slow chia pet.

A very slow bonsai chia pet.

I just think it's because there's a certain amount of reality to it. Even if

you've never been in the music business, don't know anything about the music

business, or don't know any rock and roll people, you know, firsthand, it

has that kind of quality of this is really happening to us.

I ran into somebody recently who was there, who was an extra. I was there.

This is live, too. Yeah.

These were extras. The park wasn't really open for business that day. This

wintertime. Yeah. This was November, so the park wasn't open during the week.

Top of the Hyatt. Top of the Hyatt.

One of the people at this party is one of the more notorious figures in the

record business, Artie Ripp, who is one of the major guys in Buddha Records, and

there's a million stories about Artie Ripp. We cast him in this, I think,

basically just for the authenticity of having a real record business character

in it.

And also Donahue, Rachel Donahue.

That's right.

spotted briefly, DJ and widow of Tom Donahue, who invented underground radio,

progressive rock radio.

It's a good crowd, good crowd.

It is, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. I mean... John Sinclair's wife.

Right. And Lindsay... Lindsay Duran. Lindsay Duran, executive producer of the

movie. And now vice president of Paramount, right? Yes. Yeah, of Charged

Productions.

The interesting thing now is when we made the film, it is actually in the

that has gone by...

I have friends that live in North London, in Tufnel Park and that area.

The East Ender accent has now spread all over London, and the middle class and

even upper middle class are speaking the way that the Cockneys used to speak up

until probably the early 80s, and then it started to spread.

And I have friends now, and these are kids going to good schools and going to

university. You can barely understand what they're saying. It's really

extraordinary.

And then you could very much define in a given section of London, and we

invented the Squatney area, and we actually found it when we did our

92. We went past the Docklands and we found E14 or wherever it is, and we

the Squatney area.

I have the answer. Yeah, I do. Me too.

This is the embassy. This might be the embassy. Yeah.

And specifically in this location, we were all kind of trying to nail the art

director because the graffiti didn't look very realistic for backstage rock

roll graffiti. And we'd been in enough toilets.

He'd written, gosh darn it, on the wall.

Go to the whiskey. Go hang and go to the top of the troubadour. How about go to

the borderline? What was that place in London? Oh, the borderline.

That had the best graffiti in it. Yeah, and CBGBs.

Hand me another Freddie Mercury. This one's dead.

This one's cold.

This one's cold.

Hand me another Freddie Mercury. Pass me another Freddie Mercury.

This one's cold.

Pretty amusing.

That jacket now is the jacket I'm wearing in this film.

I traded to Jeff Beck. He gave me one of his guitars, and I sent him this

jacket. So he has that somewhere in England right now.

So did you just come here to hang around back a day? It's like a real rock and

roll. I thought we should do it.

That's sedative reading.

Well,

he's back off the wagon here. Every character I play has a drinking problem.

It's a personal choice. It's a tax thing.

Spinal taps recording, sex part.

Number five last week, actually.

So he asked me...

to ask you, Tat, if you'd be interested in reforming. We

talked about how much stress do we place on, how much emphasis do we put

on this type of scene, and we thought it was, I mean, we had arguments about

this, as to how...

how much we needed to do that. I think in retrospect, it helps because it

shows, you know, they're so familiar now with a camera crew being around that

you don't get the feeling as if that's a problem.

And that you do see this kind of, I mean, it's kind of pathetic and poignant

see this arc where I leave the band and come back. And I think it adds a level

that you wouldn't normally have.

This is a huge backstage area, this embassy.

It's a very weird place.

It's mainly used for religious events, which this was, really.

David.

Do a good show, all right?

Yeah, okay.

It has this great sepulchral echo from being so huge, which really added to the

flavor of this scene. It was total accident. It was a place we were

but it has this... Everything just echoes like...

Sound of doom.

What we've seen over the years is when we've played live recently is that

want to feel as if they're part of the movie. Because they were the audience

watching this movie, the audience that comes to the show, that sort of is a

circular thing, feel as if they are now in the movie in a funny way. And they

become the audience in the movie. And it's very difficult to separate. It's a

very bizarre phenomenon. It's hard to explain, but...

They know all the songs, and they feel as if we can never tell if they are, at

what point this leads, you know, separates the idea that they think

they joking?

Or are they, do they know that we're, because when we play real shows now,

a two -hour show, it's a rock and roll show. It's loud. At what point does this

become real and imagined, you know?

The harness I wore during this picture is now hanging in the HBO Comedy Hall of

Fame in New York City on permanent loan.

Fans can't stay ahead of us.

Usually they can't even find us.

No, I mean, we've had to do so much for the promotional tour. We did a whole new

set of histories of what had happened in the intervening period of time and kept

embellishing it as we were being interviewed. So there's no way that, I

we've had...

so much more time to work on this stuff than they have.

Nobody's really brought us anything new.

Generally, we haven't spoken out of character about the film or the parts.

have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in motel and hotel rooms with wigs

talking to journalists about the film, but basically as the characters.

Basically, especially when we were touring, felt it was incumbent on us to

maintain the reality of the band much more than to acknowledge that these were

fictional characters.

And I think it paid off in the sense that Chris was talking about of the

audience feeling part of the movie as opposed to part of a performance by some

fake people.

That wouldn't sell at all.

Tonight only, a performance by fake people.

Well, the Archies did it.

Monkeys did it? Yeah.

That is Sadahura Oh's jersey I'm wearing, the actual one. And that was

call for, you know, extras in Los Angeles for Asian extras, you know,

none of them were Japanese. I think they were all Korean. Mostly Filipino and

Korean. Oh, well.

This, for all of us, because we're actors and musicians, is the ultimate

is that you can...

Do a movie where you're acting and hopefully being funny and playing music.

me a break. It's like show business camp.

The extension of that when we go on the road is being let loose in front of

thousands of people.

Absolutely. And it fulfills a number of levels because we're playing songs that

are fun to play where you get to...

Play and you're really playing and you're having fun singing and you're

cavorting cavorting and compelling and ticking also I mean when we're on the

road, especially when we're doing media stuff or being observed We're staying in

character So the tour and the build -up to the tour was actually a much longer

period of acting as these characters than the movie The movie was five weeks

of our lives. Yeah, the tour and the build -up to the tour was like three

-quarters of a year.

Most of the day... The second tour.

Yeah, the second tour. Most of those days spent in character improvising with

each other in front of strangers.

Another element in that is that the three of us like to make each other

and that's a huge part of it because, you know, you're sitting with morning

because they get it.

And so we're basically... Playing to each other. Playing to each other and...

Again, we've never heard what we're going to say, and that becomes that kind

little challenge.

There was a day where we were interviewed by a lot of people in

was one guy, I remember, almost the last person that came into this hotel room

from one of the papers who just took it as a personal insult that he was being

required to talk to people in character. It was as if he was being required to

interview puppets, and he had to speak to pieces of fluff. It was beneath him,

and he refused to do it. Well, it is pretty surreal. We've done maybe 500

interviews. sitting in hotel rooms wearing wigs. It is an odd idea,

It's an odd life. The specific reason why he was knighted was for the founding

of Hogwood, which is a summer camp for pale young boys.

We wanted to avoid that Bob Hope movie thing where... These are all interviews,

as you notice. It was a thing in the 70s that was happening in the mid -70s with

Burt Reynolds movies where it was just him and Dom Dewey making each other

laugh. We tried to avoid that.

Yeah, the end of Hardly Working had that, too.

Kent Bader, the assistant film editor, is a big film editor now as well.

Kent Bader. Cary Gleiberman. The Gleib. That's right. That's the man you shot in

Roma 79.

Don Newman and Erwin Mucus, as you called him.

Occasion or another, the second AD. I haven't seen this in a long time.

Michelle Payne did the hair. Wonderful.

And Annie Rapp, the continuity director, who had a real challenging job since

there was no continuity. There was no script, so he was the script supervisor.

She's become a huge script supervisor.

Not well -known, but she's just 400 pounds. No, she's very, very prominent

the industry.

She would write down every single thing that happened. A thankless job in this

particular occasion.

No, it was like being the comic strip editor at the New York Times.

It was a job you really kind of defined as you went.

Have a good time all the time.

That's my philosophy, Marty.

I believe virtually everything I read.

And I think that is what makes me more of a selective human than someone who

doesn't believe anything.

I like watching the credits.

Yeah, I'm trying to remember all these people. Who did Julie Payne play? Oh,

was a mime waitress. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Paul Shortino, wasn't he the guy that used to hang around us and wanted to be

our keyboard player?

Yeah. Yeah.

And Gloria Gifford.

And Nancy Childs ultimately ended up at the store on 3rd Street. No bones.

Musical stylings.

Apropos of the writing credit, because of the way this movie was created, the

four of us went to the Writers Guild and said, we really want to acknowledge the

contributions of the actors in creating the dialogue for this picture. Is there

any credit that we can give that will acknowledge that?

What about additional dialogue? They said, no, that's a TV credit.

Well, who cares? It's what happened.

No, we really don't want you to denigrate the importance of the writer.

said, we're not trying to denigrate anything. We're just trying to give

where it's due.

There was a vote by the board of directors of the Writers Guild, 15 to

against anything but us taking this writing credit. That's why that credit

appears in this picture.

They were against acknowledging that anybody but writers could think up

anything.

That's all we could figure out.

What time is it?

It's seven after one.

Well, I was supposed to be somewhere at one.

Well, you are, Michael. You are somewhere at one.

Not the right place. Okay.

Pressure's off.

The bad news, I was supposed to be somewhere at one. The good news, I am

somewhere. I am somewhere.

You are somewhere.

You ain't nobody, but you're somewhere.

It's Jesse Jackson Jr. trying to launch his own career. You are somewhere.

Chicken and waffles for everybody.

For the hours.