This Is Spinal Tap

There had been mockumentaries before This is Spinal Tap. Albert Brooks' 1979 debut feature Real Life was an inspired spoof of the first "reality show" PBS's An American Family, Michael Ritchie's Smile used the form to send up beauty pageants in 1975, and Woody Allen made the fake you-are-there doc Take the Money and Run in 1969 as well as the faux historical documentary Zelig in 1983; plus there were countless examples of the form being utilized in non-comedic fiction like Shirley Clarke's "found footage" experiment The Connection (1961), Peter Watkins dystopic TV news doc-from-the-near-future Punishment Park (1971), and the South African arthouse hit The Gods Must be Crazy (1980), which was loosely made in the style of a nature documentary. But Spinal Tap perfected the form and launched the genre. There had never been a film quite like This is Spinal Tap before, and though it birthed a whole category of improvised comedies shot in a cinéma vérité style that would eventually all but take over the TV sitcom, there has never been another film like it. It's hard to imagine a satire this hilariously over-the-top being taken as a real documentary about a real band by moviegoers, but This is Spinal Tap was conceived and executed with such commitment to truth in characterization and performance that many who initially saw it didn't realize it wasn’t real, and were baffled at why anyone would choose to make a movie about this band.

Of course, most audiences were in on the joke. But of the principal on-camera team that created the band and film, only director Rob Reiner, who plays the documentarian, looked much like the guy most people knew from TV. Michael McKean was part of a duo with David Lander portraying Lenny and Squiggy every week on the runaway hit sitcom Laverne & Shirley, Harry Shearer had been a cast member of Saturday Night Live during the tail end of that show's original '70s run, and Christopher Guest had appeared in several films, on stage and TV, memorably with Reiner in the All in the Family episode in which Mike and Gloria recall how they first met as a result of Guest's character setting them up on an awkward blind date. Still, under their wings and eyeliner, sealed into their tight leather outfits, and deeply immersed in their characters of David St. Hubbins, Derek Smalls, and Nigel Tufnel, it was hard for even the savviest comedy fan to recognize these actors.

The mid-80s was the decade when almost comically broad heavy metal began its dominance. Started largely in 1960s England by extremely loud blues-rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, characterized by whaling lead singers with big hair and virtuosic guitarists who played lengthy, heavily distorted solos in the middle of songs, Heavy Metal music had become so commonplace by the mid-'80s that there were many such bands who had already become has-beens. Spinal Tap was envisioned as one of those aging rock groups. The concept had grown out of a musical parody McKean, Guest, Shearer, and Reiner had devised for a failed sketch comedy show they all worked on in 1978 with the meta title The TV Show. All four were talented musicians as well as gifted comic actors, and they loved improvising as these characters. As the years rolled on, they would frequently discuss the idea of doing something with this fake band for TV or film, developing a full history of the group's various incarnations with lengthy backstories for each character. They also wrote songs that the band had ostensibly written and performed during the various decades it had been active. By the time it came to shooting the movie, each performer knew their characters and the band's collective history so well it was as if it all really existed.

When they attempted to write a script for a Spinal Tap movie, they realized the hilarious stuff they came up with together didn’t translate well to paper, and they decided to shoot a 16mm demo in the documentary style they were envisioning, which they could shop around to studios. That short film demo has been made available on many home video releases of The is Spinal Tap, and though it's funny and you can see the germ of the movie in it, you can also understand why no one at the major studios could see how this was going to become a feature film. All in the Family producer Norman Lear ended up backing the project as a favor to Reiner, and the film was made independently with the young, savvy first-time producer Karen Murphy overseeing the project. Though Reiner was an accomplished keyboard player, he opted out of being in the band, probably because his girth wasn't well suited to the band's tight leather outfits. As the film's director, he opted to play the director in the film—Marty Di Bergi (a blend of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Steven Spielberg).

The four leads knew virtually everyone in comedy at the time and invited many of their friends and colleagues to take roles in the picture, knowing these folks would understand how to work in the improvised style they envisioned for their fake doc. Each actor was given an outline for the scene they were shooting that laid out where the scenes started and where they needed to end, as well as who their character was, what they wanted in the scene, and what they knew about the other characters they were interacting with. From that point, it was up to each actor to behave as their character would and get from the start of the scene to the end. In many cases, small bits grew into larger ones. For example, Bruno Kirby played a New York limo driver obsessed with Frank Sinatra. He has a small bit where he tells director Di Bergi that this whole Heavy Metal thing is a passing fad and real music is what Sinatra does. The character was so funny that they had him come up to the hotel room and smoke his first joint with the band, which ultimately leads to Kirby singing Sinatra songs in his underwear. None of that footage made the final cut, but it's indicative of how the movie was loosely structured as it went along, with the story later found in the editing room, much like an actual non-fiction film.

Murphy brought on veteran documentary cinematographer Peter Smokler to shoot the picture with handheld 16mm equipment and a crew that worked exactly like a non-fiction film crew would, except that every scene was shot and reshot three or four times. This was not only so Smokler could get coverage, but also so the performers in each scene could refine their improvised moments. Reiner loved working with Smokler because the cameraman didn't come from the world of improv comedy and often didn't get what was funny about what they were doing, but he had developed and perfected his instincts for what his camera should be trained on from moment to moment so that things would cut together smoothly. Murphy found herself constantly having to explain what was funny about all this to those outside the world of comedy, editing, and documentary filmmaking, as many who looked at the dailies not only didn't find much to laugh at, but they couldn't see how this handheld mess was going to ever look like a real movie.

The concert footage was similarly shot like an actual concert film, with the actors playing all the music live. The three leads were dead set against playing to pre-recorded tracks or a click track to maintain a consistent tempo from take to take. This was how fictional features about musicians were usually produced, but not how concert movies were made, and the actors wanted to be able to play all the musical numbers as if they were really playing at live concerts. This made cutting the concert footage more difficult, but editors Robert Leighton, Kent Beyda, and Kim Secrist were up to the task. Spinal Tap's musical numbers are shot and cut more in the style of another iconic music film from 1984, Stop Making Sense than a film like the previous year's fictional band picture Eddie and the Cruisers. As with Stop Making Sense and other concert films, the band members overdubbed and re-recorded parts of songs after the editors had cut the concert footage together so that details like finger positioning during guitar solos would visually match what was heard on the soundtrack even if the footage had been used from a different performance than the audio. This attention to detail was important to the Spinal Tap members because they genuinely loved the music they were lampooning and took it seriously. They treated every aspect of performance earnestly rather than as a joke.

Ultimately, this commitment to finding humor in authenticity rather than simply showcasing how funny improv actors can be is what sets This is Spinal Tap apart from all the mockumentaries that followed. Guest went on to build his directorial career—everything from TV commercials to feature films—on the mockumentary approach and aesthetic developed with Spinal Tap. But while Guest has never given a comedic performance that wasn't 100% grounded in verisimilitude, the same can not be said of everyone who populates his films. This is especially true of his closest mockumentary collaborator Eugene Levy, co-writer of Guest's Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. Levy, a gifted comic actor, to be sure, is far more interested in getting laughs than creating something organically funny. I'll never forget the first time I saw Waiting for Guffman and how crestfallen I was when Levy, playing one of the community theater actors that the film centers on, explains that he has two left feet and asks the cameraman to pan down to show that, sure enough, he really does! It's the type of painfully contrived comedy beat that is impossible to find in This is Spinal Tap. Every single actor in the final cut of this movie, from Tony Hendra and June Chadwick, who play major characters, to Fran Drescher, Dana Carvey, Paul Benedict, and Anjelica Huston, in single-scene appearances, never seems like an actor trying to get a laugh. Even Paul Shaffer, playing the hilariously inept record promoter Artie Fufkin, feels utterly credible despite how broad his role is. Perhaps it's because the fictional Fufkin is exaggerated in ways that the actual Shaffer himself was already a bit of a show biz caricature. Just as Bruno Kirby's raving about Frank Sinatra probably feels authentic because Kirby actually feels the same way about Frank as his limo driver character does.

The world of aging rock stars is already such an exaggerated milieu that it requires only the slightest heightening to become hilariously satirical. In many cases, no heightening is required at all. Guest has told the story of how one of the inspirations for his character in the band was a stoned musician he once saw at an airport who was constantly being asked by his road manager where he had put his bass guitar. The rocker was so out of it that he couldn't seem to comprehend the meaning of what the increasingly harried manager was asking him. Their lengthy, fruitless exchange could have been a scene out of Spinal Tap; no exaggeration required.

Any moments that didn't come off as 100% authentic simply didn't make the final cut. In some cases, the outline of a scene wasn't working, but the performers were able to take it in a different direction. One instance of this was a scene where the band, after learning that the rooms they've booked at a hotel aren't available, bump into fellow rocker Duke Fame, who is enjoying a great deal more success than Spinal Tap at that point. Real-life rocker Paul Shortino, who had sung for Rough Cutt and Quiet Riot, was cast as Duke Fame but wasn't really capable of improvising the scene as the creators had envisioned. So that scene became more about the interaction between Spinal Tap's manager (Tony Hendra) and Duke Fame's manager, played by WKRP in Cincinnati star and founding member of the San Francisco-based improv troupe The Committee, Howard Hesseman. The re-envisioned scene led to Hessman's sublimely dismissive line, "We'd love to stand around a chat, but we've gotta sit down in the lobby and wait for the limo." That line is not only stingingly uproarious, it crystalizes and comments on the status of each character in the scene.

The movie is crammed wall-to-wall with some of the most quotable lines of dialogue ever filmed. These lines do much more than provide a showcase for an actor who is quick on their feet, as is so often the case in Guest's later pictures. The laughs here tell the story. The ensemble in This is Spinal Tap performs with a uniform level of excellence and credibility, never seen again in any of the myriad films and TV shows that adopted the mockumentary style, a form that, over the years, devolved into the laziest approach to filmed comedy imaginable. For some major rock stars, the satire of Spinal Tap hit so close to home that they found the film more depressing than hilarious. But, the movie quickly became a staple of tour buses and greenroom TV sets. So many of the things depicted in the movie have literally happened to almost every touring musician, not just those in British Heavy Metal bands. The scene in which Spinal Tap is trying to make an entrance for an arena show but gets lost in the confusing backstage hallways—eventually having to stop and ask a janitor, played by New Deal era comedian Wonderful Smith, how to get to the stage—was inspired by a video of Tom Petty at a venue in Germany, but it turned out to be a universal experience that practically every performer whose ever played a large venue has been through.

Released in early March of 1984, This is Spinal Tap was hardly a major hit. It more than doubled the $2M budget Norman Lear had fronted, but it disappeared from theaters rather quickly. If ever the was a movie made to be watched over and over again on home video, it was Spinal Tap. It's one of those films you can drop in on at any point, and, at just 82 minutes, it practically begs you to start the film again as soon as it's over. In order to maintain the copyright and legal control over the fictional band and its characters, McKean, Guest, and Shearer have reunited as Spinal Tap every few years for some type of project. A TV movie, The Return of Spinal Tap, consisting mostly of footage from a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, was released as a promotional film made to coincide with their 1992 album Break Like the Wind. In May 2022, director Rob Reiner announced that an official movie sequel was going into production with the original band members, him as Marty Di Bergi, and cameos from folks like Paul McCartney, Elton John, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, and Questlove. As with most legasequils, I can't say I have high hopes, but I also understand the desire to return to the wonderful playground that is this movie, this music, and these characters!