This Is Spinal Tap
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| This Is Spinal Tap. | |
|---|---|
 U.S. DVD Cover | |
| Directed by | Rob Reiner |
| Produced by | Karen Murphy |
| Written by | Christopher Guest Michael McKean Harry Shearer Rob Reiner |
| Starring | Rob Reiner Michael McKean Christopher Guest Harry Shearer Fran Drescher Bruno Kirby |
| Distributed by | Embassy Pictures |
| Release date(s) | Image:Flag of the United States.svg 2 March, 1984 |
| Running time | 82 min |
| Language | English |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
- This article is about the film. For the soundtrack album, see This Is Spinal Tap (album).
This Is Spinal Tap is a 1984 mockumentary directed by Rob Reiner and starring members of the semi-fictional heavy-metal glam rock band Spinal Tap. The film is a mock rockumentary that satirizes the wild personal behavior and musical pretensions of bands such as Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Queen, Aerosmith, KISS, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and The Beatles, among many others. The cast worked with the band Saxon in preparation for their roles.
Much of the film was ad libbed, and several dozen hours of footage were shot before Reiner edited it down to the released film. A 4½ hour bootleg version of the film exists and has been traded among fans and collectors for years. [1]
In addition to the three core members of Spinal Tap, David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls (Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer - respectively - all of whom actually play their instruments), plus Reiner, who appeared as "Marty DiBergi", the maker of the documentary, the film starred Tony Hendra, Paul Shaffer, Fred Willard, Fran Drescher, Bruno Kirby, Howard Hesseman, Ed Begley Jr., Patrick Macnee and Anjelica Huston. Dana Carvey and Billy Crystal also had small roles in the film.
The name Spinal Tap might come from the 1959 dystopian science fiction novel Wolfbane by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth that includes the draining of spinal fluid (using a spinal tap) as a particularly unpleasant and lengthy form of execution. This could be seen as a parody of the late 1960s and early 1970s penchant of rock groups taking inspiration from science fiction motifs, including bands such as Jefferson Airplane; Yes; David Bowie; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Genesis; and Rush, among others.
This film is number 64 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies".
Contents |
[edit] Plot overview
This Is Spinal Tap chronicles the group's waning popularity during a tour of the United States while promoting their latest record, Smell the Glove. The sexist, misogynist, and overly-masculinized elements the general public associates with heavy metal music are parodied throughout. Marty DiBergi (Reiner), a director of television commercials, films the tour and interviews the musicians.
David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel were childhood friends who ran through many band names at the beginning of their career before settling on "The Thamesmen," having an early hit with the song, "Gimme Some Money". Renaming themselves Spinal Tap, they had another hit with the flower power anthem, "Listen to the Flower People", before turning to heavy metal. (This would seem to be an allusion to Status Quo, who had started out as a psychedelic band before turning to the more traditional rock and roll sound that made them famous; Black Sabbath, who were originally a blues-based psychedelic band before turning to their current heavy metal stylings; or the evolution of The Yardbirds into Led Zeppelin.) The original name of the band was "The Originals", which they had to change to "The New Originals" because there was already another band going by the name "The Originals." A mildly serious thread running through the story is that Hubbins and Tufnel possess genuine and substantial talent as composers, but have utterly squandered their potential for a more broad commercial appeal with their crude, vulgar, and adolescent lyrics (thus foreshadowing the film's seemingly deus ex machina ending).
The film notes early on that Spinal Tap — "One of England's Loudest Bands" — have had a succession of drummers, all of whom have died under odd circumstances: one died in a "bizarre gardening accident". (By a strange twist of fate Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro suffered a heart attack and died in such a gardening accident in 1992, after using a pesticide and suffering an allergic reaction.) Another "choked on vomit", specifically someone else's vomit; and one seems to have fallen prey to spontaneous human combustion. St. Hubbins reports that "Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It's just not really widely reported." This run on drummers was a nod towards several bands; both Led Zeppelin's John Bonham and The Who's Keith Moon had died years before, the former having actually choked on his own vomit, while Judas Priest were, for a variety of reasons, on their seventh drummer at the time of the film's release.
Their concert appearances are repeatedly cancelled due to low ticket sales, and tensions rise when several major retailers refuse to sell Smell the Glove due to its sexist cover art (inspired by Whitesnake's Lovehunter album art), and when St. Hubbins' girlfriend — a slightly spacy but exceptionally spiteful and manipulative yoga and astrology devotee — joins the group on tour.
"Polymer Records" (not Polydor Records) decides to release Smell the Glove with an entirely black cover, though without consulting the band (four years after The Damned's, The Black Album, some versions of which were genuinely all-black, but embossed; two years after AC/DC's Back in Black, also all black with embossed writing; and seven years before Metallica's eponymous 1991 album, which featured a nearly-all black cover). This prompts more distress from the band; St. Hubbins delivers the memorable observation, "There's a fine line between stupid and clever."
In an interlude, Nigel Tufnel is shown during his guitar solo spot, playing the guitar first with his feet (parodying Jimi Hendrix's habit of playing his guitar with his teeth) and then with a violin parodying Jimmy Page's violin bow solo spot on "Dazed and Confused".
A memorable segment of the film occurs when a miniature replica of Stonehenge is lowered onto the stage behind the band and two dwarves come on stage to dance around it. The band members were expecting a full sized, 18-foot (5.5 meter) high replica, but were instead presented with an 18-inch (46 cm) model, made exactly as indicated on the original plan by Tufnel (a bar napkin with 18" instead of 18' written on it). St Hubbins laments during the gig debrief, "I think that the problem may have been... that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed... by a dwarf." It is commonly believed this was a play on Black Sabbath's tour for 1983's Born Again album, which featured massive Stonehenge sets that barely fit on the stages the band played (Sabbath's management had ordered the set measurements in feet, but the manufacturers accidentally built the set using meters). But in reality the reverse may be true, as the Stonehenge sequence appeared in a 1982, 20-minute demo of the film. Led Zeppelin also had a Stonehenge stage theme in the final US concerts held in Oakland, California in July 1977.
After the Stonehenge debacle, Spinal Tap's manager, Ian Faith (played by humor writer Tony Hendra), quits in disgust when St. Hubbins suggests his girlfriend co-manage the group. She takes over his duties and begins plotting astrology charts for the entire group, even basing their concert appearances on the alignment of stars. Her character is drawn chiefly on the public image of Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney, and Nancy Spungen as inexperienced interlopers in their lovers' music careers.
When the group performs at a US Air Force base (managed by Fred Willard, who calls the group "Spinal Tarp"), Tufnel's wireless guitar-amplification system receives interference from an air traffic control broadcast, causing him to storm offstage. After Tufnel leaves the group, DiBergi asks St. Hubbins how he feels about his longtime collaborator's departure and St. Hubbins replies, "Well, I'm sure I'd feel much worse if I weren't under such heavy sedation."
Spinal Tap regroup, and attempt to rearrange some of their songs to account for the absent guitar, which leaves them with about 20 minutes of material. Against St. Hubbins' initial reluctance, the group launches "The new birth of Spinal Tap, mark two", with Smalls' fusion-esque, "Jazz Odyssey", which is roundly rejected by their already diminishing fan base. (This would seem to be based on the career of Jeff Beck who turned from hard rock to jazz funk later on in his career.) Adding insult to injury, their only performance of the Jazz Odyssey takes place at an amusement park where they are the opening act for a puppet show.
St. Hubbins and Smalls reconsider "Saucy Jack", their long-abandoned idea for a musical based on Jack the Ripper.
Tufnel returns to tell the group that "Sex Farm", one of their Shark Sandwich songs, is a big hit in Japan and that their former manager would like to arrange a tour. His entreaties are initially rebuffed, but St. Hubbins relents and invites his friend back onstage.
The film ends with Spinal Tap performing in Japan with new drummer, Joe "Mama" Besser (a reference to one of the latter members of The Three Stooges), after Mick Shrimpton's sudden death from spontaneous human combustion. Besser himself then combusts in the background, right at the film's finale. As the band plays on stage, Ian Faith stands offstage, once again the manager of Spinal Tap, while David's girlfriend looks apathetically towards the reunited band.
[edit] Response
This Is Spinal Tap was only a modest success upon its initial release, suffering from, among other things, the failure of many viewers to understand that it was not a real documentary. Audience feedback cards from early screenings had comments such as "Too shaky. Get new cameraman." (some viewers thought it was a serious documentary about a real band.) However, the film found greater success, and a cult following, after it was released on video.
In 2002 the United States Library of Congress deemed the original film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.[2]
The response from Heavy Metal bands was mixed. Almost every band could relate to the scene where Spinal Tap is lost backstage, and local CB and police radios were often picked up by the early wireless sound systems.
The movie cut a little too close to home for some musicians. Eddie Van Halen has said that when he first saw the film, everyone else in the room with him laughed as he failed to see the humor in the film. "Everything in that movie had happened to me," Van Halen said. When Dokken's George Lynch saw the movie he is said to have exclaimed, "That's us! How'd they make a movie about us?" (Konow, David (2002). Bang Your Head. Three Rivers Press, 216-217. ISBN 0609807323.)
It became a common insult for a pretentious band to be told they were funnier than Spinal Tap. As George Lynch put it, the more seriously a band took themselves, the more they resembled Spinal Tap. (Konow, David (2002). Bang Your Head. Three Rivers Press, 216-217. ISBN 0609807323.)
[edit] DVD
This Is Spinal Tap has been released twice on DVD.
The first release was a 1998 Criterion edition which used supplemental material from the 1994 Criterion laserdisc release. It included an audio commentary track with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer; a second audio commentary track with Rob Reiner, Karen Murphy, Robert Leighton, and Kent Beyda; 79 minutes of deleted scenes; Spinal Tap: The Final Tour, the original twenty minute short they shot to pitch the film; a mock promo film, Cheese Rolling; a TV promo, Heavy Metal Memories; and a music video, Hell Hole. Sales of this edition were discontinued after only two years and the DVD has become a valuable collector's item. Much of this material had appeared on a 1994 CD-ROM by The Voyager Company that included the entire film in QuickTime format.
In 2000, a "Special Edition" was released with new supplemental material. It has a new audio commentary track with Guest, McKean, and Shearer performing in character throughout, commenting on the film entirely in their fictional alter-egos, and often disapproving of how the film presents them; 70 minutes of deleted scenes (some of which were not on the Criterion DVD); a new short, Catching Up with Marty DiBergi; a shorter version of Cheese Rolling; the Heavy Metal Memories promo and six additional TV promos; music videos for Hell Hole, Gimme Some Money, Listen to the Flower People, and Big Bottom; segments of Spinal Tap appearing on The Joe Franklin Show; and the theatrical trailer. The special features were produced by Automat Pictures.
On IGN, This is Spinal Tap was the only DVD - and seemingly the only thing reviewed on IGN - to get 11 out of 10, though it is more than likely a joke in reference to the memorable scene in the film.
[edit] Other musical parodies
Other notable "rockumentaries" include:
[edit] Related works
Break Like the Wind, a follow up to Smell The Glove, was released in 1992.
This is Spinal Tap: The Official Companion (ISBN 0-7475-4218-X) was published in 2000. It featured a "Tap'istory", full transcript of the film (including outtakes), a discography, lyrics and an A-Z of the band.
[edit] Audio samples
- The Thamesmen - Gimme Some Money excerpt (file info) — play in browser (beta)
- An excerpt from the Thamesmen's Gimme Some Money
- Problems listening to the file? See media help.
- Spinal Tap - Stonehenge excerpt (file info) — play in browser (beta)
- An excerpt from Spinal Tap's Stonehenge
- Problems listening to the file? See media help.
[edit] See also
- A comprehensive Spinal Tap discography
- Mockumentary
- Waiting for Guffman (1996)
- Best in Show (2000)
- A Mighty Wind (2003)
- For Your Consideration (2006)
- Up to eleven
[edit] External links
- The Ultimate Spinal Tap Discography - the ultimate source for pictures and info on Tap's albums (both real and imagined)
- This Is Spinal Tap at the Internet Movie Database
- SpinalTapFan.com - fan site, includes the extensive guide Spinal Tap A to Zed
- Criterion Collection essay by Peter Occhiogrosso
- Funny and moving short based on Tap
| Films by Christopher Guest and his frequent costars |
|---|
| Films: This Is Spinal Tap | Waiting for Guffman | Best in Show | A Mighty Wind | For Your Consideration |
| Actors: Bob Balaban | Paul Benedict | Ed Begley Jr. | Jennifer Coolidge | Paul Dooley | Christopher Guest | Rachael Harris | John Michael Higgins | Michael Hitchcock | Don Lake | Eugene Levy | Jane Lynch | Michael McKean | Larry Miller | Catherine O'Hara | Jim Piddock | Parker Posey | Harry Shearer | Deborah Theaker | Fred Willard | Scott Williamson |
| Preceded by: The Seventh Seal | The Criterion Collection 12 | Succeeded by: The Silence of the Lambs |
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