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Banging your head against the wall for the want of quality late night entertainment? Well, bang no more… or bang on! Either way, tune in to TCM Underground this weekend for a double dose of heavy metal (movie) madness.
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Having paid her own way through UCLA’s film school by waitressing and by forming her own independent production company at a time when most Hollywood hopefuls would have been content to staff someone else’s, Penelope Spheeris set a pattern for going her own way. After producing Albert Brooks’ first film, the mockumentary REAL LIFE (1979) – and having taught Brooks everything he needed to know about a storytelling medium with which he was entirely unfamiliar – Spheeris received a spate offers to do more of the same: namely, to put her industry and problem-solving ingenuity at the service of male filmmakers. Declining an interview with Warner Bros. to produce PRIVATE BENJAMIN (1980) for Howard Zieff and flatly refusing to make a porno movie, Spheeris instead put her energies into THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981), a documentary study of the So-Cal punk rock music scene. When over a thousand punk fans turned out for the film’s premiere and shut down Hollywood Boulevard, LAPD chief Daryl Gates called for a ban on the film, making it an instant cause célebrè and one of the most talked-about releases of the year. Spheeris’ aptitude for both the documentary and the mockumentary formats put her on the short list of potential directors for THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984), another offer she turned down flat.
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Spheeris spent the next few years toiling in the exploitation market, making the punk rock drama SUBURBIA (1983) for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and THE BOYS NEXT DOOR (1985), a pre-Columbine examination of youth violence. Itching to return to the documentary format, Spheeris jumped at the offer from MTV producers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (later co-directors of the Oscar-winning LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (2006) to add a second film to what would become a trilogy with THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART II: THE METAL YEARS (1988). In her early years as a director of rock-and-roll promos (proto music videos), Spheeris encountered resistance from male music acts disinclined to let a woman breach their inner circles. Through a combination of persistence, toughness, and honesty, Spheeris earned the trust of her subjects, a tack that paid off in DECLINE II. Much has been made of how the film’s subjects (among them, Ozzy Osbourne, Kiss frontman Paul Stanley, Chris Holmes of W.A.S.P., and a cadre of metalhead wannabes plucked off the Sunset Strip) come off as self-parodies straight out of THIS IS SPINAL TAP, though the real story is of how Spheeris persuaded all involved to drop their protective pretenses and get real about a lifestyle from which none wanted to break but which few enjoyed living.
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Spheeris was researching a documentary project on the subject of mental illness, and was in fact on the grounds of California’s Patton State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, when she received an offer from Paramount Pictures and producer Lorne Michaels (a colleague from her early collaborations with Albert Brooks for Michaels’ SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE) to direct WAYNE’S WORLD (1992), a feature film spin-off of a popular series of SNL sketches featuring Michael Meyers and Dana Carvey as diehard heavy metal fans. Going against her instincts, Spheeris opted for the paying job and fell into what she later termed her “sell out” period. Though acting as an intermediary between Paramount and the autocratic Meyers cost Spheeris the job of directing a sequel to the hugely successful WAYNE’S WORLD, she went on to helm such needless studio rehashes as THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES (1993) and THE LITTLE RASCALS (1994), as well as another SNL haircut, BLACK SHEEP (1996). To chase back the bitter aftertaste of studio work, Spheeris channeled profits from her for-hire jobs into completing her rock-and-roll documentary trilogy with THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART III (1998), a look into the lives of so-called “gutter punk” kids, homeless teens (and pre-teens) adrift in the wash of Southern California street life.
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Truth be told, I was never a headbanger and heavy metal music holds very little currency for me. That being said, I am a complete HEAVY METAL geek. Though I missed its theatrical roll-out in July 1981, I watched the animated anthology repeatedly on cable TV in my later college/post-college years. As a long-time Second City Television fan, I was very happy to hear the voices of John Candy, Eugene Levy, and Joe Flaherty in multiple character roles, and of Harold Ramis (who I knew then from the National Lampoon Radio Hour and STRIPES), Richard Romanus from MEAN STREETS (1973), John Vernon from POINT BLANK (1967) and ANIMAL HOUSE (1978), Percy Rodrigues (from every TV show ever made between 1960 and 1980, it seemed), and such assorted Canadian thesps as Jackie Burroughs, Al Waxman, and Harvey Atkin (from MEATBALLS). Plus, HEAVY METAL features the final acting role of Douglas Kenney, the genius who co-founded the National Lampoon Radio Hour and who co-wrote both ANIMAL HOUSE and CADDYSHACK (1980) before dying in a fall from a cliff in Hawaii in August 1980. (Long-time friend Ramis said at the time of Kenney’s death that he probably fell while looking for a place to jump, which says a lot about the brand of comedy that these guys helped to popularize, and which would have an incalculable effect on American humor from the 1970s onward.) I love this movie, particularly the “Harry Canyon” episode.
Tune in on Saturday night at 11:30 pm PST/2:30 am EST.