This week’s TCM Underground double feature of Penelope Spheeris’ THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART III (1998) and Jonathan Kaplan’s OVER THE EDGE (1979) goes out to all the expectant first-time parents out there!
The third, and to date final, installment of a documentary trilogy from filmmaker Penelope Spheeris that began in 1981, THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART III (1998) focuses on a subset of Southern California’s teenage homeless population – underage runaways and street smart tearabouts who have accepted the nickname “gutter punks.” Largely born after the heyday of punk rock but adhering with an almost Pentecostal fervor to its tenets and fashions, the subjects of DECLINE III cloak their true identities under such Dickensian street names as Squid, Filth, Spinner, Troll, Pinwheel, Little Tommy the Queer and Why-Me? but remain to a man (and woman) unable to keep the truth from Spheeris, or to hide their essential innocence and eagerness to please. In a 2015 interview conducted at the time of the long overdue DVD debut of the THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION trilogy, Spheeris told writer Laura Snapes:
“What I found interesting is that it’s human nature to have a family, so they formed new families. They were very protective of each other and still, to this day, so many of them are just as close.”
Finding a distributor for THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART III proved as frustrating for Spheeris as it had been eliciting sympathy and understanding for her gutter punk friends. “I showed it to my agent of the time,” she told Eric Ducker for TheVerge.com. “I asked if we could get distribution for it and he just threw his hands up and walked away.”
While THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART III lapsed upon completion into a kind of limbo (since rescinded), Spheeris was sufficiently inspired by her time with homeless teens to become a Foster parent – a role she has played for half a dozen kids since 2013. For Spheeris, the act is far from community service, reinforcing a sense of family that she never knew as a rootless trailer park kid whose father had been murdered when she was 7 and whose mother subjected her children to multiple, often wildly unstable stepfathers. “DECLINE III is my favorite movie I ever did,” Spheeris recalled in the summer of 2015. “And the people in DECLINE III are my favorite people I have ever worked on a movie with.”
Jonathan Kaplan’s OVER THE EDGE came out while I was a senior in high school but I didn’t see it until college a year or so later, during which time its reputation grew ominously through word of mouth. Even back then, the movie sounded scary because deep down we all know what kids are like when left to their own devices and the supervision of the inexperienced and like-minded. OVER THE EDGE opened in November of ’79, about ten months after 16 year-old Brenda Spencer used a .22 caliber rifle to open fire on students, faculty, and staff on the grounds of San Diego’s Grover Cleveland Elementary School; killed that day were a custodian and the school’s principal. My dad was my high school principal, so this incident certainly hit home, and OVER THE EDGE fed into that mounting sense of teenage dread. Thirty-six years later, post-Columbine, post-Sandy Hook, post-Dunblane, post-Virginia Tech, post-Umpqua (shout out your own favorites!), it’s still scary — you should pardon my language — as fuck. It’s like an S. E. Hinton novel adapted by David Cronenberg.