Peter Smokler was a camera operator on the famed rock documentary “Gimme Shelter,” about a 1969 Rolling Stones concert where a man was stabbed to death.
Despite his experience in the genre, Smokler was baffled when director Rob Reiner recruited him to shoot “This is Spinal Tap,” the 1984 mockumentary that takes a satiric swipe at heavy metal bands.
The problem for Smokler — and for many actual rockers as well — was that the rock band tropes mocked in the film were way too real.
“At the beginning of our shoot, Peter couldn’t quite grasp what we were doing,” writes Reiner in the new book, “A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap,” out Tuesday, which Reiner co-wrote with his co-creators and co-stars on the improvised comedy classic — Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer — and writer David Kamp.
“At one point, [Peter] said to me, ‘I don’t get what’s funny about this. It’s not any different from what bands do in the documentaries I’ve worked on,” Reiner said in the book.
While “This is Spinal Tap” bombed at the box office, it eventually became a cult classic, inventing the mockumentary format later found in shows like “The Office,” placing lines like “these go to eleven” into the pop culture vernacular, and becoming a mandatory VHS tape on the buses of touring rock bands everywhere.
Some rockers, though, took the film very personally. For Ozzy Osbourne, “This is Spinal Tap” was way too
close to real life.
“I wasn’t laughing! It was f–king real!” Osbourne once told NME. “It’s like a documentary, not a f–kng funny film. That’s it, man! That’s what it’s like!”
Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler even took personal offense at the film’s handling of what he saw as his life.
“That movie bummed me out,” said Tyler. “Because I thought, ‘How dare they? That’s all real. And they’re
mocking it.’”
The offended rock stars weren’t wrong.
While “This is Spinal Tap” is now regarded as one of the funniest films of its era — a sequel, “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues,” hits theaters on September 12 — many of its memorable bits were inspired by real life.
Sometime in the 1970s, Guest was shopping at Matt Umanov Guitars on Greenwich Village’s Bleecker Street when a well-known British rocker entered the shop.
“He looked, shall we say, a bit worse for wear,” Guest said in the book, protecting the guy’s identity. “He was wearing leather pants and there was a noticeable bulge in them. A baguette, basically.”
When the rocker stood to leave, the bulge had migrated to his ankle.
Guest “filed that away,” and it inspired the scene where Shearer’s Derek Smalls has to remove a zucchini wrapped in foil from his pants at airport security.
Shearer, McKean and McKean’s college friend David Lander performed in a comedy troupe called The Credibility Gap which once played a disaster of a show where nothing they requested — including a PA and a changing space — was provided.
After the show, the promo guy who arranged it begged forgiveness.
“Before we could vent our anger, he goes into this routine,” Shearer recalls in the book. “‘Guys, I know. I know! It’s all my fault. It’s all me. Do me a favor. Kick my ass. Kick my ass! I’m not asking you, I’m telling you: Kick my ass!’
This inspired Spinal Tap’s promo guy Artie Fufkin, played by Paul Shaffer, who utters pretty much those exact words in the movie.
McKean and Lander would gain fame as Lenny & Squiggy on “Laverne & Shirley,” the No. 1 TV show in the country in 1977 and 1978. The pair wrote comedic songs for the characters, for a parody band called Lenny and the Squigtones, and Casablanca Records signed the group and sent them on tour.
The PR rep for the tour was a woman named Bobbi Cowan. “She was really friendly, but had an abrasive New York accent and weighed about 75 pounds,” said Guest, who played guitar on the tour. In the film, Cowan would become Fran Drescher’s Bobbi Fleckman.
As Reiner, Guest, McKean, and Shearer developed the film’s characters and scenarios, they sought inspiration from throughout the rock world.
The hilarious scene in the film in which Guest’s Nigel Tufnel is put off by a poorly-arranged deli tray, calling it “a complete catastrophe,” was inspired by the infamous story about Van Halen not allowing brown M&Ms backstage as part of their tour rider.
Other scenes adhered even more closely to real-life inspiration.
While writing Spinal Tap’s songs, the comedians worked with a veteran keyboardist named John Sinclair, who ended up leaving the project to to tour with UK hard rockers Uriah Heep. He stayed in touch with Guest, relaying crazy stories from the road.
“Like Tap, Uriah Heep was past its commercial prime and playing in smaller venues than before,” Reiner writes. “
“We had a gig canceled. We were on such a tight budget that our tour manager filled the date with a gig at an Air Force base, just to keep some dough coming in,” Sinclair wrote to Guest. “When it was time for the show, we were confronted with an audience full of guys in full uniform accompanied by wives and girlfriends in their best evening dress. From the initial slamming metal riff of ‘Sell Your Soul’ to the slamming metal riff of ‘Gypsy’ at the end, there was silence. We died a dramatic death.”
This inspired the scene in which Fred Willard improvises as an extremely square Air Force officer, ushering Spinal Tap around a military base where they play “Sex Farm” to an extremely confused audience of airmen and their dates.
During that scene, the band suffers radio interference coming through their amplifiers. This was inspired by something Guest witnessed at a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park in 1982.
“The actors had lavaliere mics on,” recalls Guest in the book. “All of a sudden, taxi calls started coming over them: ‘Pick’er up at Fawty-Fifth Street! Take her ovah to Amsterdam!’ The actors didn’t know what to do. The audience was going insane with laughter. For the actors, it was over. The spell was broken.”
In time, the film’s stupid, clever and hilarious take on rock bands earned it a place in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, and also the respect of the sort of people it was based on.
Guns N’ Roses’ Slash seems to get the joke.
“We don’t think we’re in the Spinal Tap position,” he once said. The movie’s OK, though. When I saw the singer [guitarist, actually] stand up and say, ‘This is a beautiful ballad called ‘Lick My Love Pump,’ I thought, ‘Yeah, it’s OK after all.”