This Is Spinal Tap (Spinal Tap Productions, Goldcrest International, Embassy Pictures, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, including the 1984 “mockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap. (The original title actually had an umlaut over the “n,” but my computer says that’s wrong and I can’t do that.) It wasn’t actually the first spoof documentary about a nonexistent rock band – that came eight years earlier with the marvelous and little-known The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, which hilariously united the casts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live in a screamingly funny spoof of the Beatles – but This Is Spinal Tap makes fun of the conventions of heavy metal and its fans. This movie has so many scenes that have become iconic – like the one in which the members of Spinal Tap boast that everybody else’s amplifiers stop at 10 but “our amps go to 11”; the scene in which the various band members get lost and can’t find their way to the stage; or the scene in which one of the band members orders a mockup of Stonehenge for a song, only he mistakenly marks the sze as 18 by 15 inches instead of feet (a gag previously done in the 1934 Laurel and Hardy film Babes in Toyland in which Laurel, meaning to order 600 toy soldiers ech one foot high, mistakenly asks for 100 toy soldiers six feet high) – it’s hard to believe it came about by accident. It seems that the members of Spinal Tap – David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) – were involved in another film and spent the time between takes jamming out songs for a fictitious heavy-metal band named “Spinal Tap.”

Things snowballed from that and led to this film, in which Rob Renier both appears as the pretend director Marty DiBergi and was the actual director. (it was his first feature for theatrical release and he use the launch to make quite a few well-remembered films like Stand by Me, A Few Good Men and When Harry Met Sally – not bad at all for the guy who used to play Archie Bunker’s “meathead” son-in-law). I’d forgotten that some quite good comic actors like Fran Drescher and Billy Crystal were in this movie, or that some of the scenes that didn’t become iconic (like Spinal Tap getting booked to play a tea dance at an Air Force base in Washington state, or the band getting held up at an airport security station because one of the members has a big metal object hidden in his crotch) are as funny as the ones that did. I’m also struck by the longevity of the Spinal Tap concept; n 2017 the principal cast members got together for an actual concert tour as Spinal Tap, and the imdb.com page for Rob Reiner sayes he’s preparing a long-delayed sequel, Spinal Tap II. (If this film is about what I’m guessing it is – a bunch of very long-in-the-tooth musicians putting their band back together for a reunion tour – it could be even funnier than this one!). And of course no account of This Is Spinal Tap would be complete without mentioning the sheer plethora of drummers who have been in and out of the band, and the bizarre demises they have met – including at least one who just spontaneously combusted and blew up on stage. When Charles and I watched a quite engaging 1931 movie called I Like Your Nerve, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in the sort of role that had made his dad a star – a happy-go-lucky adventurer who stumbles into a fictitious Latin American country called “San Patricio” whose capital was represented by the familiar and iconic buildings of San Diego’s Balboa Park – I joked about the film, “The life expectancy of a San Patricio treasurer is about the same as that of a Spinal Tap drummer!”