When Rob Reiner‘s directorial debut, “This Is Spinal Tap,” opened in theaters in early 1984, it quickly became a cult classic beloved by music fans and cinephiles alike for its hilarious portrayal of the title band, a heavy metal group plagued by mishaps while on tour promoting its latest album. Told in a documentary style in which Reiner riffed on films like D.A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back” and Martin Scorsese‘s “The Last Waltz” to tell Spinal Tap’s story, the film was incredibly influential, spawning a whole series of mockumentaries by “Spinal Tap” band member Christopher Guest (“Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” etc.) and television series like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation.”
Yet, when Reiner tried to raise money for the movie, no one was interested — even after he shot a 20-minute reel of scenes to demonstrate what he was going for. “We went to every single studio and got turned down everywhere,” Reiner told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “Nobody wanted it. We went from studio to studio with a 16mm film can under our arms.”
It didn’t help that Reiner was known as a TV sitcom actor, thanks to his role as “Meathead” on the hit comedy “All in the Family.” “In those days, there was a big division between movies and television,” Reiner said. “Television people were peons, and the movie people were royalty. They looked down on us.” Luckily, Reiner got his footage to Avco-Embassy executive Lindsay Doran, who loved it and got studio head Frank Capra, Jr. to agree to distribute the film. Reiner thought he was home free, and then another obstacle sprang up.
“This was after a couple years, so I’m excited,” Reiner said. “Then Jerry Perenchio and Norman Lear bought Avco-Embassy, and they decided to throw out everything they had in development — including ‘This Is Spinal Tap.’” Reiner begged for a meeting with Perenchio and Lear, who he knew from “All in the Family,” and passionately argued that “This Is Spinal Tap” would be a big hit with young audiences. “I heard that after the meeting Norman said, ‘Who’s gonna tell him he can’t do this?’ Because I was so passionate.”
Reiner and the actors playing Spinal Tap — Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer — wrote an outline for the film but improvised all of the dialogue, and Reiner covered the action as though he were shooting a documentary, with minimal blocking and a vérité shooting style designed to catch behavior on the fly. “We had a cameraman named Peter Smokler who had shot a lot of rock and roll documentaries,” Reiner said. “He had a good instinct for where to go, and a lot of the time I would act like a human camera dolly, I would get behind him and physically move him.”
For the film’s concert scenes, Reiner had three cameras and he shot each song three times to give himself nine angles. While the concert footage primarily mimicked music documentaries like the Led Zeppelin film “The Song Remains the Same,” the director also had fun recreating ’50s and ’60s TV shows for “archival” performances from Spinal Tap’s supposed early days as British Invasion rockers and psychedelic hippies. He says those moments came straight out of his own memories.
“I’m the first generation that grew up on television,” Reiner said. “My father [legendary writer, director, and actor Carl Reiner] was on television before we owned a television. We got a television in 1951 and my dad started with Sid Caesar on ‘Your Show of Shows’ in 1949. From when I was four years old, I just watched television, so in my computer brain I knew what these shows all looked like, “Hullabaloo’ and ‘Shindig’ and Dick Clark.”
Between the performances and the backstage material, Reiner found that he had a lot of footage by the time he got to the editing room. “Oh, God, it was just like a documentary, where you have millions of feet of film,” Reiner said. His first cut was four hours long, and that didn’t include three hours of interview footage — meaning that the initial version of “Spinal Tap” ran somewhere around seven hours. Slowly but surely, Reiner and his editors whittled away at the movie to get it down to a tight 84 minutes.
Reiner found himself rewriting the movie in the editing room by creating an audio track that had all the best jokes and then cutting the image to match. “I learned from Bob Leighton, our film editor who I picked because he had done a ton of BBC documentaries, that when you put together a documentary the thing that jars you isn’t cuts in the visuals, it’s the dialogue,” Reiner said. “If that doesn’t match up, that’ll be jarring. Sometimes I was on people was on people who were not talking and the best jokes came from off camera, but that’s okay. As long as you can marry them together dialogue-wise you can be on whatever.”
While sifting through the endless footage, Reiner found it was easy to lose perspective on whether or not the movie he was making was actually any good. “You sit there and start to question, ‘Is this funny?’” Reiner said. “And then the first time you find out whether you were right or wrong is when you put it in front of an audience and then they’ll tell you if it’s funny or not.”
In the case of “Spinal Tap,” Reiner said it took a while for the film to find an audience because some people were confused about whether or not the movie was a comedy or an actual documentary — and some rock and rollers were insulted by what they saw as a mockery of their work.
Over the years, however, both cinephiles and music fans — and many musicians, including Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge, and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich — have embraced the film, and it’s now returning to theaters in a fantastic looking and sounding 4K restoration.
Reiner is also preparing a sequel for release this fall. “It’s finished and it’s coming out September 12,” Reiner said, adding that although it’s essentially in the same style as the original, there will be a few upgrades. “It’s a tiny bit slicker, because Marty Di Bergi [the director played by Reiner in the original] has seen all the reality television shows and all these four-part and six-part docs,” Reiner said. “But I wanted to try to do it pretty much the way we did the first one.”
The new 4K restoration of “This Is Spinal Tap” will screen in theaters nationwide from July 5-7 via Fathom Events. To hear Rob Reiner’s episode of Filmmaker Toolkit and other great filmmaker conversations, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.