Larry Getlen of NY Post reports:
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…
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 12th — many of its memorable bits were inspired by real life.
Sometime in the 1970s, [actor Christopher] 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 [actor Harry] Shearer’s Derek Smalls has to remove a zucchini wrapped in foil from his pants at airport security…
…Guns N’ Roses’ Slash seems to get the [Spinal Tap] 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.”
Read the entire column, at the NY Post, by clicking here.