Trivia / This is Spın̈al Tap

• Acting for Two: The natural voices of the three main actors can be heard making PA announcements in the background during the airport scene.
• Breakthrough Hit: With this film, Rob Reiner officially made the transition from actor to director who occasionally acts.
• California Doubling: The entire movie was shot in Los Angeles County. It's mostly not obvious, except for the palm trees outside what's supposed to be a venue in New York.
• Cast the Expert:
  • Several genuine rock vets played the various other members of the band. David Kaff (Viv Savage) and R.J. Parnell (Mick Shrimpton) had both been in British Progressive Rock bands (Rare Bird and Atomic Rooster, respectively). Veteran session musicians Danny Kortchmar (Ronnie Pudding) and Russ Kunkel (Eric "Stumpy Joe" Childs) appear in the archival footage.
  • Ed Begley Jr., who appears in archive footage as the band's first doomed drummer John "Stumpy" Pepys, drummed for the Real Life Garage Band The Four Dimensions in his teen years.
• The Cast Showoff: The three leads play their own instruments and do their own singing. As stated elsewhere, they've done countless live performances demonstrating their musical talents.
• Channel Hop: A negative example. The film was originally produced by Norman Lear's Embassy Pictures. Over the years, the rights have gone between different companies for home video and everything else; currently, StudioCanal of France owns the movie, but licenses it and other Embassy titles to MGM for home video. The main cast members have since sued because of the former company pulling Hollywood Accounting on them to prevent them from getting royalties.
• Defictionalization: In spades. The actors perform in character in live shows. They've recorded three albums, made music videos, and appeared on countless radio and TV shows. They even have a feud with Marty DiBergi about their portrayal in the film, going so far as to take offense that people find the film humorous. DiBergi has at times responded to these claims. Their audio commentary on the Special Edition DVD is also fully in character, arguably constituting a movie in its own right. The song "Gimme Some Money" was even covered for an American Express commercial!
  • The venues they play in the movie are fictitious. However, in 1989 an actual Shank Hall opened in Milwaukee. Their logo includes a miniature Stonehenge and there's a shrine to Spın̈al Tap in the club.
  • Also, amps that actually go up to eleven are now available.
  • "Up to Eleven" itself became a legitimate English phrase with its inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary.
  • You can buy "Nigel's Skeleton" Shirt online.
  • In many ways, Spın̈al Tap has become so iconic that the boundary between real and fiction is blurred for many fans and performers of the genre, even if only to maintain The Masquerade.
• Deleted Scenes: The DVD release includes many scenes that did not make the final cut.^note As with most real documentaries, hours upon hours of footage was shot and what we see in the film is just a tiny portion of that. They include a visit from David's 18-year-old son who has "doctored his appearance to achieve coolness", Derek negotiating a divorce from his wife, Tommy the chauffeur getting high and singing in his underwear, a clip from an Italian film Derek appeared in, the band attempting to find a replacement for Nigel after he quits and a trip to a local zoo (where we learn that apes eat bread, not soup, and are capable of simple phrases such as asking for more soup) amongst others.
• Dueling Works: Released a few months after Zelig, the other Mockumentary Trope Codifier.
• DVD Commentary: The original commentary for the film released on DVD by Criterion was played straight. When MGM re-released the film on DVD twelve years later, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer recorded a commentary in character, spending most of it ripping director DiBergi for the "hatchet job" he produced.
• Fake Brit: Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. Christopher Guest, on the other hand, has dual American-British citizenship and is an actual lord. The accents of the cast were apparently good enough to fool British audiences.
• Inspiration for the Work: Christopher Guest was inspired to create the Nigel Tufnel character while waiting for a friend in a hotel lobby and seeing a British band checking in. The bass player realized he'd left his bass at the airport and got in an argument with the manager and fellow band members.
• Life Imitates Art:
  • A year after a demo reel of the film was produced in 1982, Black Sabbath's Born Again tour featured a Stonehenge set that was also marked up with the wrong measurements on the schematics (meters instead of feet, resulting in a 50' tall stone instead of a 15' tall stone).
  • Boy George got stuck inside a ridiculously huge prop onstage during a number. As did U2 some years later. The Edge said he was thinking of this movie when it happened and his blood went cold at the thought.
  The Edge: When I first saw Spinal Tap, I didn't laugh so much as I wept.
  • Metallica released a black album, partly as a Shout-Out to the movie, and ended up getting a good-natured bollocking from Tap for ripping off the concept.
  • David has a line where he'd been planning on doing a collaboration with the London Philharmonic. 15 years later, Metallica came out with "S&M," a live album featuring the band playing alongside the San Francisco Symphony. Not to mention that there's now an entire genre of Symphonic Metal...
  • One of Spın̈al Tap's drummers died in a "bizarre gardening accident"; Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro was reported to have died after inhaling insecticide that he had been spraying in his garden. However, coroners later put his death down to a heart attack due to cocaine abuse. Family and friends disputed this, claiming that he had a family history of heart conditions and was not a heavy cocaine user.
    • Abba drummer Ola Brunkert died in Mallorca, Spain 2008 in a "bizarre gardening accident" - he had fallen through a greenhouse glass pane and cut his neck artery.
    • Similarly, Ronnie James Dio injured his thumb moving a garden gnome. He even referred to the incident as a "bizarre gardening accident".
  • Between 1983 and 1984, Marillion burned through three drummers in rapid succession after firing Mick Pointer before finally settling on Ian Mosley. Notably, they did this in between their first two albums, Script for a Jester's Tear and Fugazi.
    • Similarly, Pearl Jam has gone through 5 drummers over the course of their career while having an otherwise stable lineup. The band members even lampshaded it in their documentary, Pearl Jam Twenty, by comparing themselves to Spın̈al Tap.
  • In the film the band's album Shark Sandwich is given a two-word review in Rolling Stone: "Shit Sandwich." The same year it was released, Quiet Riot's fourth album Condition Critical was given a similar two-word review in Rolling Stone: "Condition Terminal." Happy Mondays' album Yes, Please similarly received a two-word review in Melody Maker: "No thanks." GTR's 1986 self-titled release was infamously panned by J. D. Considine as "SHT".
  • In 1992, the German heavy metal band Headhunter released an album titled A Bizarre Gardening Accident.
  • There are now guitar amplifiers that actually go to 11... and beyond. Marshall released models in the 90s with '11's on the faceplates specifically to replicate the ones in the film. Extends to some audio recording equipment too, with SSL mixers' monitor (speaker) volume settings and PreSonus audio I/O interfaces headphone settings.
  • Authentic metal legend Ozzy Osbourne is on record as saying that This Is Spın̈al Tap is a worryingly accurate portrayal of what it was like being a rock star in the 1980's. Specifically, although it hadn't happened to him, he describes the scene where the band get lost backstage and claims that he "could all too easily imagine that the same thing had actually happened" in real life, among other examples. In fact, when he first saw the film, he didn't laugh once because he didn't realize it was a satire.
  • Heart's Ann Wilson said that she watched it and said, "Oh my God, that's me!"
  • KISS's Gene Simmons has said that the "Hello Cleveland" sequence happened to Kiss, though the specifics were different. Their dressing room was on the fourth floor, and they went down to the first floor because that's where they thought the stage would be and found nothing. They tried the second floor, nothing. Meanwhile, they could hear themselves being announced on the third floor.
  • Re David's comment "37 people have been in this band over the years!"; that's coincidentally almost the same number of total members that Hawkwind had gone through around the time the film came out. These days, the number is inching closer to 50! And a cursory look at the Hawkwind personnel list shows a disproportionate number of these were drummers. Hawkwind's stage sets and lasers were also so ambitious they blew the fuses at many venues.
  • Members of Jethro Tull played a prank on their frontman, Ian Anderson, during one of their concerts. They lowered an 18" model of Stonehenge from the ceiling in mid-song, and the roadies danced around it. The same thing was done once at a Nine Inch Nails concert, resulting in a good laugh by both normally stoic frontman Trent Reznor and bassist Robin Fink.
  • Todd in the Shadows noted the unflattering similarity between the visit to Graceland in this film and the one U2 made in their Rattle and Hum concert film.
  • A non-musical example: Nowadays, the gift shop at Stonehenge sells trilithon-shaped cushions that look just like the prop from the film ... and are more or less the same size.
• Production Posse:
  • This film originated Christopher Guest's production posse for his own mockumentary films.
  • Many of Rob Reiner's posse are in this film in minor roles (Crystal, Kirby and so on.)
• The Red Stapler: Lots of real-life amps now go to 11, as well as the volume on BBC's iPlayer.
  • And the film's rating on IMDb (well, for one film, anyway.)
• Technology Marches On: Dear God, those wireless amps are huge. Also, playing Polaris on the Radio Shack Color Computer. With a keyboard.
  Viv: Quite exciting, this computer magic!
  • The band seems to be a generation behind in technology. In the MGM Commentary recorded in 2000, eBay gets brought up a lot and Nigel doesn't have his own email account.

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