THE PASSION (S) OF PENELOPE SPHEERIS

THE PASSION (S) OF PENELOPE SPHEERIS

CREEM GOES TO THE MOVIES

The world’s a mess, it’s in her films

Zachary Lipez

"I’m not one of those flashy, glamorous, walk-the-red-carpet people. That sucks. I hate it,” Penelope Spheeris says over the phone, the slight rasp of her voice closer to that of a sardonically peeved twentysomething podcaster than someone who was at the ground floor for punk, hardcore, and hair metal, and who covered all three so incisively and authoritatively that all the subcultures of the three that came after were at least indirectly shaped by the templates she was the first (and best) to set on celluloid. Appropriately (maybe necessarily), her affection for punk and metal precludes any love for posers: “I hate the fucking jive parties they have. Every time I come back from one, I puke in my driveway.”

Posers abound in every corner of the culture industries, but especially in Hollywood. Hacks, pseuds, social climbers, and serial abusers—all draped in alt signifiers—take up so much air that we can fail to fully appreciate the real outsiders; the iconoclasts who don’t peddle schlock but are neither self-consciously weird enough for cult status nor male enough to rate periodic Oscar tuggers just for showing up. The kind of outsiders who might direct the only SNL franchise film funny enough to succeed on its own merits (to the tune of $183 million worldwide) and still not be asked to direct the sequel. In other words, the kind of outsiders who couldn’t be insiders if they tried, with the “if” in question as big as the Hollywood Sign.

Bitching about Hollywood has its own cottage industry, with disgust for the industry’s inanity being the fuel for satires ranging from Sullivan’s Travels to Entourage. As surprising as it might be that there hasn’t been any death leaps off the Hollywood Sign since Peg Entwistle jumped in 1932, it can be assumed that everyone since has only made it as far as the foot of Mount Lee before deciding to channel their ideation into making a movie about how Hollywood makes them want to die. Of course, many of these haters only hate the biz in the same way any normal non-sociopath despises capitalism in general, with an abstract loathing we whistle through on our way to the local Coinstar machine. It’s not like anyone leaves, at least not with Peg’s certitude. That said, there are degrees of not leaving. As opposed to Preston Sturges, who followed up Sullivan’s Travels with The Palm Beach Story, or Mark Wahlberg, who left the Entourage wrap party determined to make nothing but Ted or Transformers movies until he dropkick-murphied the bucket, Penelope Spheeris is not kidding about hating Hollywood.

“I’m not kidding,” she says. “It literally makes me sick.

“My only friends, honestly, from all the movies are the gutter punks from The Decline III,” Spheeris says, apparently entirely disinterested in glad-handing/ name-dropping. “Those are the people that are close to my heart. Because they’re honest and they’re just good people with a lot of integrity. I don’t have any friends from Wayne’s World or from Little Rascals, Black Sheep, any of that shit. I don’t have any Hollywood friends, really. And I don’t think I ever belonged in that system in the first place. I belonged on the street with gutter punks.’’

Besides Wayne’s World and the Decline of Western Civilization trilogy, which she’s justifiably revered for (even if not everyone knows that the same person directed both), Penelope Spheeris’ filmography and career makes for a laundry list of wild, often divergent, impulses. An overview contains artsy but accessible thrillers (Dudes, The Boys Next Door), a sociologically significant punxploitation flick produced by Roger Corman (Suburbia), two music videos for Megadeth, a number of bemusingly idiocentric choices of movies she didn’t make (she passed on The Brady Bunch Movie because she felt more affinity for the script of The Little Rascals), writing for Roseanne during that series’ golden age, and Black Sheep, a David Spade vehicle whose main plot point pivots on Mudhoney confusing Chris Farley for a Senate candidate.

The first two Declines were formative to the popularization of hardcore and heavy metal, and the films—like any good microscope—altered their subjects in the process. Considering that those subjects were two of the dominant strains of guitar music for the past half century, that’s huge. Akin to bumming Godard his first cigarette. If that feels hyperbolic, the first Decline of Western Civilization’s importance simply cannot be overstated. Spheeris ably documents the nascent Los Angeles punk scene. As punk, infected by dread and Orange County, transitions into hardcore, the director read the subculture more accurately than even many who followed in the trail she blazed. In her wryly affectionate lens, punk is taken at its word as a petulant demand to end history, but also rendered—as expressed through the narcoleptic charms of Germs’ Darby Crash, Greg Ginn posturing as straight man Potsie of the Apocalypse, and the screwball sweetness of X’s (and eventual exes) John Doe and Exene Cervenka—as something as traditionally Hollywood as driving over a seaside cliff on Mulholland Drive.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years features recurring scenes of Ozzy Osbourne standing over his kitchen stove, his bare chest peeking from a cheetah-print bathrobe with a zebra-stripe collar. The hair on his scalp resembles a blow-dried lion’s mane, as he improves on the “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” campaign of the same year by frying an egg in the normal cautionary way (with 10 pounds of bleach-white bacon strips) and replacing the PSA script with a soliloquy of the singer practically salivating as he lists all the drugs he’s definitely, for sure, glad to be done with. A few years prior to The Metal Years’ filming, Spheeris had turned down the chance to direct This Is Spinal Tap because she didn’t want to make fun of heavy metal music. This may seem ironic until one considers how Spheeris doesn’t ever see her subjects as punchlines. And she loves musicians. Like it’s her job, which it is. Love what you do, etc., etc., and it’s also an ethos that she extends beyond the documentary work into her features, introducing the square world to the charms of Flea and Fear’s Lee Ving both and, further, having a rock ’n’ roll live performance in the plot of every movie one could reasonably (or unreasonably) shoehorn one into. Hence Mudhoney (even though she doesn’t love grunge) playing in Black Sheep, D.I. and T.S.O.L. in Suburbia, and the Vandals in both the latter and again in Dudes (where all the extras were actual punks who apparently took the mosh-pit-portunity to get a few licks in at poor John Cryer and Daniel Roebuck).

“I’m HOT OME OF THOSE FLASHY, GLAmOROUS, UJALKTHE-RED-CARPET PEOPLE. THAT SUCKS. I HATE IT.”

“Because I had the first music video company here in L.A., Rock and Reel, and I shot tons of music videos [performance only, before MTV] and all that, because I worked for the record company [Slash Records]; that’s where I really learned how to shoot performance. And my brother Jimmy was a musician. All my boyfriends have been musicians. So I understand that world as well,” Spheeris explains, “and I always wanted to give credit to the band because oftentimes their music is just used peripherally and not highlighted. The bands don’t really get enough credit. So, as often as I can, I’ll get a band to actually perform in my films. Because I know how to shoot. I can do it with my eyes closed, you know? It’s my way of giving credit and validity to the bands, and letting them have their onscreen moment.’’

All the above makes the purgatory of We Sold Our Souls for Rock ’n Roll—the documentary of Ozzfest Spheeris directed in 1999—that much more tragic. The film, made at Sharon Osbourne’s request, was supposed to be released in 2001 but, because of licensing issues, has thus far—outside the occasional special screening—remained unshown, even on streaming services (and with a bootleg on YouTube looking so shit that Spheeris kindly requests that the reader absolutely not view it).

“I think Sharon didn’t tell the bands we were going to be doing a movie. That’s Sharon Osborne for you, you know? She probably thought, 'Well, we’ll just see what happens.’ So these bands are looking at me like I just flew down from the moon,” Spheeris says with some amount of tamped-down exasperation. Apparently, only the singer of Fear Factory was respectful, and Rob Zombie was a real pill.

“The fact of the matter is these guys didn’t know who the hell I was. And in a way, Sharon is very smart because it kind of gave a spontaneity and distance between me and them. I mean, I had to chase Rob Zombie around parked trucks for two weeks to try to get an interview with him. And he was so evasive [because] he didn’t want anybody else, I don’t believe, making a movie about him. I went in the dressing room at one point and they were unloading his costume gear that he gets into, and he got really pissed and kicked me out because I’m not supposed to see that shit, I guess,” the director says with a laugh, eventually adding, “That’s water under the bridge I want to hang myself from, you know? I don’t hold any grudges because the only person it hurts is me. I wish Sharon and Ozzy and the family the best. And if she would like to release her movie before I die, I would appreciate it. And if she doesn’t? Okay, then, I hope she releases it after I’m dead.”