Scenes from the “This Is Spinal Tap” Cutting-Room Floor
In 1982, I began shooting an almost entirely improvised film,“This Is Spinal Tap,” which also happened to be my first as a director. It transformed my life and the lives of my three friends, co-writers, and co-stars: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer.
People have often asked us if we would ever consider doing a sequel. For a long time, we resisted. Then, a few years ago, after a long legal battle, we finally got the rights back to the film. So Chris, Michael, Harry, and I decided to get together to see if there was any gas left in the tank. On March 6, 2024, my seventy-seventh birthday, in the city of New Orleans, we started shooting the sequel.
We also decided that it was time to tell the full story of the making of the original “This Is Spinal Tap.” What you are about to read is a short excerpt from that account.
Early on in editing “This Is Spinal Tap,” it became obvious that some of the film’s plotlines would have to be thrown out altogether. For example, Spinal Tap initially had an opening act, a New Wave band called the Dose. The guys are against having the Dose tour with them. They feel that the group’s punky music isn’t a good fit with heavy metal. But then, during a sound check, they catch sight of the Dose’s lead singer, Stellazine, played by Cherie Currie, the former lead singer of the Runaways—a beautiful, sexy, young blonde in a skintight, metallic-blue catsuit.
After a deliberation of about an eighth of a second, the band does a one-eighty and insists to Ian (Tony Hendra) that it’s critical the Dose be their opening act for the entire length of the tour. Ian obliges and books the band. But there’s a problem: Stellazine is what one might deem a “free spirit.” After a scene in which Nigel (Guest) is seen making time with her, he turns up with a herpes sore on his lip. Next, we see David (McKean) pairing up with Stellazine, after which he, too, sports a herpes sore. Stellazine then hangs out with Derek (Shearer) and then Viv (David Kaff), both of whom subsequently also display the herpes badge.
A band meeting is called: Should the Dose remain on the tour? The four herpes-afflicted Tap members vote the Dose out. Mick (R. J. Parnell), who is clueless and herpes-free, votes for the Dose to stay.
Currie’s scenes were terrific, but the travelling-herpes show took way too long to play out. So, unfortunately, the sequence had to go. There is, however, a remnant of this subplot in the scene in which Nigel and David defend the “Smell the Glove” album cover to Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher). Nigel has a sore on his lower lip, and David has one on his upper lip. Conspicuous as these blemishes are, they go unexplained. Depending on your take, this is either a complete non sequitur or an ambiguous “What the hell is going on?” moment. Regardless, it always got a laugh—which surprised me.
We also abandoned a side trip into David’s personal life in which it’s revealed that, as a result of a fling he had years ago with a groupie, he has a son named Jordan St. Hubbins. Jordan, now a teen-ager, lives with his mother in Phoenix and has rebelled by becoming a punk rocker. This upsets David and leads to a backstage father-son confrontation. “The actor playing my son was Sean Frye, brother of Soleil Moon Frye, of ‘Punky Brewster’ fame,” McKean recently recalled. “But the squabble at the venue and David’s disapproval of the kid’s appearance just didn’t land right.”
For similar reasons, we ditched a sequence that showed Tap, after their “Jazz Odyssey” fiasco as a four-piece, trying to carry on with a new guitarist. As McKean remembers it, “We had this scene where we get a replacement guitarist for Nigel, a kid named Ricky. He’s only nineteen, and he comes in and just plays the shit out of ‘Hell Hole.’ He’s really good, incredibly good-looking, and he’s all over the stage. Jeanine”—June Chadwick—“keeps looking at him lustfully. At one point, Ricky lifts up his guitar in a pose and it hits me in the face. After that, he’s out. It’s a really cool scene in its own way, but it had no intro or outro, and that was the problem. Where did he come from? Do we have to see him auditioning? We didn’t have time to get into all that.”
Ricky, incidentally, was played by a musician named Louie Merlino, who has since done hundreds of sessions as a backup singer and now lives in Las Vegas.
There was also a subplot about Derek going through a painful divorce. We filmed a number of scenes of him on the phone, getting the latest bad news from his lawyer. In one scene, he learns that his soon-to-be ex has taken out a full-page ad in the New Musical Express laying out her settlement demands. In another, he is seen saying, “She can’t have the Lamborghini. . . . O.K., she can have the Mini.” Again, it slowed the momentum. So the audience would never learn of Derek’s crumbling marriage.
Parnell, who had no background in acting, delivered an incredible performance in a scene we cut. The setup was that Artie Fufkin (Paul Shaffer) had succeeded in getting the band to do an earlymorning radio-station appearance. What Artie didn’t know was that, on that day, the station had changed its programming format from sports talk to rock and roll. One caller, who wasn’t aware of the change, asks the band, “Can you settle a bet I have with a buddy of mine? I think Ferguson Jenkins had fifty shutouts with the Cubs. He says he had forty-four. Who’s right?” Just as the radio host is about to brush off the question, Mick—shades on, cigarette in hand—answers, “Actually, you’re both wrong, mate. Ferguson Jenkins has had forty-eight career shutouts, and not all of them were with the Cubs.”
Then, in his sleepy drawl, he proceeds to deliver a complete statistical breakdown of Jenkins’s career. But since we ended up losing the radio-station scene, we lost with it Parnell’s eloquent Ferguson Jenkins soliloquy.
I not only cut scenes we had planned. On any given day, brilliant stuff would spontaneously fly out of someone’s mouth. A lot of that stuff had to go, too, to keep the film’s motor running. In particular, I remember a dissertation that David delivers to Marty (as played by me) about slime molds:
