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(Editor’s Note: Billboard interviewed Rob Reiner in September about making Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Reiner and his wife, Michele, were found dead Sunday, Dec. 14, at their Brentwood home in Los Angeles).
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Oasis’s Noel and Liam Gallagher aren’t this year’s only long-anticipated musical reconciliation.
As Spinal Tap II: The End Continues opens, it’s revealed that Spinal Tap bandmates Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) have been estranged for 15 years. While not actual blood brothers like the Gallaghers, the two musicians grew up together in England and had been pals since they were five.
The fortuitous timing is, of course, completely coincidental, Spinal Tap II director Rob Reiner notes, but he still gets a kick out of “life imitating art imitating life,” he says over a Zoom interview, sporting a Spinal Tap baseball cap and t-shirt. “In Oasis’ case, they’re real brothers, but with Spinal Tap, the two guys were best friends since they were little and break apart and come back together.” The movie opens in theaters nationwide Friday (Sept. 12).
In the sequel to 1984’s This is Spinal Tap — the revered mockumentary about a British heavy metal band touring America as their fortunes are fading — Tufnel and St. Hubbins, along with bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), are forced to reunite because, as it is revealed after the death of original manager Ian Faith, the band is contractually obligated to play one more show.
“The emotional ballast of the movie is the relationship between the two guys. Now, many years later, they’re older. The same issues are happening, but it’s deeper because they’ve known each other longer,” says Reiner, who recreates his role as documentarian Marty DiBergi. “[The sequel] couldn’t be just a straight satire; it had to have some kind of emotional underpinnings. And it’s not easy because satire and emotion, they don’t like to be with each other.”
The original film wasn’t a box office success, grossing only $5.98 million — but over the decades, thanks to home video and word of mouth, it has become a cherished cult classic among musicians, comedians and music fans. At first, it did have a few detractors among rockers who felt it cut a little too close to home, Reiner says.
“Initially, you had people like Steven Tyler, Axl Rose and, God rest his soul, Ozzy Osbourne, they were not so happy with it because they thought we were making fun of their music and all that,” Reiner says, noting that many of the incidents in the film “we took from the real world of rock and roll: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers getting lost backstage; Van Halen demanding backstage there be no [brown] M&Ms.”
Despite — or perhaps because of– the film’s iconic status, the quartet never truly considered making a follow-up. “I mean, people approached us all the time to do a sequel, and we always felt like we did it, you know,” Reiner says. “We don’t want to do it again. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh god, we’ve got to do a sequel.’ Nobody ever talked about it that way.”
Then in 2016, Shearer filed a lawsuit against Vivendi and its StudioCanal division, which the other three later joined, alleging they had made less than $200 each on the mockumentary due to “Hollywood accounting.” The quartet asked for damages — but more importantly, to reclaim the rights to Spinal Tap. The case settled in a California federal court in 2020, allowing the filmmakers to move forward should they wish.
Once the lawsuit was resolved, Reiner, Guest, McKean and Shearer gathered at Shearer’s house in Santa Monica, once again broaching the idea of a sequel. “The first meeting we had we talked about, ‘Do we really want to do this, [given] the high bar that we were dealing with?’” Reiner says.
The film’s mythical status had only grown in the intervening decades: it’s now in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry — and Tufnel’s now-classic “These go to 11” quote, as he shows DiBergi his amplifier, is even in the Oxford English Dictionary to reference anything that goes to an extreme. At the real Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England (not the 18” replica in the first movie), a display wall with quotes from philosophers, scientists and poets about the ancient, prehistoric site includes Tufnel’s lyric, “No one knows who they were or what they were doing,” from the band’s masterpiece, “Stonehenge.” “This fictional thing that we created — we have definitely invaded the real world,” Reiner says.
Around their third meeting, the quartet landed on the basic theme of a forced reunion and decided to incorporate a plot point spurred on by another real-life event: Kate Bush’s 1985 song, “Running Up That Hill,” soaring to the top of the Spotify charts, and Bush earning her first No. 1 album on a Billboard chart after being used on Netflix’s Stranger Things: “We said, ‘Wait! What if some big musician is screwing around at sound check and sings one of [Spinal Tap’s] songs. Someone captures it on an iPhone, throws it on TikTok and it goes viral?’”
Enter Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who appear as the superstars singing Spinal Tap’s classic “Big Bottom” at a soundcheck. Reiner had met the pair at Jeff Bezos’ annual Campfire retreat and had mentioned the possibility of a sequel. He then called them when it became a reality, and they were immediately in.
Like with the first film, after basic ideas for the scenes were agreed upon, the dialog for second film was entirely improvised. Similarly, the quartet brought back the “Grimsby Method” to work out primary plot points: While creating the first movie, Shearer was dating a woman who worked at ABC News, and he brought home a small stack of promotional cards with then WABC news reporter Roger Grimsby’s face on them that had a blank back. “We had a big bulletin board where we put ideas for scenes and if we came up with something, we thought, ‘Does this warrant a Grimsby? Should we sacrifice a Grimsby to put the idea down since we have a limited amount?” Reiner recalls. Though Grimsby died in 1995, McKean found his picture on the internet, and came up with similar cards while they workshopped the ideas for the sequel.
Other than a significant callback to Stonehenge, “The charge was to create a film that worked on its own,” Reiner says. “If you’ve seen the first one, there are little references that you might pick up, but if you haven’t, it works on its own.”
The sequel also continues Spinal Tap’s horrible track record with drummers, all of whom have either spontaneously combusted or died in unfortunate incidents, such as a “bizarre gardening accident,” with the most recent drummer succumbing to a lethal sneeze.
To find a new drummer, Spinal Tap held real tryouts — there are fake auditions for comedic effect shown in the movie — ultimately choosing Valerie Franco, a professional drummer who has played with Hayley Kiyoko, Halsey and Kylie Minogue, among others.
“We had a place at SIR [rehearsal studio] in Los Angeles and Valerie kicked ass,” Reiner says. “We thought, ‘Wow, this is incredible.’ And then we thought, ‘Well, why not? Let’s have a female drummer.’ She had never acted before, and she just took to it right away. “
The film features a number of cameos from rock royalty, including Paul McCartney and Elton John.
McCartney’s scene is based on a real visit that happened years ago when the members of Spinal Tap and the Beatle were both rehearsing for tours in the same facility in Burbank. McCartney dropped by and suggested they play a song together (Reiner thinks it was an acoustic version of “Start Me Up”). That scene takes a different turn in the film, “but came out of a real place that Paul McCartney stopped by to say hello.”
After improvising scenes with McCartney, Reiner declares, “He’s really funny. He’s glib. He was great. When [Dibergi] interviewed him, he didn’t know what I was going to ask him. We just started talking to see what comes out of it. Same with Elton.”
Similarly, John adlibbed his lines as he comes into the studio, and joins the band on “Flower People” and later on “Stonehenge.”
Both songs with John appear on Interscope’s The End Continues — a new album from Spinal Tap, also out Sept. 12 — which includes nine new songs, including “Rockin’ in the Urn” and “The Devil’s Not Just Getting Old,” as well as four remakes with John, McCartney and Brooks and Yearwood.
Given the title Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, could there be another sequel, especially since the film ends on a cliffhanger? “Who knows? We never know,” Reiner says, admitting he has a “love/hate relationship” with the characters.
But he does know that he wants fans to see Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in movie theaters for “the shared experience, to laugh with others. If you’ve seen the first one, I want them to feel nostalgic and to feel for the emotional part of it, which is the relationship with the guys,” he says. “We’re living in a rough time right now and [I’m for] anything that can make people have a good time and get some good laughs in.”
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