Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, and Christopher Guest actually played their own instruments and did their own singing in This Is Spinal Tap, which lends a great deal more authenticity to their performances. They also wrote all the music.

Although he had worked on several real rock documentaries and shot the pseudo-documentary Punishment Park (1971), cinematographer Peter Smokler was not entirely comfortable working on this picture and often sought reassurance from director Rob Reiner that his work was valuable. "Trust me, this is funny," Reiner would say.

British actress June Chadwick, who portrays David's meddling girlfriend Jeanine, was impressed with the English accents used in the film by Shearer, McKean, and Guest.

Chadwick was thrown a bit by the fact that the script was built around a basic story and situations but no dialogue, most of which was improvised. She was told her character was into horoscopes and yoga. Never having studied yoga, she took some lessons and bought books to learn about it. She came up with the yoga pose of sticking the tongue out, which was meant to cure David's sore throat. Chadwick also said she worked from the premise that Jeanine really cared about the band, so she was really hurt when, after the film's first screening, people told her they thought Jeanine was "such a bitch."

Although scenes were improvised, there were times when Reiner called for rehearsal, to focus on what the center of attention would be in a scene and to help Smokler know what and who he should highlight in shooting it. For instance, rehearsals were called for the scene in the diner in which Jeanine presents her sketches of the new look for the band as signs of the zodiac.

Although Fred Willard had known Reiner for several years, it was Shearer and McKean who insisted he be hired to play the clueless Air Force officer. Willard did not want to do it at first: "I'm tired of playing jackasses." He was won over by watching the demo reel.

Although it is about the band's national tour, This Is Spinal Tap was shot entirely in Southern California.

During production, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest first appeared in character as guests on New York's The Joe Franklin Show, a long-running celebrity talk show. Others on the show appeared to believe this was a real band. Footage from that appearance is edited into the movie.

The film's dialogue was almost entirely improvised, and many scenes and plot points were created on the fly, resulting in more than 100 hours of footage to sift through. Reiner supposedly showed a four-and-a-half-hour director's cut to his fellow filmmakers, and legend has it that a bootleg copy of it still exists. McKean said the long version was "amazing" but that they all saw a lot of material that had to go. "The removal of things gave us jokes we didn't know we had," he said.

The principal photography of This Is Spinal Tap took place over five weeks in 1983. Editing took more than nine months.

by Rob Nixon

SOURCES:
Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company by John Kenneth Muir (Applause, 2004).