Few cult films have had as big an influence on pop culture as the 1984 mockumentary, “This Is Spinal Tap,” about a floundering hard-rock band whose amps go to 11. As pants-stuffing bassist Derek Smalls, actor Harry Shearer delivered a hilariously deadpan performance with partners Christopher Guest and Michael McKean -- the near-telepathic improvisational team that would create such satiric comedy classics as “Waiting for Guffman” and “A Mighty Wind.”
A child of Hollywood, Shearer got his start working for the legendary Jack Benny (he was also the original Eddie Haskell in “Leave It to Beaver”), and his 1953 film debut came in “Abbot and Costello Go to Mars.” Later he was a two-stint “Saturday Night Live” writer in the ’70s and ’80s and launched his own successful radio variety program, “Le Show,” still syndicated weekly (it airs Mondays at 10 a.m. on WRIR-FM 97.3). Perhaps his biggest break came as a lead voice actor on “The Simpsons,” now in its 21st season, providing the voices of Ned Flanders, C. Montgomery Burns, Kent Brockman, the Rev. Lovejoy, Principal Skinner and Otto, among others.
A Newsweek writer out of college who covered the Watts riots, Shearer, 65, resides part-time in New Orleans and is working on a documentary about engineering and planning failures involved in the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He’s coming to Richmond to present a special 25th anniversary screening of “This Is Spinal Tap” at the Byrd Theatre, a benefit for WRIR. Style spoke with him from Los Angeles.
Style: Do you have a fixed idea going in what you want from your Katrina documentary?
Shearer: The film is basically a response to my surprise over the last four and a half years. Surprise at how badly the mainstream media missed the actual story of what happened in New Orleans, then turned around and patted themselves on the back. … If the country doesn’t get what happened, there’s not the political will to prevent it from happening again. My goal is to get the film out by the fifth anniversary when there will be a lot of new media attention. The media love nothing more than anniversaries, especially anniversaries with fives in them.
There are plenty of mockumentaries now but few stand up to the original, “This Is Spinal Tap,” when it comes to respecting the audience.
Thank you. But I don’t think most people get that that’s part of the picture. They think shaky camera or moving in odd ways gets the job done. But unless you really are serious about trusting the audience in saying, “We’re all in this together, let’s take this journey,” it ain’t gonna turn out right.
So what is the essential element of successful comedic improvisation?
One word: trust. It suffuses those projects. Chris [Guest] has gotten film companies to trust him as we did with “Spinal Tap,” and he transmits that trust to the actors who work with him, and we enjoy that. And the thing that binds it all together is we trust the audience. There’s no sense of, “We gotta get a laugh in the next 10 seconds.” If you study classic improv theory, that’s the basis of the Viola Spolin book, actors trusting each other.
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