![]() ![]() But in the end we went ahead with Anna in control. My first reaction was, oh my God, I can’t handle it. She said: ‘Only if you do the Decline box set first.’ She hung around the LA music scene, she was very familiar with the clubs and the people, and so she knew there was an audience, a huge appetite, out there for those films. “Four years ago I told my daughter Anna that I wanted her to come and work for me. Mike Myers is incredibly talented but he was also unbelievably difficult to work with. In a way, you can look at Decline II as the research and then Wayne’s World as the final product. You just point a camera at him and off he goes. But Ozzy’s one of the funniest people alive. And we faked the spilling of the orange juice. The sequence with Ozzy, that’s not really his house. “There were certain things we had to manipulate. But I was also determined to get people like Dave Mustaine of Megadeth into the film, because those guys were different, kinda deeper than the others. I wasn’t sure, at the end of Chris’s interview, that I even had an interview but, you know, it wasn’t me that gave him the vodka. I found guys like Chris Holmes of W.A.S.P. “Attempts were made to get me to include more of the mainstream, successful bands, but that wasn’t really what interested me. “The first Decline had been made for about a hundred thousand dollars with money from a couple of guys who thought I was going to make a porn movie for them, but the second one I was able to get some money from Miles Copeland. I just knew I had to make another film, about these people. With punk all the girls had looked like boys, but with metal the boys all looked like girls. I remember driving down Sunset Strip in my car, seeing all these strangely dressed people spilling out on to the sidewalk. The second Decline movie came about because I saw the punk scene dying, the clubs shutting down and a whole new scene growing. Penelope Spheeris: “My family background was chaotic, so when I saw the punk thing happening in clubs I felt very at home with it. Her experiences on The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II would bear fruit when she went on to direct blockbuster comedy Wayne’s World. Three decades on, the members of W.A.S.P., Faster Pussycat, London and Odin are still making music, still dreaming the dream and still unrepentant, despite having never reaped the rewards that they were utterly convinced would soon be theirs.īrought up in her father’s travelling carnival, Penelope Spheeris was the ideal person to turn the camera on the three-ring circus that was the 80s/90s Sunset Strip scene. These days, the mythology of that era now revolves largely around Guns N’ Roses, Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, all of whom feature prominently in the film, but its most memorable moments and unforgettable utterances came from the era’s young hopefuls who never quite scaled the heights they dreamed of. But it remained unreleased on DVD until it finally got a long-deserved reissue as part of a box set with its less boneheaded predecessor, The Decline Of Western Civilisation Part I (which dealt with LA’s punk scene) and the belated third part, which addressed America’s homeless youth.īut it’s Part II on which the series’ legend is built – as well as that of the dying days of the Hollywood scene. Directed by acclaimed documentary maker Penelope Spheeris and originally released in June 1988, it swiftly became a cult classic (and an undeniable influence on a later Spheeris movie, Wayne’s World). ![]()
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